February 18, 2025

Firo Frontier Newsletter - Vol. 2 No. 3

Firo Frontier · February 18, 2025

Firo Frontier provides a brief summary of what's been happening in Firo over the past two weeks.

What a whirlwind!

With the Libra token that was launched by the Argentinian President then denounced with Portnoy refunded for his losses as an insider, people aping into CZ’s dog Broccoli, PlanB (of Bitcoin stock-to-flow model fame) ditching Bitcoin in favour of Bitcoin ETFs, it’s been a crazy few weeks that also shows the sorry state of the crypto industry.

Meanwhile Firo continues to build cypherpunk money, private, decentralized and community owned to solve what cryptocurrencies were supposed to do in the first place: uncensorable money that is controlled by no single entity.

Spark Names

Spark Names is live on testnet but the core team has not released it for public testing yet to iron out some user interface bugs. Stay tuned for the public release of Spark Names on testnet! Thank you for your patience!

Reminder - You Can Help Shape Firo’s Mining Future: Weigh In on FiroPoW’s VRAM Requirements Poll

FiroPOW’s DAG size has now exceeded 7.7 GB, making GPUs with 8 GB of VRAM unable to mine Firo on virtually all platforms. This has prompted discussions about the VRAM requirements for mining Firo, and we’d like the community’s input on how to proceed.

Vote on what Firo's mining VRAM requirement should be! More info here:

https://firo.org/2025/01/30/firopow-vram-requirement

Forum Poll can be found here: https://forum.firo.org/t/poll-what-should-the-vram-requirement-for-mining-firo-be/3877

MAGIC Grants (one way to donate to the Firo project) will be starting email newsletters

MAGIC Grants will be starting email newsletters, if FiroFam are interested in getting updates on the Firo fund you can subscribe here: https://listmonk.magicgrants.org/subscription/form
Learn more about the MAGIC Firo Fund here:
https://magicgrants.org/funds/firo/

‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Roger Ver Asks Trump to End Lawfare

Roger Ver - as many may know - was one of the first supporters of Bitcoin and has been called the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ by many. During an interview on X, Roger asked President Trump to End Lawfare created by the previous US government. The interview can be seen here:
https://x.com/rogerkver/status/1889706157905944714

Roger was one of Firo’s (Zcoin at the time) seed investors and earliest supporters - and he is now facing charges that may lead to a 109 years’ prison sentence. You can sign the letter of support and spread the word!

Updates from the developers

The $FIRO developers continue to actively work towards having $FIRO’s infrastructure become the best privacy preserving technology in the crypto space.

Current work includes:

Spark Names - Work on this new feature continues and will allow people to be able to send and receive Firo through human readable names. Spark Names are expected to launch on testnet soon. Finalization of the User Interface for Spark Names is almost complete.

Spark Assets (Spats) - this feature allows all assets on the tokenization layer to share the same anonymity pool, vastly improving privacy. Work on this feature continues with Spats asset creation, minting, and transactions being the current focus. Spats spending will be the next focus very soon.

Spark support for newly created $FIRO coins - work continues on enabling all newly created $FIRO coins (as part of the mining or Master Node rewards process) to be created as Spark assets rather than the current transparent coins. This will provide privacy for all coins created as part of the $FIRO ecosystem.

Work continues on FiroDex - We expect FiroDEX to be live again soon with the infrastructure being run by community volunteers.

Normal Firo maintenance continues - this includes performance improvements, preparation work for implementation of new $FIRO features, and normal bug fixes.

Development details can be found in this Firo Forum post:

https://forum.firo.org/t/weekly-firo-development-meeting-minutes/2337/114

Summary of major topics covered by Reuben in his recent interview on the ‘Bitcoin Takeover Podcast’ with Vlad Costea!

Reuben's interview on Vlad Costea’s - Bitcoin Takeover Podcast was a little over 4 hours and covered a lot of topics, and is certainly worth listening to (play it in the background while you are doing other things instead of listening to the radio, or listening to your spouse complain about how much time you spend on the computer). Some of the many topics covered are:
- Moving past tribalism
- Zerocoin/Zerocash history
- Discussions about historical exploits and overcoming them
- Evolution of Zcoin to Firo and ZK proofs
- Protocol evolutions from Zerocoin to Sygma to Lelantus to Lelantus Spark and modularity
- Comparison of Firo and other privacy coins (Monero, Zano, Zcash, Beam)
- Work done to prevent Binance delisting Firo (so far)
- FiroDex discussions + atomic swaps
- Dandelion++ protocol discussion
- Discussion about recent mining reward changes
- Firo's commitment to retaining privacy protocols even with regulatory pressures

Listen to it here or watch it in video on X below:

Other News

• Masternode numbers: Enabled Masternode numbers continue to steadily grow every month showing long term holder growth.
  Enabled Firo Master Nodes have grown by over 19% in the past 5 months. Return on Investment is almost 20% with over 35% of Firo’s emitted coins held in Master Nodes. Firo Master Nodes currently pay 4.375 Firo about every 8 days (dependent on the number of active nodes there are on the Firo network). (Obviously Not financial advice)

• Members of our community can collect bug bounties for finding and reporting bugs in Firo’s code

  One of Firo’s community members, Petr Vacha @nrsimha, recently found and reported a bug that caused some transactions to fail under certain conditions. While the bug has been classified as a minor issue, he has still been awarded a 100 FIRO bounty for finding and disclosing this bug as per the bug bounty program. The bug has been fixed and the code now ensures that fee deductions do not reduce any recipient's amount to zero or negative, and an appropriate error is set otherwise. More info can be found at Firo’s Github here: https://github.com/firoorg/firo/pull/1525

• Reminder - FiroFam! Beware of Scammers!
  Just a reminder to be vigilant of all the scammers working hard to steal your coins. Note that our official site is firo.org. We do NOT offer cloud mining, deposits, or any investment schemes. Anyone using Firo's Telegram or Discord channels please beware of scammers and impersonators! Our admins and team members will NEVER DM you first. All support questions are answered publicly to keep you safe.
  Stay safe and always verify!

Did you know?

• More information about Firo is available at: https://firo.org

• Firo Telegram news channel: https://t.me/fironews

• Archive copies of previous Firo Frontier Newsletters can be found at:
  https://newsletter.firo.org/archive