Firo (cryptocurrency)

Firo, formerly known as Zcoin, is a cryptocurrency aimed at using cryptography to provide better privacy for its users compared to other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

In late 2014, Poramin Insom, a student in Masters in Security Informatics from Johns Hopkins University, wrote a paper on implementing the zerocoin protocol into a cryptocurrency with Matthew Green as a faculty member. The project to create a standalone cryptocurrency implementing the Zerocoin protocol was named "Moneta".

On 28 September 2016, Zcoin, the first cryptocurrency to implement the zerocoin protocol, was launched by Poramin Insom and team. Roger Ver was the initial investor. Reuben Yap, a former lawyer and founder of virtual private network BolehVPN joined the team as co-founder shortly after the launch of Zcoin.

On 20 February 2017, a malicious coding attack on the Zerocoin protocol created 370,000 fake tokens which perpetrators sold for over 400 Bitcoins ($440,000). Zcoin team announced that a single-symbol error in a piece of code "allowed an attacker to create Zerocoin spend transactions without a corresponding mint". Unlike Ethereum during the DAO event, developers have opted not to destroy any coins or attempt to reverse what happened with the newly generated ones.

In September 2017, Poramin set up an exchange named "Satang Pro" that can convert Thai Baht to Zcoin directly.

In April 2018, a cryptographic flaw was found in the Zerocoin protocol which allowed attackers to steal, destroy, and create Zcoins. The Zcoin cryptocurrency team, while acknowledging the flaw, stated the high difficulty in performing such attacks and the low probability of giving economic benefit to the attacker.

In August 2018, Boozeat, a liquor delivery service in Malaysia accepted Zcoin as a payment method.

In September 2018, Zcoin introduced the Dandelion protocol that hides the origin IP address of a sender without using The Onion Router (Tor) or Virtual Private Network (VPN).