I thought I’ll give an informal update here as there has been quite a few things happening in the background. Have been super busy and a bit overloaded so I’ll just do an info dump here and then later elaborate/break it up further. This doesn’t include developmental plans which I will share in another post.
Power Up Privacy Donations
Power up Privacy has given us some additional donations for us to keep up our work and support us. Once the funds are in, we’ll make an announcement for this. Please everyone give a huge thank you to PUP for continuing to support out work, if not for them we would have been in a very difficult position.
Roger’s DOJ Settlement
Roger Ver @RogerVer one of our initial angel investors in the project appears to have reached a settlement with the DoJ and should have his freedom soon. A huge congrats to him and thanks to everyone who signed! I recently met Bitcoin.com reps at a local conference here as well and want to see if further integration into their wallet ecosystem is possible just like how Zano has been onboarded into their system.
ECC Conference
I was invited to speak at the Ecash (XEC) conference which their community kindly sponsored my flight and accommodation so no Firo funds were spent. I have known Amaury Sechet for a while since when he was working for Bitcoin Cash under the Bitcoin ABC banner. Lately they have been working on finalizing their Avalanche pre-consensus which is coming live on the 15 November.
The reason why this is interesting is I wanted to assess the long-term viability of the hybrid masternode/PoW model that we have and explore other consensus models especially when we hit tail emission. Avalanche hybrid consensus seemed like an interesting alternative and I wanted to learn more. Furthermore, while it would be some engineering work, most of the work would have already been done by Ecash already. There are some questions about how resistant this consensus is to malicious nodes and you can trade off liveness for a higher threshold of malicious nodes but thus far it looks as if that if you can compromise 20% of the nodes, you can halt the network though perhaps with the hybrid PoW, the network can still go on but lose finality. This is still early stage and for the moment it isn’t worth the engineering work to move to the new consensus since we already have private and instant transactions but it’s good to have it considered. There were also talks about subnets and whether Firo would be interested in launching a Ecash subnet or Avalanche subnet.
I also learnt a lot about what was happening in Bitcoin Script and various approaches to having tokens on Bitcoin-like chains. For example, there was the SLP spec, Ecash came up with the ALP spec and there’s also the Cashtoken spec. Hearing from people who have been dedicating their time to looking into it and been buliding stablecoins and other usecases on it was enlightening and gives me further insight into how we might want to further improve Spark Assets functionality. This is something I’ve asked our team to look deeper into when our workload clears a bit.
Further Spark Address Ecosystem Support
@blackmennewstyle has enabled Spark address and Spark Name payouts in his Firo mining pool. Please show some support and mine on his pool! He’s done a lot of work to make it all work. With the shutdown of ZergPool, there’s an unhealthy concentration on WoolyPooly.
Datavex.eu a new masternode provider has also enabled Spark payments or soon to do so (will double check).
Also not to forget @freQniK MeileDVPN which also supports Spark payments.
I have also personally deployed some liquidity to NonKYC.io that supports full Spark deposits and withdrawals as well.
Wizardswap.io is also showing strong Firo volume with full Spark only support.
CFC considering building out Firo payment gateway integration
We have previously relied on NowPayments and coinpayments as a payment gateway integration but there seems to be limited desire for them to develop a payment gateway that supports Spark payments. However more people are wanting to accept Spark payments and as @Fiendish has been tirelessly advocating for an easy way for people to integrate it, I have introduced to the Firo Community Fund Committee, Digilol, a company that is behind MoneroPay. They can either built a centralized hosted version (but still non-custodial) which would be the easiest for merchants to integrate but at the cost of the host seeing payment details or they can do a BTCPayserver self hosted type of version which is harder for merchants to setup, but would allow more self custody. Obviously both would be great but this is something we need to consider the cost benefit analysis of.
Borneo Blockchain Conference
This was a small conference in my hometown (around 600 people) where I was assisting to obtain speakers, moderate content and also present Firo’s technology both in privacy and also in e-voting. It was attended by quite a few dignitaries and government officials but also local uni students. @poramin was kind enough also to fly down for a day to present his experiences on the 2018 Thailand Democrat Party elections and compare them to recent Malaysian blockchain elections. It was super nice to meet up with him again with Anwar and Ajay who also helped to man the booth that we had there.
While it is early days, the state government does seem interested in building a sentiment polling system though it is unclear whether it would involve Firo’s blockchain or more likely a private permissioned blockchain like Hyperledger though it is likely that we may be involved in some way.
That being said, we got some positive exposure with the Deputy Premier of our state, a Senator and a MP coming by our booth, mentioning my speech several times and even holding up our Citizens not Suspects t-shirt! At the end of the day it is good exposure to the local community and establishing ourselves as a legit player.
Working with ZeroSpread
We are trying out ZeroSpread’s services for 3 months to boost our social media interactions and see if we can also get more organic KOL interaction and also partner up with additional projects to support Firo’s ecosystem. We’ll be starting this soon.
Chaos Computing Conference - Critical Decentralization Cluster
We’ve been invited to be part of the Critical Decentralization Cluster at the Chaos Computing Conference in Hamburg at the end of the year. It’s a major hacker/cypherpunk conference but one that is quite hesitant on cryptocurrencies in general. Might be a good place to meet interesting leads and further build credibility in the right circles. Will update more once more has been confirmed.
Happy mining and keep it up the great job 