Firo is a cryptocurrency represented with the symbol "FIRO". It was formerly known as ZCoin. Firo is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that utilizes zero-knowledge proofs which allows users to destroy coins and then redeem them later for brand new ones with no transaction history.^[2]

Overview

Firo's research created the Lelantus privacy protocol which supports high anonymity sets without requiring a trusted setup and relying only on standard cryptographic assumptions. Firo also utilizes Dandelion++ to obscure the originating IP of transactions without relying on any external services such as Tor/i2P.

Firo developed and utilizes Merkle Tree Proofs (MTP) as its Proof-of-Work algorithm which aims to be memory hard with fast verification to encourage mining using commodity hardware. The blockchain is also further secured with LLMQ ChainLocks that allow near-instant finality of blocks once confirmed and are protected against 51% mining attacks.

Firo's blockchain was used in the Thai Democrat Party Elections in 2018 to elect its party leader with over 127,000+ votes cast nationwide making it the first wide-scale application of blockchain technology in a political election.

Features

Privacy

Firo is at the forefront of cryptocurrency privacy with Lelantus and Lelantus Spark providing trustless, on-chain privacy with high anonymity sets. Dandelion++ technology also provides network-layer privacy.

Firo's Elysium tokenization layer allows users to create their own privacy-enabled tokens with use-cases from private stablecoins or voting tokens and in the future offer privacy for bridged assets from other chains.

Firo stands out as one out of a handful of projects that contribute independent research to blockchain privacy and decentralization technologies such as Sigma, Lelantus, Lelantus Spark and MTP.

Firo's Development Fund

15% of Firo’s block reward goes towards a development fund to fund development work and other efforts in promoting Firo’s adoption. The fund pays primarily for coder and researcher salaries, community managers, translation work, audits, bug bounties, integration costs and infrastructure overheads.^[6]

Token Distribution

Firo has 21.4 million token units. It follows the same halving cycle as Bitcoin (every 4 years). The current block reward of 12.5 FIRO/block is divided as follows:

• Miners (50%, 6.25 FIRO)
• Masternodes (34%, 4.375 FIRO )
• Development Fund (15%, 1.875 FIRO).^[7]

Mining

Firo uses the MTP algorithm which aims for democratic mining without sacrificing quick validation. The MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) algorithm promotes fair and democratic mining by making ASIC development expensive. To mine Firo with MTP, users need to first get their miners from the list on the official website and extract the exe binary into a folder of their choice. Then they register with a pool and configure the miner, after which they can run the miner.

Firo, however, has plans to switch to a ProgPOW variant in the near future to address the large proof sizes of MTP while remaining FPGA/ASIC resistant.

Tokenomics

Firo has a circulating supply of 11,553,404 FIRO, total supply of 21,400,000 FIRO, and a maximum supply of 21,400,000 FIRO. It recorded an all-time high of $169.99 on December 26, 2017, and an all-time low of $0.2751 on December 2, 2016.

Exchange

Firo is listed on the following exchanges:

1. Binance
2. Huobi Global
3. Hotbit
4. MXC

Team

• Poramin Insom - Co-Founder
• Reuben Yap - Co-Founder & Project Steward
• Peter Shugalev - Lead Developer
• Tadhg Riordan - Developer
• Andrey Bezrukov - Developer
• Panu Suksumonsin - Developer
• Aram Jivanyan - Cryptographer
• Tigran Mamikonyan - Developer
• Anthony Montecalvo - Spanish Community Manager
• Taygun Dogan - Turkish Community Manager
• Lemar “Luke” Briones - Filipino Community Manager

Online Community

Firo is active on GitHub, Facebook, Reddit, facebook, Telegram, and Twitter.^[1][5]