ICO & Crypto News #67 - 09 April 2018 [The first results of the Monero hardfork]

On April 6, the hardfork of the anonymous Monero cryptocurrency, which was directed against ASIC-mining, took place. The reason for this step was the release of Antminer X3, the new Bitmain's cryptocurrency miner based on the PoW-algorithm, CryptoNight, to which Monero refers.

The developer lead of Monero said the new miner could result in the centralization of computing power in the hands of one or more players. A new hardfork with the modified PoW-algorithm became a measure of counteraction to such a result.

The developers called hardfork successful, but not all members of the community believed so. As a result, four new cryptocurrencies broke away from Monero at once: Monero Classic, Monero Zero, Monero Original and the fourth one, called Monero-Classic. The main idea of all projects: the individual devs's solutions offering protocol changes harm the decentralization more than ASIC-miners, and the emergence of professional mining machines is a normal consequence of the market economy.

The first batch of Antminer X3 will appear on the market in May. In addition to Monero, the machine can be used for mining Bytecoin, Aeon, Dashcoin and several other digital currencies using the same protocol. Therefore, the potential demand for four new Monero "daughters" is still in question.

As for the Monero, the hardfork hasn't changed its rate.