Hey Firo Fam!
I just wanted to share a little about some of the thoughts I’ve been having about Firo and also share a little bit about what’s been going on behind the scenes including some personal stories. There’s no particular objective or agenda to this post and thus it may be a bit rambling but I still want to get it out there rather than overthink it and not have anything out.
A lot of my thoughts these past few months have been how to make Firo a success and also things that went wrong. Sometimes I feel that I cannot share these thoughts for fear of it being perceived as weakness and sometimes you got to show strength even in times of adversity.
But I think it’s important for me to do so, for myself and also to be transparent at some of the challenges we face.
Things that we have going on for us
Some of the best privacy tech in the business
Strong exchange listings that many projects dream about and cost many millions to get
Some really die hard community members that have been with us through thick and thin
Developers and researchers that really have our back
Upheld our values and continued development rain or shine
Challenges
Small marketcap
Poor price action
Privacy narrative has been challenging
Lack of adoption as a means of payment/usage
Limited funding/resources
Regulatory challenges with exchange (especially Binance)
Things that we could do better
Strengthening our messaging
Community building
Community member engagement and retention
User experience and guides
Documentation
Personal shortcomings
I’ll be the first to admit I have a lot of shortcomings. Some of it is showing appreciation to community members who help out or building and maintaining friendships/relationships. As a result, some may feel that their efforts aren’t being recognized and quietly drop out. A lot of people care about the project but if they feel like they’re not being heard or taken seriously.
Another shortcoming is that I have been too lax on non performing people and kept them longer than they should have draining our resources for no good reason. There were people who dragged on for a whole year despite limited progress and yet I still wanted to believe (for e.g. the early work on Firo-client) and some of the more junior devs that we had.
Communication and consistency is also something I struggle with in communicating the general direction and idea of the project. I notice a lot of people saying we should do something (like DEX listings) which we are already doing but because of lack of communication a lot of it is missed. Firo fortnight is often delayed because I can’t bring myself to do it.
Learning to trust and delegate tasks down for community handling is also something I struggle with which leads me to spending a lot of time responding to things personally since I’m often the only one equipped to do so.
Perhaps the biggest one is my lack of marketing skills. Coming from a legal background, I focus more on accuracy than clarity and always am super worried about saying something misleading. This is great for academics but makes for poor marketing and unclear messaging. When Zcoin first started, crypto coins didn’t really need much marketing. You just built cool stuff and they would come. But now with a million tokens being launched and all with marketing budgets and professional marketing teams, it’s hard to stand out but this was something I and the team could have focused more on instead of doubling down on tech. You can build the greatest tech but if no one knows about it, it’s pointless.
Personal challenges
In the past few years, it’s also sometimes feels like stewarding the project is a thankless job. I’ve done many things behind the scenes to retain our talent and to resolve my team member’s issues (from relocation, medical issues, dealing with war, or personal issues) but these are things I can’t share publicly despite it taking a lot of my time and energy.
I genuinely put my own resources and wealth on the line with Firo even to my detriment. Most of my financial capital is locked up in supporting Firo and while I’m okay, I’m not super rich. Being called a scammer or saying that I’m dumping when I’m not (I’ve been actually buying Firo even when it is not financially responsible to do so). Recently I paid out of my own pocket market making fees for 6 months upfront to support Firo as the core team has not enough funds to fund it. All inventory for market making is provided by me with a little help from Poramin. Even the recent AscendEX listing was paid for by me.
Struggling to pay our team every month is also one of the biggest stressors and I pay everyone else before myself. And if the price drops, I stress about where to find the money or what additional services to cut.
Some of the battles I face like negotiating with Binance on keeping us listed have been really stressful and honestly were done almost alone. The developers can’t help me with this nor my support team. I can’t also communicate with this community of the details. The monitoring tag was on schedule to be removed but due to constant regulatory pressure they changed their minds and decided to keep it on for the moment.
I actually cried hard that day. I was so looking forward to a reprieve and a change in sentiment with the removal of the monitoring tag but when we were told it would be kept on due to regulatory pressure, it felt like a huge blow to the gut. Almost every day we have someone messaging or commenting about the monitoring tag or saying that we are about to be delisted when that’s not true. Feeling that you’ve fought so hard but it is still not enough and not achieving the result you want is seriously demoralizing. But if everyone keeps that same attitude, then yeah, that would be the eventuality too.
