Haven Will Upgrade to Monero v0.16, Re-Launch xUSD Web Vault

The Haven team is committed to creating a robust and sustainable ecosystem of private assets available to anyone in the world. Our release of the first private stablecoin (xUSD) was only the first step in this long-term mission.

To ensure Haven’s users have access to all the latest privacy innovations developed by the fantastic Monero community, today we are announcing a major upgrade to Haven’s codebase:

Haven will upgrade to Monero v0.16 this month and re-launch the web Vault with xUSD functionality. 

As Haven prepares to onboard new users and new platforms, it is critical that we enable access to the web Vault and complete this rebase of our code. This is the third announcement made during Haven’s multi-week “Announcement Season”, following introduction of the Haven 2.0 Fee Structure and publishing of Haven’s Core Protocol 3.0 white paper. 

In May 2020, Monero released version 0.16.0.0 ‘Nitrogen Nebula’. Haven’s codebase has been utilizing Monero v0.14 for more than a year, so our developers have been hard at work to conduct a complete upgrade to v0.16. This will provide significant upgrades to Haven’s network including faster daemon performance and improved Bulletproof verification.

Perhaps most importantly, Haven’s upgrade to Monero v0.16 will enable us to quickly re-launch the web Vault with complete functionality for xUSD exchanges and transactions. The web Vault will allow anyone, anywhere in the world, on any device to use xUSD and have complete control over their private assets in the Haven ecosystem.

The upgrade allows our developers to use a new library for building the web Vault and a single codebase for building future versions of both the desktop and web Vaults. This will significantly reduce development time and resources and make it much easier to conduct ongoing maintenance and upgrades to the Vaults. 

Finally, upgrading to Monero v0.16 at this stage will allow our protocol developers to move onto multiple asset work immediately and begin adding more private assets to the Haven ecosystem. This upgrade will be the first step towards the addition of new xAssets, such as xGOLD and xEUR. We continue to monitor the launch of xUSD and discuss options for future xAssets with our community. 

Development work for v0.16 and the web Vault has been ongoing for several weeks, and we expect to launch a v0.16 testnet next week. Our goal is to conduct a hard fork in October (once testing is complete) to launch these upgrades live on Haven’s network.