Firo (formerly Zcoin)FIRO
The first coin to implement the Zerocoin protocol, launched as Zcoin in September 2016 and renamed Firo in October 2020; its team says it is not a Zcash fork.
The wiki's angle: Firo is in a Bitcoin fork wiki because people keep calling it one, and because its own steward spent part of S16 E5 explaining that it is not a Zcash fork. Yap says that confusion was the main reason for the rename, and rejects the suggestion that it was meant to hide the project’s history.[4]
Zcoin
Wikipedia says Poramin Insom wrote a paper on implementing Zerocoin with Matthew Green as faculty member, and launched Zcoin, the first cryptocurrency to implement the protocol, on 28 September 2016, with Roger Ver as initial investor[1]. On S16 E5 Reuben Yap said Poramin was essentially a lone developer and that Zcoin launched in September 2016[2].
The 2017 bug
Wikipedia reports that in February 2017 an attack on the Zerocoin code created 370,000 fake tokens, which the attackers sold for more than 400 BTC, and that the team called it a single-symbol error[1]. Yap described it on the show as “a really, really basic bug… missing some equal sign”, which meant about 400,000 coins were created “out of thin air”[3].
From Zcoin to Firo
Wikipedia says Zcoin adopted the Sigma protocol in July 2019 and announced the rebrand to Firo in October 2020[1]. Yap said the main reason was constant confusion with Zcash: “people were like, oh, Zcoin is a Zcash fork when it's not”, because Zerocoin and Zerocash are different protocols[4]. The README describes Firo today as using the Spark protocol, FiroPoW mining and LLMQ ChainLocks against 51% attacks[5].
Lineage
This wiki has not verified which codebase Zcoin was originally built on, so it draws Firo without a parent line on the lineage map[1]. Wikipedia reports that Firo itself suffered a 51% attack in January 2021[1].
References
- secondaryWikipedia, “Firo (cryptocurrency)” [archived]
- episodeS16 E5: Reuben Yap on Zcoin's launch and the 2017 Zerocoin bug▶ listen at 55:28timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
- episodeS16 E5: Reuben Yap on the missing equal sign▶ listen at 59:35timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
- episodeS16 E5: Reuben Yap on why Zcoin became Firo▶ listen at 1:02:40timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
- primaryFiro README, GitHub firoorg/firo [archived]