The hardcore privacy advocates see me as selling out for introducing Exchange Addresses though I genuinely think it’s an ok compromise while others say, hey you guys implemented this but the monitoring tag is still on, so what’s the point? Getting hammered from both sides when fighting so hard through this battle has been disheartening.
Also having to regulate what I say all the time is seriously tiring when all I want to do is express my thoughts freely but as the steward steering the project I recognize there are consequences and weight to what I say. Every time I say something, I have to worry about it being misconstrued especially for those whose first language isn’t English or it offending someone when that was not the intention.
Then there are those who message me on the glory days of Tim. People forget that I never enjoyed a founder’s wallet and receive a salary (I’m paid less than our developers).It wasn’t me who dumped on them for an entire two years. I’ve more or less moved past this and in retrospect understand why Tim felt slighted by me when I didn’t listen to him. He wanted the price to rise as of course all of us, we just didn’t agree the way to do it and he felt betrayed that we were not listening to his every suggestion (which not all of them were good). He’s used to being a boss and felt that he was a shareholder of a company. I don’t blame him. What I don’t like is people saying that I should have listened to him and that I was the one who brought down the project. We actually arranged to see if he was willing to be bought out responsibly but he wanted to go out on his own terms and dump it to make a point.
Also a lot of the times I see all these suggestions from the community and I’m like okay, great suggestion…who is going to do it? I have community members messaging me with their personal suggestions and while I appreciate them it takes an immense amount of time to formulate responses or even figure out what it takes. Some are great while others are just plain bad. And all of them are like when when when, this is the most important thing. When everything is a priority, nothing is and I’m only one person. Usually I don’t really know how to respond to these things and these people feel like I’m not listening to them. I am listening, I just don’t know how to respond.
Then you have those in the trading channel or even in the main chan who just just want to see Firo burn and hoping/wishing for it to go down or just laughing when it goes down. It makes me wonder, why? Like what’s wrong with these people?
Or the people constantly asking for ‘institution’ support when it was precisely the institutions that screwed us over and even if we do get them in, it will be at a heavy cost (for e.g. DWF) which is more akin to a last pump rug pull rather than long term revival.
With all these negative feedback I often question myself whether I should go on and there are many days where I struggle to wake up to find the motivation even when there are things to do. This leads me to feel guilty and then there’s this self perpetuating cycle.
Recently our team has also suffered a lot of personal issues, me with my dad’s declining mental health leading to a lot of friction, while others with their parents dying or being ill. It’s life and we all have our own issues but there are days where it just feels like too much. COVID was particularly tough for me as I dealt with severe paralysis of my left hand that doctors weren’t sure whether it would recover and fighting through the depression and frustration that came with it. It took a year and a half of constant physiotherapy for me to regain function.
I also regret the rebrand to Firo and while at the time it seemed like the right idea at the time especially with the constant confusion with Zcash, continuing the old brand name actually has power. Though the window to rebrand back i think is gone and would result in delistings since changing a ticker is a lot of work and counts as a new ‘listing’. The Firo branding isn’t actually all that bad. It’s just the price action and the lack of current brand recognition that made it ‘bad’. I still think the reasoning and logic behind it were sound and if the price improved, people would have felt better about it.
The positive side and things to be thankful for
On the other hand I have a lot to be thankful for. Our project has come up with privacy protocols that has influenced many other projects including Monero (even though we sometimes don’t get the recognition). We did this with a shoestring budget and I would argue we achieved a lot of what Zcash has done technically with a fraction of the resources.
We have a lot of existing integrations and listings that would be very hard to get today!
But i wanted to give a shout-out to the people who have made Firo possible and just been awesome people. This list is non exhaustive and there are many others who have helped.
@AJaydono and @anwar has been a stabilizing presence, having worked with me for more than ten years (even before Firo) and they are people whom I trust and am thankful for though i should express that thanks more. They have faced immense personal challenges but they’re still here.
@ajivanyan has been the creative force for the project making Lelantus and Spark possible and really really a good guy. He’s worked and supported us in more ways than one and he is a very very dear friend whom I wish I could give more of my time to. He’s been always generous and one of the most genuine person I know.
@rasikhmorani as well. A huge supporter and bedrock and friend. Without him the project wouldn’t be possible with his generous donations and also generous with his advice and friendship. Hanging out with him despite our initial rocky start really makes me feel there are some genuine people in the space.
