Since December 2024 when I made my post several changes have happened. On the bright side there have been 2 positive developments which are swapspace finally listing firo exchange pairs and xchange me as well.
However we are faced with a deepening problem:
Exolix has entirely dropped support for Firo with no plans to reinstate.
Stealthex have one of the worst rates for Firo I have ever seen anywhere. When asked - “these are best rates from our liquidity provider”. Who dis?
exchangio doesn’t have Firo crypto pair available
swapswopio doesn’t offer Firo swaps in either direction with a number of coins including Ethereum
On top issues persist with blocking Tor, VPNs, not accepting sending from Spark (default) addresses meaning we have to go out of our way to convert to transparent and then send. Very user-friendly and intuitive design /s
Please core team, tell me since all of these issues plague 90% of the listed exchanges here firo DOT org/get-firo/buy-firo/ in the Coin Swapping Services section, why are these exchanges still listed? Do you have a deal with them to increase their backlink and SEO traffic? I’m really curious specifically since you didn’t answer the facts the first time I posted this.
No action or basic research has been undertaken by the Firo core team in regards to why letsexchange doesn’t accept Spark transactions or why Majesticbank is still allowed to be listed with their tainted history (they also dropped support on their page for Firo-> several other pairs as well).
It seems no one is really bothered by all this at all. All we get are integrations like Firo on Binance chain (with no privacy aspects) which we don’t really need. In order to really flourish we need decentralized ways to trade NATIVE FIRO in both directions. Really should take a page from Moneros book that got banned on most exchanges but look at their community and price now!
I thank everyone who took time to read this and should nothing come out of this, I would seriously consider supporting Firo as privacy doesn’t seem to be of concern. Yet people here ask why the price is like this or why Firo isn’t considered as a serious replacement to Monero (since currently Firo IS better). If we don’t fulfill the basic core function of the Firo coin we might as well be yet another function-less shit/meme/coin listed on Binance and the likes… Thanks
In the past couple of months, we haven’t lost any major exchange with the exception of a small exchange called Coinstore (which only supported BEP20 FIRO and didn’t have any organic users).
Swap providers come and go and we don’t really have time to test everyone listed on our page since they don’t give us notification when they drop us. If Exolix no longer supports us, then we’ll drop it from our page. @anwar Please see that it is done. We do reviews every few months but it’s better to rely on community to report us on this.
Most swap providers rely almost entirely on centralized exchange listing backends to perform their swaps hence if they don’t have a ‘crypto’ pair, they won’t offer it or they’ll do so with markups since they have to route it through several ‘trades’.
Also it’s not that we didn’t have ‘crypto’ pairs before but the crypto world has changed to be operating primarily with stablecoin as the preferred way to exchange into a particular crypto. This makes sense because stablecoins are issued on multiple chains and almost every crypto’s major pair is with some stablecoin. Previously FIRO had several crypto pairs being FIRO/BTC, FIRO/ETH and FIRO/XRP. We tried to maintain the first two which actually divided our resources but honestly, there wasn’t any trading volume there. Also with the high gas fees of BTC and ETH, it no longer was really the preferred way to move money between exchanges. Only much larger cryptocurrencies have alt pairings that make sense and yet are still only a fraction of the volume of their stablecoin pairings. Every pair needs to have maintained liquidity which means either core team provides market making services + liqudity (each pair probably needs at least 50k USD worth at a minimum) or the community provides it (which we know there is no organic demand cause even when we supported it heavily there was little trading activity).
As for Majestic Bank, I don’t know, I know they have not been super reliable in the past, but from what I understand they always fulfilled it eventually. It’s hard to make determinations but unless they’re conclusively a scam which they aren’t and they’ve also built additional FIRO integrations like with their Telegram swap bot etc.
As mentioned most swap providers use CEX backends and the biggest exchange for it which is Binance uses Exchange Addresses. We have been in talks with several providers to support Spark Addresses, but it’s often low in their priority list though there are still smaller providers that are willing to work with us. We’ve been also trying to get NowPayments and their ‘Now’ ecosystem to support Spark addresses and also other payment processors.
The way I see it, don’t expect privacy with CEXes and just anonymize in and out of it and use them as conversion points.
If you force the exchanges to use Spark addresses, most likely they will just drop support for FIRO and you’ll lose even more ‘swap providers’ and liquidity. We at FIRO try to balance privacy with liquidity as both are required for a functioning cryptocurrency.
