After the Chinese manufacturer of ASIC miners Bitmain following the company Baikal announced the release of ASIC miners working on the CryptoNight algorithm, which are able to produce including Monero, the creators of this cryptocurrency reported about the upcoming update, after which the production efficiency of Monero on such ASIC miners will greatly decrease.
Monero's chief developer Riccardo Spagni presented details of the planned changes to the hashing algorithm on Github. According to the information presented on the site, the update of the client version 0.12.0 called Lithium Luna is scheduled for April 6. This update contains "minor change" in the algorithm of mining cryptocurrency, which will be directed primarily against ASIC miners.
The Monero development team warned in February about its intention to change the algorithm and thus prevent the centralization of mining. In March, after Bitmain Antminer introduced the X3, this was stated and Spagni.
"The recently announced ASIC miners, due to significant performance advantages over General — purpose hardware such as CPU, GPU and even FPGA, will receive a significant portion of the network hashrate, which will make it centralized," a recent speech by a representative of the Monero development team.