Why $FIRO?
What is firo?
Firo is a privacy focused cryptocurrency and Blockchain platform designed to provide enhanced financial privacy and security. Firo uses an advanced privacy protocol lelantus spark to ensure that transactions remain confidential, allowing users to transact and store value without the risk of exposure of data
What are firo’s contribution towards cryptocurrency
We are actually the first coin that uses zero-knowledge proofs in our privacy protocol through the use of Zerocoin (not to be confused with Zcash’s Zerocash). Zerocoin was at one time the second most used privacy protocol back in 2018. We identified a critical flaw in the protocol that we responsibly disclosed to other projects and moved to Sigma which removes trusted setup and gave much smaller zero-knowledge proofs.
Thereafter we developed Lelantus which inspired the development of Triptych (Monero) and LelantusMW (Beam). And in January 2024 of this year, Lelantus Spark was launched which gives full sender, receiver and amount privacy with very high anonymity sets. This work heavily influenced Seraphis, a potential candidate to upgrade Monero’s privacy.
We’re actually one of the few privacy coins that actively develops innovative privacy protocols rather than adopting others.
Benefits of Firo's lelantus spark protocol over Monero's RingCT and Z’cashs orchard.
Monero’s current protocol, RingCT, only offers a limited anonymity set per transaction (16) and its stealth addresses do not support outgoing view keys, only incoming. This makes it hard for people to reveal balance. Multi-sig support is also inefficient making it hard to develop cross-chain bridges. Its upcoming FCMP++ upgrade does a lot to resolve this though it is expected that Spark still remains more efficient.
Zcash’s Orchard protocol is a great piece of work that uses Halo2 and boasts great feature set and high anonymity. The work is highly complex which makes it harder for outside developers and researchers to understand it completely and also uses more exotic cryptography such as bilinear pairings which are less battle tested than the discrete logarithm assumptions which Spark uses. Spark takes a modular approach with specific ZKPs proving specific things which makes it easier to analyze security, easy to upgrade and also relies on more standard cryptographic assumptions.
Benefits of Firo's hybrid consensus mechanism.
Firo uses a hybrid masternode and PoW consensus mechanism meaning to break the security you would both need to control 51% of the hashrate and also a significant proportion of the masternode network. This makes it a lot harder to compromise.
The consensus mechanism also enables great features like Chainlocks which makes blocks final the moment they are confirmed with no possibility of reorganizations (no waiting of x number of confirmations!) and also InstantSend which makes transactions confirmed even before a block is confirmed.
We are one of the few projects that have adopted (with modifications) Dash’s masternode system with working LLMQs and chainlocks.
Masternodes require 1000 FIRO to host to encourage honest behaviour and also doesn’t require you to keep your private key to those nodes online. It currently yields about 17%p.a and soon to be 22%.
Conclusion
In conclusion Firo ($FIRO) is a pioneering privacy-focused cryptocurrency that offers exceptional financial confidentiality and security. Its advanced Lelantus Spark protocol provides enhanced anonymity, building upon innovative contributions to zero-knowledge proofs. With larger anonymity sets and efficient multi-sig support, Firo surpasses Monero's RingCT and Zcash's Orchard. Additionally, its hybrid consensus mechanism combines PoW and masternode consensus for increased security, featuring Chainlocks for instant block finality and InstantSend for rapid transaction confirmation. Overall, Firo's cutting-edge technology makes it a premier choice for those seeking financial privacy and security.