Monero can lose a few CEXes as you only need a handful of tier 1 exchanges to keep your markets going but for the moment they’re not completely immune to it and if they lose Kraken and Kucoin, that’s going to be a bigger issue. You can already see complaints on forums on commmunity members being cut off from Monero and even those I know who are in the states or regularly accept Monero are having increasing issues in converting Monero especially if they lose Kraken.
No we don’t have any deal with backlink or SEO traffic. Again, we rely on community to inform us. Our website’s code is up for everyone to see including the articles and people can submit PRs to add or remove it.
This is actually primarily as a backup. As you know FIRO on BEP20 has no privacy but that technically also makes it compliant for those exchanges who don’t want privacy coins. The main way we see the use of BEP20 FIRO is as a steady pool of liquidity that can be managed passively as people arbitrage the pool and access to BSC is not gated by any CEX. This acts like a constant indirect buffer to CEXes. But we offer cheap ways to convert from BEP20 FIRO to native FIRO using FiroDEX that is done using atomic swaps. Why this is also easy to do is because BEP20 FIRO and native FIRO are what we call ‘mirror assets’ meaning their price is going to be almost the same so market making on BEP20 FIRO to FIRO is super low risk and easy to do which is why we can offer decent amounts of FIRO to swap either side without fear of inventory loss.
AMMs are greatly useful but is challenging for privacy coins like ours to do it without smart contract functionality which is why AMMs that support privacy often need to be ‘wrapped’ into assets that don’t have privacy which is the case even with Monero with Serai or Confidential Layer with Zano and Firo (to come soon).
We of course feel that DEXes are the way to go and are focusing our efforts on doing that but it takes time. We had a working FiroDEX working for years but take up on that was low too though we are working on it (however Komodo wallet’s risk adverse stance and European presence have made it moe challenging).
On a side note, being a core developer on a privacy project has a lot of uncertain risks as we have seen with Tornado Cash, Samourai and such especially as a doxxed team. We have no intention to enable criminal activity but are wary that what we do can be construed as facilitating it, for example if we setup a DEX web front-end or even running DEX orderbook infrastructure. You know how easily we can be demonized and you very well know that even these forum posts can be used as evidence that we ‘facilitated’ money laundering etc. This is why we prefer for community volunteers to run these infra and ensure there is no way we benefit from it.
I’d want to first thank you for your response. It really does show great character when you have answered in the calm and rational way that you have. I’m sure other Firo members feel the same way.
You’re right about calling the websites I mentioned not exchanges but rather than swap providers as I know many or most of them don’t even have their own reserves (as you mentioned too). Majestic has had issues and if you dig deeper on place I referenced initially in my first ever post you will find affected. About the rest I do agree with what you have said putting coins out from spark to transparent and transparent to exchanges would have to do for now. I really hope there is a simple button soon where you can click (like a tickbox) which will convert the Spark to Transparent before being sent. This will make life so much easier.
I’m in agreement with you about the CEX-es they don’t make things easy. That’s why I was hoping the community-vetted swap providers would help with a more seamless experience rather than wondering if my ID is going to end up for sale somewhere from yet another hacked exchange.
Should the community create a table to track/regularly test swap providers? It would seem to me to be beneficial if we do that and is maintained by community members and linked below the swap provider section on the official website (with a warning of course).
I also agree unfortunately with the privacy risks to you as developers. While as far as I remember Tornado Cash sanctions vs developers were ruled by US courts to be unconstitutional (https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-texas-court-reverses-tornado-cash-sanctions-crypto-privacy-win) I know there is a lot of uncertainty. I recognize the need to make sure we don’t allow criminal elements and the delicate balance with privacy. After all if a country becomes a dictatorship as it can happen with any country at any point such technologies would give normal citizens some way to retain basic human rights.
On a more positive note I do know Firo is a coin worth fighting for and it will have long-term positive effect on the entire world. I don’t mean it will go up insanely in value but its use is undisputed and it has the potential and guts to be right up there, dare I even say further, than Monero (as obviously both coins cater to similar ideal customer-personas).
The Tornado Cash sanctions court case only rules that the OFAC sanctions on the smart contracts are illegal but doesn’t make a ruling as to whether the developers ‘facilitated’ the money laundering which is the key issue. The latter is the more important though of course the first is at least a victory (albeit a much more clear-cut one).
Also I would like to clarify that I have respect for the approach some projects like Monero take which is to have an uncompromising attitude towards regulation but I do believe there is value in our balanced approach towards the entire crypto space as well. And I would even argue that they complement each other.
