Firo (FIRO) is one of the earliest privacy coins, created by Poramin Insom and his team. It launched in September 2016 (under the name Zcoin, with the token ticker being XZC).
At the beginning, Firo was the first cryptocurrency implementing the Zerocoin protocol designed by Matthew Green in 2013.
Firo is based on Bitcoin's source-code, with a GPU-friendly ASIC-resistant algorithm (Merkle Tree Function since 2018). Its total maximum supply is 21.4 million and block rewards are halved every four years.
Firo has activated its Lelantus privacy protocol on January 12 2021, which increases the anonymity set and hides change amounts while protecting transactional privacy without requiring a trusted setup. Lelantus is the result of Firo’s research team and its innovations are also being used in other privacy projects such as Beam (Lelantus-MW) and Monero (Triptych).
Firo’s blockchain was used to run the Thailand Democrat Party primary elections in 2018 where over 127,000+ votes were cast on its blockchain making it the first wide scale use of blockchain in a political election.