Monero reported its network stable after anti-ASIC upgrade

Monero’s April 14, 2018 community meeting recorded that the network was back to normal following its April 6 protocol upgrade, which changed the proof-of-work rules to resist specialized mining hardware. Meeting participants characterized the upgrade as successful after block times had remained longer than normal for roughly one day.

That assessment was consequential because Monero had deliberately made existing CryptoNight mining equipment incompatible with its preferred chain. The action turned opposition to application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, from a design preference into an enforced consensus rule—with immediate consequences for miners, exchanges and competing chains.

The April 14 statement was a project-community assessment rather than an independently audited network-health report. It nevertheless marked a change from the uncertainty surrounding the upgrade’s activation eight days earlier.

What changed at block 1,546,000

Monero activated consensus version 7 at block 1,546,000 on April 6. Contemporaneous reporting placed the block at approximately 08:20 UTC. The project’s March 28 upgrade notice instructed users, services, merchants, mining pools and exchanges to install version 0.12.0.0, known as Lithium Luna.

The release introduced a proof-of-work modification intended to curb the potential threat from CryptoNight ASICs. It also raised the minimum ring size from five to seven. Ring signatures allow a transaction’s actual signer to be represented among other possible signers, so the larger minimum was a separate privacy-related consensus change rather than part of the mining defense.

The project described the event as a scheduled and consensual network upgrade, not an intended creation of a second asset. That distinction did not prevent groups from maintaining the previous ASIC-compatible rules under names including Monero Classic and Monero Original. Their appearance showed that software consensus and economic consensus were related but not identical: developers could publish new rules, while miners and markets could elect to preserve old ones.

The difficult adjustment after the fork

Monero’s April 14 meeting log said network difficulty had fallen dramatically and block times were longer than normal for about a day. The surviving statement does not provide an event-day hash-rate series, a calculated average block interval or a precise definition of “back to normal.” It therefore supports a qualitative recovery assessment, not a verified percentage decline in mining power.

The disruption was consistent with the upgrade’s intended mechanism. Hardware continuing to calculate the earlier proof-of-work variant could no longer produce valid blocks under version 7. A sudden withdrawal of compatible computing power could leave blocks arriving slowly until the difficulty calculation adjusted. That is a protocol interpretation, not proof of which miners or machines left the network.

Bitmain had announced its CryptoNight-focused Antminer X3 in March. Monero’s change was widely understood as a response to that class of equipment, but the April 14 evidence did not establish how much pre-upgrade hash power came from deployed X3 units, other ASICs, botnets, graphics processors or central processors. Claims assigning the entire hash-rate change to one manufacturer would exceed the record.

Market and governance context

Kraken’s April 14 daily report marked XMR at $192.01, down 2.13%, with $2.5 million in reported XMR trading volume. Kraken reported $226 million across all its markets for the labeled daily period. Those figures describe one exchange, not a consolidated global close; the surviving report does not disclose its exact cutoff or timezone.

The more durable significance was institutional. Monero demonstrated that a cryptocurrency community could impose costs on specialized hardware manufacturers through coordinated software adoption. That approach also imposed recurring coordination costs on exchanges, pools, wallet providers and users, while offering no guarantee that ASIC resistance would remain permanent.

As of April 14, the defensible conclusion was narrow: Monero’s community reported that its preferred version 7 network had recovered from the immediate block-production disruption. The record did not yet prove long-term mining decentralization, permanent ASIC exclusion or the economic fate of the competing chains.