Meeting and knowing @rehrar was one of the best things to happen to our project. Through him we got to know Sarang and also @sgp and started our exposure to the Monero community. His company CypherStack has built some of the foundations of Firo and he’s always made it a point to do right by us even if it was not always the most profitable thing to do. Campfire is built by him, Firo runner, and the FCS (which was completely rewritten when there was a dispute with the Monero CCS code). It was also through his recommendation that we got that generous donation from Power Up Privacy.
@levonpetrosyan93 has also been a huge backbone of the project helping to build our dev team during challenging times and doing the vast amount of work for Spark.
@Fiendish despite being a bit tired of it all, has been also a huge help to the project, generously offering his time and advice and feedback. Sparky was his idea! 
This is a relationship which I wish i had more time to maintain and nurture.
@Zed who has been always constantly giving us feedback and helped with the whitepaper (still awaiting finalization due to my lack of availability).
@poramin for coming up with the whole concept and idea of Zcoin and sharing his insights and feedback still. Even donating some of his intern’s time to develop Firo.
And the many others like @Gungden @nrsimha, @alpha_rabbit, @antibit just to name a few…who still chime in and care about Firo. People caring deeply about Firo really makes it worthwhile.
And even @Zen and @madaocheng2024 that despite our differences have still been vocal about their opinions yet polite and respectful. Having dissenting opinions are important to keep us honest and to question ourselves.
Moving forward and need everyone’s help
Firo is short handed and anything that is none development related is often handled by me. But Firo is not the core team and isn’t built for me or the core team. It’s for you guys. It’s also why most of the rewards and supply is with you guys, the community members. There’s no huge Firo allocation to us for us to influence the price up or down. I hope people understand this that it’s not that core doesn’t want to do it, there’s a limit to what we can do but if we work together, then there’s nothing we can’t do.
And while we have a lot of challenges, at the end of the day, Firo is in the community’s hands. Coming up with good content, organizing local meetups…and while some may not agree, a bit of what @Lil-King has been trying to do. We aren’t perfect so we all try within our means. But every little effort counts be it welcoming someone new to the community, answering someone’s question, banning a spammer or even just commenting on our content.
We as a community can choose to be positive, we can choose not to be defined by our failures or mistakes but instead learn from them. How we think and the way we approach things, shades and colours everything. It is the community that can steer this ship. There’s a reason why I call myself a Project Steward not a CEO. But we as a community need to believe and understand what we are standing up for instead of it just being something to get rich on.
LIke I take a look at what our friends at Zano is doing which has been doing amazing price wise, it’s great but fundamentally we actually have a lot of all the same fundamentals or even better. Our privacy tech is better, our Spark names will be better and i think our Spark Assets implementation is better but they have the benefit of having deployed Aliases and their Zano Assets earlier. This came from really good community manager and marketing from people like Kwibs who really tirelessly grew their space. They struggled for many years too until it finally broke out and the sentiment shifted which became a self fulfilling cycle.
What we are working on
The core team has been working on a few key things these past few weeks:
a) Spark Address Names
b) Spark coinbase (ability for miners and masternodes to pick spark address payouts)
c) Tokenomics change (as per the poll)
On the marketing side, Power Up Privacy is interested in helping us fund some marketing activities if we can find the right partner and we are in talks with several marketing companies to grow our community and presence but this can only be successful if our community rallies behind it too and welcomes and retains these new people that would come in.
Marketing will consist of:
- Updating and laying out the roadmap and vision of Firo
- Improving our existing content and delivery (website and other materials)
- Unified messaging and delivery
- Reaching out to KOLs to promote Firo in local communities
- Focusing more on high growth regions like in SE Asia and MENA and the Chinese speaking areas and making sure our content is accessible there
- Community recruitment and growth in these regions
My Role
Despite everything, I’ll be here as long as the community wants me here. I deeply love this project and the people that make it up even though at times it’s been painful. I really want the best for this project and this is why I like to call our community Firo fam. I want us to feel like a family again, helping each other, welcoming people like the early days of Firo.
I cannot promise that there won’t be any new challenges, but with every challenge, we have survived and become stronger. No matter what we face, I think as long as people care, this project will continue regardless. Even if I or the core team are not here. That’s been one of my key goals is to make sure that even if the core team cannot continue, Firo will still be left in a fundamentally good shape.
So even if this was a long, rambling, unstructured post, I want to say THANK YOU, I appreciate all of you, and I look forward to seeing Firo through this come what may but we can’t do this alone.
I only have Binance