Firo Research Update 11 November 2022

Development
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Wanted to give some updates on what our research team has been working on.

Spark Assets

TL:DR: We have improved the Spark Assets protocol so that all assets in Spark Assets are indistinguishable from each other and with FIRO as well. Meaning they all look the same on-chain!

We have made a significant improvement in the way Spark assets work. Lelantus Spark is our upcoming privacy protocol and Spark Assets is the successor to the Elysium tokenization layer that allows tokens to be created using Firo’s privacy mechanism.

Previously in Spark Assets (Spats), Firo was treated differently from other Spark assets so that Firo transfers will be identifiable vs other Spark assets. That meant you would have two anonymity pools, one for all Spark assets and one for Firo.

With the new proposed change, Firo transfers and Spark asset transfers are indistinguishable from each other making one global anonymity pool for all assets on Firo.

Fees for transfers are all paid in Firo still giving Firo utility for the Spark ecosystem

Ongoing Research Tasks

  • Explore alternative consensus mechanisms for stronger censorship resistance. Masternodes currently require a fixed IPv4 address. We may consider enabling IPv6 support to assist with this as a stop gap.
  • Investigate better ways to bridge assets from other chains into Spats. Possible Layer 2 EVM?
  • Exploring funding and monetization opportunities for our Aura voting system: Aura: private voting with reduced trust on tallying authorities
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Hello Reuben. Did you decide to enable/implement ipv6 support for masternodes? Will it possible to host several masternodes on just one VPS using ip v6 addresses? Thank you.

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We haven’t decided on this. While there has been a request on it, our main concern is that hardware is configured to run multiple masternodes on a single device. While I understand the allure of it especially in terms of cost, it also defeats one of the main points of the masternodes in the first place which is to have actual nodes on it. We rather have less masternodes with actual VPSes backing it than more masternodes with the same VPS backing a few.

While it is true that many masternodes are indeed hosted on the same datacentre, I think the risk is different here since a single device can fail and we don’t want to be given a false sense of security.

While we are exploring alternatives to this as we do want to encourage decentralized hosting without the need of a fixed IP, it would need a rearchitecture of the way masternodes work and we’re still evaluating whether we do want to keep the masternode infrastructure.

That being said, I do think that we need to shift our focus to things that people really care about which is usability and utility rather than reinventing the wheel house all the time so I don’t think we’ll move from masternodes that soon.

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