Things were looking rather grim for XMR before the end of June, considering its ATH saw it traded for nearly 4 times higher than the 116 USD it was valued at on the penultimate day of the month. Still, the turn of the month brought about plenty of positive price action as the coin managed to climb to 145 USD sometime around July 3rd. Since then it was a slow sideways pattern followed up by a steep drop from 140 to 124 USD on July 10th, right around the time Bitcoin reached its weekly lows. Monero was relatively stable since then, fluctuating around 120 USD before today’s break-out. XMR is currently worth $133,10 USD which is a 7,01% rise in the last 24 hours. Volume has slightly picked up and is almost at 5000 BTC while the market cap currently sits at 2,160,267,683 USD, which makes Monero the 13th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world.
Analyst agree that a strong support is formed around 119 USD, and see the coin having the short-term potential to rise up to 142, and if it breaks that ever 160 USD in the short term.
Monero team has been working hard on development as of lately. A couple of weeks ago we saw it release the long awaited GUI v0.12.2.0, which fixed several issues that were present with the 0.12.0.0 version. Soon afterwards, CLI v 0.12.3.0 was released soon after, also delivering several upgrades and bug fixes to the Monero client. Another important milestone in Monero’s development came today when company named Kudelski Security confirmed that an audit of Monero’s new “Bulletproofs” protocol has been successfully completed, finding only minor bugs and issues.
Monero announced the news via its Twitter account, saying:
“The first audit (by Kudelski Security) of Monero compatible Bulletproofs has, bearing a few minor issues, been successfully completed!”
Buletproofs is a new, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol with very short proofs that doesn’t require a trusted setup. This report from Stanford suggests that Bulletproofs offer “short zero-knowledge proofs for general arithmetic circuits while only relying on the discrete logarithm assumption and without requiring a trusted setup”. The report confirms that such a protocol is very well suited for cryptocurrencies:
“The efficiency of Bulletproofs is particularly well suited for the distributed and trustless nature of blockchains.”
The protocol will be an upgrade on the existing RingCT protocol, where the developers will replace one of the RingCT building blocks and implement a smaller and faster Buletproofs.
This will not be all as Monero has confirmed two more upcoming audits that will be conducted by Quarkslab and Benedikt Bünz. Due to the fact that it’s still being audited, the protocol hasn’t yet been implemented. With plans of launching it somewhere around September/October, Monero wants to make sure that Bulletproofs will be fully functional and bug-free. If Bulletproofs brings an improvement in transaction speed and privacy as expected, Monero’s already solid foundations are about to become a lot thicker.
