Monero will be hardforked on October 18.
The developers expect that the size of anonymous transactions on the Monero network will decrease by 80%, and the commissions will be significantly reduced.
The Monero protocol involves three different mechanisms to ensure the anonymity of users: stealth addresses, circular signatures, and RingCT. At the same time, the latter requires complex calculations and time, which makes the maintenance of a full node extremely expensive. That's why it will be replaced by the Bulletproofs technology.
Bulletproofs allows you to aggregate transaction information into new data structures that can be logarithmically rather than linearly scaled.
The network update also contains a number of changes to the mining algorithm aimed at fighting ASIC miners.