Firo’s Elysium Privacy Infrastructure for the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem

One of the primary traits of cryptocurrencies, and undoubtedly the thing that everyone was most excited about, at least at the beginning, is privacy.

Early cryptocurrency adopters were discussing the privacy-oriented capabilities of various cryptocurrencies at length, placing great emphasis on this particular feature. For the better or worse, a lot of the contemporary projects place absolutely no attention on privacy as the focus has shifted.

Yet, this remains a critical component of a cryptocurrency and one that a tremendously large community is concerned with.

One coin that works towards building a completely private yet robust and convenient infrastructure is Firo. Formerly known as Zcoin, the project has recently announced its Elysium testnet that’s aimed at allowing anyone to create their own tokens on Firo while utilizing Firo’s privacy and security.

What is Elysium?

In essence, Elysium is Firo’s tokenization layer. It’s designed to allow users to create their very own cryptocurrencies or tokens and take advantage of the privacy features of the network’s Lelantus technology.

It intends to open the door to anonymous and verifiable voting tokens and private stablecoins. Firo is no stranger to voting applications, and back in 2018, Firo’s (then Zcoin) blockchain was utilized to run the world’s first large-scale political election in Thailand for the Thai Democrat Party’s primaries with over 127,000 votes cast nationwide.

The country has also touted blockchain technology as means of increasing its GDP. The team also shared that they are in the process of finalizing the architecture for bridging various cryptocurrencies from other networks to Elysium through decentralized custodians.

This should allow Firo to work as a privacy infrastructure where the crypto economy will be able to benefit from its privacy technology. The latter is structured directly within the protocol, which should allow for cheap and quick private transactions.

To obtain testnet FIRO coins, it’s important to use the testnet faucet, and if for testing purposes, more coins are required, users can inquire through the public Discord or Telegram channels. A detailed guide on how to manage the testnet can be found on the official website.

Lelantus Spark Technology

As mentioned above, Elysium allows users to benefit from the network’s Lelantus Spark technology. This is the protocol’s next major update and it was introduced in August 2021. The protocol introduces a lot of privacy-preserving features, which include but are not limited to:

• Incoming and full view keys
• Spark Addresses with full hidden amounts
• Modular Design
• Efficient multi-sig operations

It’s essential to the network’s functionalities, and the team continues to seek new avenues to expand its capabilities, further looking into enhanced addressing and the ability to show proof of payment to various merchants.

While adding more capabilities, the team has also made sure to retain many of its important features. These include, but are not limited to:

• High anonymity set
• No trusted setup
• Relying on well-established cryptographic assumptions
• Efficient support for batch verification
• Straightforward construction

Lelantus Spark’s key ideas have also been used in Monero’s upcoming privacy framework Seraphis in an effort to scale its ring sizes. Firo’s implementation of Spark focuses on much higher anonymity sets and utilizes sliding windows between large sets, avoiding many of the issues of decoy selection present in ring-based privacy.