Firo Frontier Newsletter - Vol. 2 No. 4
Firo Frontier · March 4, 2025
Firo Frontier provides a brief summary of what's been happening in Firo over the past two weeks.
Crypto - a way to opt out of traditional financial systems and authority and control
Being a permission-less platform - crypto can be used for a multitude of different purposes - an escape hatch is one, speculative playground is another - but as nation states crumble and increase their tax and control over fiat currencies we may see the true value in crypto as a way to exchange ‘money’ in parallel with the normal messed up world.
Some discussions can be found here:
https://x.com/Fiskantes/status/1891577487764881487
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 and is now available for public testing.
Thank you for your patience!
Join us in testing the new address system — your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Read more about it here:
https://firo.org/2025/03/04/spark-names-testnet-launch
Firo - Correction in Circulating Supply Calculation
Firo's circulating supply (and thus market cap) has been underreported by CMC and Coingecko due to use of an outdated and incorrect explorer API dating back when Firo was Zcoin.
We have investigated and have the correct figures. CMC and Coingecko have verified our submissions and both CMC and CoinGecko have updated their figures, reflecting the circulating supply increase of 2.2 million coins.
Read more about it (and verify for yourself) here: https://firo.org/2025/02/26/correction-in-supply-calculations.html
Binance delisting non MICA compliant stablecoins for EEA users
In a recent post, Binance announced its intention to delist non-MICA complaint stablecoins for EEA users which includes USDT which is FIRO’s (and many other crypto’s) main stablecoin and trading pair. The core team is monitoring the situation closely and will keep the community posted on mitigation measures. The only MICA-compliant USD stablecoin currently is USDC which has its own set of challenges.
Delays in mining Firo blocks on March 3rd - the importance of miners choosing the right mining pool:
The Firo network is a hybrid (POW + Master Node) crypto network with both mining and Master Nodes serving critical roles in the creation and verification of blocks on the network.
On March 3rd - the largest mining pool for Firo - WoolyPooly - was unable to continue mining Firo for about 24 hours (not verified - but is seems a server hardware failure had a part to play in the situation). Since at the time WoolyPooly had over 80% of the Firo Network hashrate - and with the loss of this hashrate it caused long delays in blocks being mined and resulted in some blocks taking 45 mins (instead of the normal 2.5 min average) to be mined and validated by the network. This caused long delays in some Firo transfers during this time. The Firo network was working (as designed) to adjust the mining difficulty to work around the much lower hashrate - but this takes time (network difficulty is designed to adjust every 12 blocks - or about 30 mins) - however 12 blocks can take a long time to mine when 80% of the hashrate is gone. The remaining two major Firo mining pools (K1POOL, and Zergpool), and a few solo miners, took up the task of mining all blocks on the Firo network until WoolyPooly was back online for mining Firo again.
This highlights the importance that miners have in the stability of the Firo network - and brings up a point that the Firo team has asked miners to do a number of times over the past few years - with little to no results - Please distribute your Firo mining hashrate to some of the smaller pools to help decentralize the hashrate so this sort of thing doesn't happen again (or at least the impact of losing 30%-40% of the hashrate will be much less significant than losing over 80%). Some people think it's better to be in a bigger pool - however - there really is no difference - if you are in a pool with 10 times more people than another pool - you will have to share you winnings with 10 times more people - and - ultimately end up with the same amount of Firo in the long run - it may take a little bit longer time between blocks - but your rewards are bigger when you get them. Plus - if you spread the hashrate around between the smaller pools you will be doing your part to being a good Firo community member.
Miners can use the MingPoolStats website to monitor hashrate distribution and move their rigs around to help balance out hashrate appropriately.
The concern right now is that if miners go back to the same-old-same-old way of doing things we risk the same situation happening again. While WoolyPooly is a wonderful mining site - the health of the Firo network has to be given priority when choosing where miners assign their hashrate. In less than 24 hours WoolyPooly is already up to over 60% of the Firo network hashrate - and headed higher if people don't use a little common sense and community spirt.
