The Monero Moon (Issue 51)
The Monero Moon is a curated weekly newsletter covering all the latest news within Monero (XMR).
Table of Contents:
Development, Releases, and Technology
Monero is scheduled to undergo a network upgrade (hard-fork) on the 13th of August 2022, at block 2,688,888. The software you must implement to ensure compatibility with the network upgrade has now been released (v0.18 Flourine Fermi) and can be downloaded from the official Monero website www.GetMonero.org. This gives everyone a couple of weeks to make the switch. If you use a mobile wallet or other third party software make sure your apps are up to date. Please reach out to members of the Monero community on r/Monero or other social platforms if you have any questions.
The network upgrade will include a variety of new features such as:
Ring-size increase from 11 to 16 to increase privacy
Viewtags to reduce wallet-sync times by up to 40%
Bulletproofs+ to reduce transaction sizes by ~7%, and improve verification performance by ~7%.
A complete list of upgrades and improvements will soon be released along with the new software. If you want to learn more about Monero’s upcoming network upgrade, please check out this post on the official Monero website.
If you can help with Monero’s upgrade, be it simply notifying wallet or exchange providers, please check out this ‘upgrade checklist’ to ensure all parties appropriately update their software and make the necessary changes.
Monero Observer provided a comprehensive meeting summary of the Monero Research Lab meeting that took place on the 13th July 2022. The meeting touched on the upcoming network upgrade, Bulletproofs++, and Seraphis. The summary includes full logs of the meeting. Check it out here.
Justin Berman is looking to commit to another 3 months full time work on Monero, working on Seraphis and Jamtis, implementing subaddresses in monero-lws, patching bugs, and a few other things. Check out his work proposal here.
noot aka elizabethereum has provided an ETH-XMR atomic swap development update, informing the Monero community she has completed her CCS proposal. The final two milestones were a paper/article outlining the swap protocol in detail as well as potential extensions to it, and a UI for the swap that allows users to use their MetaMask wallet to take a swap offer. She now is looking to make further improvements on ETH-XMR atomic swaps by working on things such as ERC20 token support, and Tornado Cash integration. More information regarding her past and future work on ETH-XMR atomic swaps can be found here.
binarybaron from Unstoppable Swap will continue to spend time working on an open source GUI for BTC<>XMR Atomic Swaps after having their recent CCS proposal funded. The GUI is being built around the swap-cli and will empower even non-technical people to swap their BTC for XMR in a safe, decentralized and trustless manner. Check out a demo below.
The daily number of Monero transactions hit an all time high on July 19th 2022, with 46,993 transactions.
As stated in the tweet above and shown in the chart below, the ratio of XMR to BTC transactions is continuing to steadily climb upwards. This means the Monero transactions are still increasing relative to Bitcoin. Monero currently makes up approximately 16.8% of Bitcoin’s transactions.
Monero is on track to record it's highest ever number of transactions in a one month period. It is estimated there will be a total of 943,192 Monero transactions in the month of July 2022. The previous highest number of transactions was 916,084 in November 2021.
Mobile wallets Cake Wallet v4.4.3 and Monero.com v1.0.7 are out now! This includes updates such as QR code displaying fixes, allow buying with new currencies for Wyre and Moonpay, UI improvements, and other bug fixes! Check out this post for more information and download links.
MyMonero have released v1.2.9 for both android and iOS mobile device users. Be sure to update and check out their Github page for more information.
tobtoht is looking to improve Monero’s Electrum style Feather Wallet by adding variety of new features. These include, but are not limited to, offline transaction signing using animated QR codes, multi-node syncing (experiment), and allowing users to send transactions almost immediately by skipping synchronization. Check out this post for more information!
CryptoMorpheus_ has abandoned their CCS proposal for their Monero metrics website moneroj.net, and gone ahead launched 14 new charts on moneroj.net anyway! They have also launched a hidden service and improved the loading speed of the charts. Check out moneroj.net, and feel free to donate to them to show some support. More information can be found here.
MAGIC Grants are holding a special election for a new MAGIC Monero Fund committee member and voters. MAGIC Grants is a public charity that provides undergraduate scholarships for students interested in Monero and cryptocurrencies, and supports various critical cryptocurrency public payment infrastructure. Applications close July 25th, and you can find more information the election here. More information about MAGIC can be found here. Reach out to them if you’d like to get involved.
