Firo (cryptocurrency)

In the late 2014, Poramin Insom, a student in Masters in Security Informatics from Johns Hopkins University wrote a paper on implementing the zerocoin protocol into a cryptocurrency with Matthew Green as faculty member.[11][5] The project to create a standalone cryptocurrency implementing the Zerocoin protocol was named "Moneta".[12]

On 28 September 2016, Zcoin, the first cryptocurrency to implement the zerocoin protocol, was launched by Poramin Insom and team.[2] Roger Ver[2] and Tim Lee were Zcoin's initial investors.[13] Poramin also set up an exchanged named "Satang" that can convert Thai Baht to Zcoin directly.[5]

On 20 February 2017, a malicious coding attack on Zerocoin protocol created 370,000 fake tokens which perpetrators sold for over 400 Bitcoins ($440,000). Zcoin team announced that a single-symbol error in a piece of code "allowed an attacker to create Zerocoin spend transactions without a corresponding mint".[14] Unlike Ethereum during the DAO event, developers have opted not to destroy any coins or attempt to reverse what happened with the newly generated ones.[15]

In April 2018, a cryptographic flaw was found in the Zerocoin protocol which allowed attackers to steal, destroy, and create Zcoins.[16] The Zcoin cryptocurrency team while acknowledging the flaw, stated the high difficulty in performing such attacks and the low probability of giving economic benefit to the attacker.[17]

In September 2018, Zcoin introduced the Dandelion protocol that hides the origin IP address of a sender without using The Onion Router (Tor) or Virtual Private Network (VPN).[18][19]

In November 2018, Zcoin conducted the world's first large-scale party elections for Thailand Democrat Party using blockhain instead of relying the election commission to count the votes.[20][21]

In December 2018, Zcoin implemented Merkle tree proof, a mining algorithm that deters the usage of Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) in mining coins by being more memory intensive for the miners. This allows ordinary users to use central processing unit (CPU) and graphics card for mining, so as to enable egalitarianism in coin mining.[8] In the same month, Zcoin released an academic paper proposing the Lelantus protocol that remove the need of trusted setup and hides the origin and the amount of coins in a transaction.[22][23]

In February 2019, Zcoin was added to wallet supported by Binance cryptocurrency exchange.[24] In the same month, Zcoin partnered with Binance Charity Foundation to raise funds for "Lunch for Children" program in Africa. The charity used blockchain to track and verify the progress of funds from donor to receiver.[25]

On 30 July 2019, Zcoin formally departed from the zerocoin protocol by adopting a new protocol called "Sigma" that prevents counterfeit privacy coins from inflating coin supply. This is achieved by removing a feature called "trusted setup" from the zerocoin protocol.[26] In August 2019, Zcoin was added to an Africian cryptocurrency exchange named OVEX.[27] In December 2019, Zcoin introduced a decentralised crowdfunding and decision making system to fund ancillary tasks for the project.[28]

In January 2020, Zcoin will implement Receiver Address Privacy (RAP) so that users can share a single permanent address to the public to receive money without the outsiders knowing any transaction history in the address.[29] In May 2020, Zcoin announced that all founder rewards will be ceased, while at the same time increase development funding to 15% of the block reward, and allocated 35% of the block reward to masternodes. Besides, a US$100,000 reserve fund was set up to protect against price volatility.[30] In September 2020, Zcoin completed first halving of block rewards.[31]

In October 2020, Zcoin announced rebranding to new name called "Firo" which signifies a unique way of burn (destroy) and redeem coins.[32]