To whom it may concern,

The Monero researchers, developers, and community members would like to announce an important proposed change regarding Monero payment IDs. Many parts of the Monero ecosystem are reliant on some form of payment IDs. These are exciting changes that improve privacy and reduce user frustration with standalone payment IDs. Furthermore, it will remove headaches when users accidentally omit payment IDs.

The Monero community is proposing to remove support for sending transactions with standalone payment IDs in most wallets in April 2019. They also propose to remove support for sending transactions with payment IDs (including integrated addresses) on the consensus layer in October 2019. Exchanges, payment processors, and other services should upgrade to support Monero subaddresses as soon as possible.

We ask that you please review the attached resources on the background decision to move to subaddresses, the upgrade process, and the timeline.

If you have any questions and would like to participate in a discussion of the future of payment IDs, please participate in the Monero Community meeting Friday January 25 at 17:00 UTC (noon eastern US). We expect to make a final decision during the meeting.

You can join the chat using one of the following methods:

Freenode IRC using your favorite IRC client: #monero-community

Kiwi IRC web client: https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/#irc://irc.freenode.net/#monero-community

Mattermost: https://mattermost.getmonero.org/monero/channels/monero-community