The lead maintainer of the privacy-centric cryptocurrency monero (XMR), Riccardo ‘Fluffypony’ Spagni, has stepped down from his role, but will continue working on the cryptocurrency as a backup maintainer.
Fluffypony has been monero’s lead maintainer since the cryptocurrency was launched back in 2014. The announcement doesn’t clarify why he is stepping down, although comments given to CoinDesk in May 2018 show he at some point thought to himself he wasn’t able to keep on being XMR’s lead maintainer.
At the time, he added he will “always be an advocate for privacy, and for monero, a part of the monero community,” but noted his actual responsibilities within it needed to be reduced. An announcement made to the monero community notes Snipa, a “longtime contributor” will be taking his place as lead maintainer:
Snipa is a longtime contributor to Monero. He is best known for developing a popular piece of Monero pool software and supporting the network with well-connected node.
Snipa, according to the post, has “substantial coding and auditing experience, and a desire to better Monero’s processes.” Monero’s price, according to CryptoCompare data, dropped around 5.65% to $46.08 after the announcement.
The cryptocurrency’s hashrate has recently surged after it implemented the ASIC-resistant RandomX update, as it ended up boosting miners contributing to the network using traditional CPUs and GPUs, which improved XMR’s decentralization.
Last month, its official website GetMonero was hacked and caused users to download cryptocurrency-stealing malware. Monero’s team quickly reacted to the situation, warning users to confirm the hashes on their wallet binaries.
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