The founder of Firo (then Zcoin) is Poramin Insom. He earned a masters degree in Information Security from Johns Hopkins University where he wrote a paper on a proposed practical implementation of the Zerocoin protocol. Aside from Firo, he is also a co-founder of the Satang Corporation and has served as second lieutenant with the Royal Thai Armed Forces in its cyber warfare division.

Reuben Yap joined the project shortly after its launch in 2016 and now leads the project in its overall strategy, development and research goals. Reuben has been a vocal advocate of online and financial privacy, having founded one of Southeast Asia’s earliest VPN services to combat censorship and is a well-respected speaker on the topic, with featured commentary in CoinDesk, BBC, Forbes, Nasdaq, Reuters and Cheddar News, among others. He assumed the role of Project Steward & Co-Founder in November 2019.

Firo's Lelantus privacy protocol and its predecessor, Sigma, relies as part of its construction a specialized zero-knowledge proof called one-out-of-many proofs which unlike other zk constructions, does not require a trusted setup or exotic math/cryptographic assumptions while retaining high anonymity sets.

It was also the first project to deploy Dandelion++ in October 2018, a method of propagating transactions that prevents third parties from linking an IP address to a transaction.

In November 2018, Firo's (then Zcoin) blockchain was used in the Thai Democrat Party's primary election to elect its party leader. With over 127,000 votes cast nationwide, it is the world's first large-scale political election held on a blockchain.

Firo was rebranded from Zcoin in October 2020.

Firo uses a PoW-Chainlock hybrid consensus model whereby quorums are formed by several hundred masternodes deterministically selected (LLMQ) that perform a verifiable network-wide measurement/vote of the “first-seen” rule and locks in the block that is first-seen. Blocks are final with a single confirmation as no reorganizations are allowed past this point. This also mitigates 51% mining attacks as more than half the masternode network would need to be compromised to disable Chainlocks before a 51% attack can be mounted.

Firo's mining algorithm is MTP which relies on memory hardness to make it resistant to ASICs. It is moving to FiroPOW, a ProgPOW variant that is designed explicitly for GPU mining and is even more resistant to ASICs and FPGAs to encourage fair distribution of its coin.

Firo (FIRO) can be traded on the following exchanges:

• Binance
• Huobi Global
• Gate.io
• DigiFinex
• HitBTC
• Bitcoin.com Exchange

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