The Monero (XMR) miners' community is getting ready for the fundamental update that will be activated in May, which is considered one of the most important changes in the network in the last few years.
What's Tail Emission?
Monero's key feature is the fact that rewards for mined blocks are never going to drop to zero. Instead, the new mechanism implies a stable block reward of 0.6 XMR per block. It will allow miners to keep the network up while receiving a monetary incentive for doing so. At the current price of XMR, a stable reward equals $163.
Monero positions itself as a private and secure blockchain, which is why it cannot afford to lose mining power. On the other side, miners are constantly facing challenges tied to the dynamic blocksize, competition and decreasing fees. All these factors affect the profitability of mining and put the network's stability in danger.
Can it potentially affect the price?
The progressive decrease in rewards is quite often considered a bullish factor since it is expected to decrease the selling pressure on the market caused by miners taking profits. But in the case of Monero, we have not seen a major problem with large selling pressure recently.
In the last two months, Monero gained almost 90% on the cryptocurrency market in contrast to the movement of such assets as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Monero has previously shown considerably independent performance on the market as it is still being actively used as a "privacy" alternative.
The popularity of Monero has been gradually increasing in recent months as more cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors started worrying about the safety of their assets following a series of limitations and regulation coming from both Europe and the U.S.