Monero Observer have put out a new Dev Report to provide a big picture view of Monero development activity throughout the past week. If you’re interested in the nitty gritty, check it out here.
Finally, It is highly recommended you run a node to help secure the Monero network. You can also solo mine via the official Monero GUI wallet which can be found here, or partake in pool mining and join the decentralized and permissionless P2Pool. You can even mine XMR on a mobile device! The official Monero website getmonero.org is a fantastic place to get started mining with lots of helpful information.
General News
There was a discussion panel titled "Bitcoin, Monero, Gold - What is the best money?" at the recent Mallorca Blockchain Days 2022 event. The panel features Monero contributor and founder of Monero Devices Michael Schloh von Bennewitz.
Monero Talk recently interviewed Margot Paez, a fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute specialising in renewable energy. Watch it here or below.
Monero Talk recently published “A thorough critique of Monero with Giacomo Zucco and Seth for Privacy” as part of a three part series. This video series covers some many different aspects of the strengths and shortcomings of Bitcoin and Monero, and is well worth the listen. Part 3 has now been released. Check it out below.
Monero Talk also published a Monerotopia video live from Freedom Fest in Las Vegas! Check it out below!
Monero contributor Justin Ehrenhofer published an opinion piece on Bitcoin Magazine titled What Coinbase’s Partnership With ICE Says About Bitcoin Surveillance. The article discusses Coinbase’s blockchain analysis partnership with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and how safe user data really is. Note that in the image below, Monero is not included in the chain analytics software service Coinbase provides. This is likely due to the strong privacy Monero provides users by default.
Ars Technica reported the amount of cryptocurrency flowing into privacy-enhancing mixer services has reached an all-time high. The article largely portrays mixers in negative light due to Chainalysis research findings, however it highlights that:
“Mixer use isn't automatically illegal or unethical. Given how easy it is to track the flow of Bitcoin and some other types of cryptocurrency, there are legitimate privacy reasons anyone might want to use one.”
Coin Bureau, a crypto YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers, published a video about the latest policy update from international anti-money laundering organization the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The host Guy explains that regulations are:
“…a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, financial privacy in cryptocurrency will slowly but surely be eliminated”, and that “this crackdown on financial privacy will force crypto projects and protocols to decentralize, and result in better crypto projects and protocols.”
Curtis Melonopoly reported that Canadian crypto exchange Bitbuy made customer inquiries after a user withdrew their crypto to their personal wallet, and then sent it to the Trade Ogre exchange. It appears more common for crypto exchanges to not only track where coins have come from, but where they are also going. See the tweet below for context.
It was reported by Protocol.com that Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a law Friday prohibiting the use of digital assets as forms of payments in Russia. As stated by Protocol.com:
The legislation will reportedly prohibit the transfer or acceptance of “digital financial assets as a consideration for transferred goods, performed works, rendered services, as well as in any other way that allows one to assume payment for goods (works, services) by a digital financial asset, except as otherwise provided by federal laws,” effectively banning the use of crypto or NFTs as forms of payments.
Crypto Lawyer Jake Chervinsky shared his opinion regarding global financial surveillance in a recent tweet.
Events
A Monero Research Lab (MRL) meeting will take place on Wednesday July 27th at 1700 UTC. It is planned to include discussion regarding such as decoy algorithms and analysis of transaction volume anomalies. You can find links to and more information regarding the meeting here thanks to the Monero Observer. The MRL meeting will take place in the #monero-research-lab channel on IRC if you want to lurk in real time.
There is a Monero Meetup in Cape Town, South Africa, at 5:00pm on the 4th of August 2022 at La Prada. More information can be found here.
There is a Monero Meetup in Berlin, Germany, at 7:00pm on the 11th of August 2022. More information can be found here. Make sure you join the group in order to see all the meetup information.
Stoic Hodler is holding a Twitter Spaces event titled Monero = Freedom from CBDC's at 1:00pm UTC on the 22nd of July 2022. Be sure to join up if you would like to listen in or participate.
Exchanges and Merchants
Monero appears to still make up the majority of trading volume on Bisq with 41%!
