Monero’s RandomX goes live on public testnet

Monero, one of the world’s leading fungible cryptocurrencies, has been up and running with a network-wide upgrade scheduled for the coming months. One of the most important features about the upgrade is the shift from Cryptonight R Proof-of-Work algorithm to RandomX Proof-of-Work algorithm.

This has undoubtedly been one of the most-awaited algorithm upgrades as it aims to put CPU miners at an advantage over ASIC miners, and GPU miners to an extent. Additionally, the shift to RandomX would ensure that the computational power has been evenly distributed and creates an ecosystem where everyone will be able to participate in the network fairly, considering the use of CPU is more egalitarian than GPUs. RandomX ensures the network is more ASIC-resistant as it uses all the components of the core, but not that of the chips.

According to Howard Chu – CTO of Symas Corp, the testing of the upcoming algorithm was successfully completed on the private RandomX testnet earlier this week, with the public testnet upgrade scheduled for 27 September. Based on a recent announcement on Reddit, the upgrade went as planned and RandomX is now live on the public testnet. Along with this, Gingeropolous – Monero subreddit moderator, announced that the testnet explorer has also been updated.

On the testnet upgrade, Howard Chu said on Reddit,

“The testnet hashrate accelerated a bit, so the fork happened several hours earlier than estimated. All running smoothly though.”

Additionally, community members have already started to reach out to exchanges with regard to the upcoming network upgrade. A member who goes by Reddit name, Mishka1984, reached out to Kraken and informed the community about the upgrade, with the exchange expressing some concerns about Long payment IDs being phased out.

Source: Reddit

The upgrade is tentatively scheduled to go live on the Mainnet by around 30 November, on block height #1978433. On the other hand, the code freeze is scheduled for 24 October and the targeted v0.15 release date is scheduled for 31 October.