Happy mining everyone!!
Reminder - You Can Help Shape Firo’s Mining Future:
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. 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
Let’sTalkCrypto Episode 32: An AMA about Privacy Coins hosted by LetsExchange
Let’sTalkCrypto Episode 32: An AMA about Privacy Coins hosted by LetsExchange happened at 1 PM UTC / 8 AM EST Feb 26, 2025 . Discussions during this 40 min AMA were focused on Privacy Projects. In addition to Firo's own Reuben, there were discussions from CakeWallet, Zano, and Pivix - about crypto privacy and comparisons between privacy features of coins including Monero - as well as discussions about Firo historical protocols. You can listen to the AMA here on X:
https://x.com/i/spaces/1OyJALmrdbLGb
Updates from the developers
Development at $FIRO continues as the 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 has launched on testnet and is now available for public access and testing.
View Keys that allow you to watch Spark addresses for receiving/sending transactions will be implemented and tested soon.
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 and minting work now complete and Spats spending is now the next focus of development work in this area.
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 - Investigation continues on why some FiroDEX transaction history entries are missing from the history display.
FiroDEX-desktop version 0.8.2 beta has been released for use. Work on improving FiroDEX continues.
Normal Firo maintenance continues - Insight Explorer will be updated with a new gettotalsupply API to correct the recent issue of underreported values of the circulating supply (and market cap).
As always, work continues on performance improvements, preparation work for implementation of new $FIRO features, and normal bug fixes.
Development details can be found in this updated Firo Forum post: https://forum.firo.org/t/weekly-firo-development-meeting-minutes/2337/115
Firo Forum discussion on Master Nodes
We occasionally receive questions on the Firo Forum about Master Nodes - and here’s some information that may interest some people.
Master Nodes provide a necessary function in protecting the Firo network from 51% attacks (Firo was attacked just before implementing Master Node chain locks, and hasn’t been attacked since). In addition to chain locks, Firo Master Nodes also provide a service called Instasend - which allows the Master Nodes to finalize transactions within seconds and provide a more secure network than normal POW only chains. Firo has a hybrid chain with both POW (mining - continuing to provide a fair distribution of new coins to anyone that wants to mine Firo) plus Master Nodes that provide the added security for the network (and provide compensation to the community members that run the Master Nodes).
Master nodes may have gotten a bad reputation due to some projects implementing them with centralized control as a primary requirement. Firo’s Master Nodes do not have a pre-registration requirement or pre-approval process like some projects. Firo’s Master Nodes can be run by anyone that sets up the required wallet and sets aside the appropriate collateral and runs a VPS with a dedicated IP4 IP address - or even by people that run a Master Node on their own systems provided they have a static IP address.
The Firo Master Node Setup Guide (Firo masternode setup guide | Firo - Privacy-preserving cryptocurrency) has the documentation on how to setup your own node (either on your own hardware or using one of many service providers providing VPS and/or Node hosting services).
Some people have concerns that Master Nodes may be centralizing - they aren’t really any more centralizing than having mining being done by only a handful of mining pools. There are 9 Master Node / VPS providers listed in the setup guide - plus many community members running their own nodes on their own equipment and using diverse VPS services) - Firo is not your average Master Node coin. Firo currently has over 4600 active Master Nodes on the Firo network.
The way Firo has setup the hybrid (Mining / Master Node) system makes a lot of sense and provides features that make Firo better than many of the other projects in the crypto space. More detailed comparissions between Firo and other coins can be found here:
https://firo.org/guide/privacy-coin-comparison
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 20% in the past 5 months. Firo Master Nodes currently pay 4.375 Firo about every 8.1 days (dependent on the number of active nodes there are on the Firo network).(Obviously Not financial advice)
Reminder - FiroFam! Beware of Scammers!
Just a reminder to watch out for 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
The Firo Telegram news channel is: https://t.me/fironews
Archive copies of previous Firo Frontier Newsletters can be found at:
https://newsletter.firo.org/archive