There have been reports of scam copycat websites of the FixedFloat.com instant exchange. If this is a website you use, please exercise caution and double check the URL for correct spelling. Thanks to dsmlegend for pointing this out!
Instant exchange aggregator Swapzone.io made a blog post about how to buy Monero using their service. You can check it out here.
Want to buy or sell something with XMR? Check out the Monero subreddit’s Friday Monero Market Thread. Feel free to post a for sale or wanted ad, and transact with your fellow Monero community members. Last week’s market thread can be found here. Visit the Monero subreddit on Friday to find the latest thread.
Pick up some Monero swag from Monerogear.shop! Check out their tweet below!
Community Crowdfunding
Several crowdfunding proposals are awaiting community feedback before they can start accepting funds through the Community Crowdfunding System (CCS). For now they are just proposals, but if they receive some positive feedback from the community they will be moved to a “Funding Required” stage so that they can accept Monero donations through the CCS.
CCS Projects requiring funding or have been recently funded:
Trading & Speculation
Monero has the largest market capitalization of all privacy coins, and has 3x the market cap of the second largest privacy coin Zcash.
The last time Monero's 20 week SMA crossed over the 100 week SMA was the beginning of the biggest bullrun XMR has ever seen. Now, six years later, the 20 week SMA is very close to crossing over the 100 week SMA again.
Additionally, here is a tweet below of the XMR/BTC monthly Renko chart. It bounced off historical support at 0.004 BTC, now looking like the 4 yr long downtrend may change. Also looks like a giant M for Monero? Could be a good luck omen.
Simon Hayes shared the chart below, explaining “Lower time frames showing some strength, dips getting bought. Could do with holding above $145 for possible continuation to $177 & $228. Will likely depend on how Bitcoin acts over the next few days.”
Performance
Total Monero in Circulation — 18,150,386 XMR
Monero Total Marketcap — $2,738,522,235
Coinmarketcap Ranking — #28
XMR/USD Price — ~$151 USD
XMR/BTC Price — 0.006588 BTC
LocalMonero.co Street Price — $158 USD
Average Transaction Fee — 0.000084 XMR ($0.013)
Monero Network Hashrate —2.551 Ghash/s
Monero Mining Pools Hashrate Distribution —
Entertainment
Here’s an amusing Monero meme video from last year!
Donate
If you like the newsletter and want more of this content, then shout me a round of beers by donating some spare Monero you didn’t lose during your boating accident.
49koJtBLRCjcfqVD93fosJGKLYFPZuBUz1iRvqJdMz9yBXV93UgKdSyDSbwUkdsytdSRvwKZhRTPp3de4fXzcioQGAFzWUU
Support Monero
Want to help contribute to the Monero Project? Developers, marketers, event coordinators, translators, Instagram personalities, meme creators, public speakers — whatever your skills may be, it is extremely likely there is something you can do to assist. I urge you to reach out to the Monero community on Reddit, IRC, GitHub, Twitter, or Telegram. The official Monero website is GetMonero.org.
Past Issues
Issue 50 / Issue 49 / Issue 48 / Issue 47 / Issue 46 / Issue 45 / Issue 44 / Issue 43 / Issue 42 / Issue 41 / Issue 40 / Issue 39 / Issue 38 / Issue 37 / Issue 36 / Issue 35 / Issue 34 / Issue 33 / Issue 32 / Issue 31 / Issue 30 / Issue 29 / Issue 28 / Issue 27 / Issue 26 / Issue 25 / Issue 24 / Issue 23 / Issue 22 / Issue 21 / Issue 20 / Issue 19 / Issue 18 / Issue 17 / Issue 16 / Issue 15 / Issue 14 / Issue 13 / Issue 12 / Issue 11 / Issue 10 / Issue 9 / Issue 8 / Issue 7 / Issue 6 / Issue 5 / Issue 4 / Issue 3 / Issue 2 / Issue 1
Socials
If you have any suggestions, corrections, or feedback, please contact me on Twitter @johnfoss69 or on Reddit u/johnfoss68.
DISCLAIMER: This publication contains opinion for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Information may contain errors and omissions. Use solely at your own risk. The author of this publication and/or the authors of articles linked to from this site may have financial investments that may bias their opinions, including ownership of Monero currency. Always do your own research, form your own opinions, and never take risks with money or trust third parties with out verifying their credibility.
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