First of all Monero’s stance is that they shouldn’t do anything to comply with regulations but the fact is, even if they wanted to, they would be hard pressed to do so given that their current view keys are not complete in that they are missing outgoing view keys (that is only coming in a later major hard fork) and the difficulty of adoption of view keys. Meaning, idealogically and technically, they are not in the right position to adopt any compliance measures. Also with the current RingCT model, it significantly degrades their privacy due to their small anonymity set per tx which relies on mandatory privacy to achieve meaningful practical anon sets. This does not apply as much to ZK models such as Firo’s or Zcash.
Firo’s and Zcash’s stance is different in that we will do what we can to comply with regulations to preserve centralized exchange liquidity but not if it would introduce unacceptable losses in p2p privacy. So for e.g., we will never introduce a backdoor into our privacy protocols for compliance’s sake (some other projects do have this). Large centralized exchanges already have your KYC information and have the right to ask you to demonstrate the source of your funds or reject your deposits if they’re not satisfied so there is already a compromise in privacy there regardless whether you use transparent addresses or private Spark addresses.
Also as centralized exchanges hold custody over user’s funds, there’s benefit in having transparent addresses where anyone can easily verify an exchange’s reserves on an explorer without the need to fiddle with view keys. It also allows easy refunds should an exchange reject a deposit since they can easily refund it to the depositing transparent address without more complicated proofs of ownership that exchanges would be reluctant to adopt (since with a Spark address or any form of stealth address you can’t prove your ownership otherwise). Exchanges cannot refund to any address even that the sender provided since a sender can just give a third party address.
These measures are not a 100% and there will remain governments and regulators who do not care about such things (such as France) who will impose a restriction just because we are ‘privacy focused’ even though it is arguable that coins like Litecoin (with MWEB) also fall into the same category as us but there also remain exchanges or jurisdictions that will keep us listed provided they can show that the coin has taken reasonable steps to compliance (which is why we have kept our Binance listing).
Because of our efforts, privacy coins who can meet these requirements can still remain listed on Binance albeit with the ‘monitoring’ tag and while it is far from ideal, it preserves liquidity and integrations as we develop more resilient alternative infrastructure. So we’re fighting for privacy coins to remain on CEXes and accessible to the mainstream while Monero is fighting on an uncompromising attitude to show that they can thrive even without big CEX listings (though I think it still hasn’t been severely tested yet since they still have Kraken and Kucoin even though they lost Binance). Both approaches have their benefits to benefiting privacy coins in different ways.
That would be great, anyone can do it on the forum and ping us to update though we’re also doing our own checks and also checking the other wallets etc now.
This is actually within our official QT reference wallet already, just not in the Campfire and Stack wallets yet due to some complexities in estimating fees though I think we can do a hacky fix that would work in most cases. Campfire is developed by a third party @rehrar’s Cypher Stack though the backend infrastructure is coded by us.
I do have lots of respect for your approach but that of Monero as well. In general I think currently Firo is much better not only from ideological stance but balance of security, privacy and attempting the best to be within regulations without affecting neither of those basic human rights.
That sounds great when I get a minute I can probably post at least my findings/experience and with other members experiences as well we can form some consensus around each provider.
Where is it in the QT wallet because that is the one I use? Did you mean it will come in the next version?
I’d also wanted to ask though this might be a bit off-topic, where can I find a link to running Firo API (for integrating into a web shop for example btcpay server style)? I can never find this on Firos website and it would be really useful for Firo adoption if there can be a simple link to github where it will say run this, this and this (firod), expose these ports, these are the API commands. People can then use Ruby, Go, Php and others to build wrappers around that.
import requests
def get_firo_price():
url = "https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price"
params = {
'ids': 'firo',
'vs_currencies': 'usd'
}
response = requests.get(url, params=params)
data = response.json()
print(data) # Print the entire response for debugging
if 'firo' in data:
return data['firo']['usd']
else:
print("Error: 'firo' not found in the response.")
return None
price = get_firo_price()
if price is not None:
print(f"The current price of FIRO in USD is: ${price}")
or
import requests
def get_firo_price():
url = "https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=firo&vs_currencies=usd"
response = requests.get(url)
data = response.json()
print(data) # Print the entire response for debugging
return data['firo']['usd']
price = get_firo_price()
print(f"The current price of FIRO in USD is: ${price}")
@Affectionate_Pop_362@anwar I didn’t mean about the coin price API. I meant the firod API so i can programmatically interact with Firo - create spark/transparent addresses, track balances, query current block etc. (like the monero rpc)
