Innovative privacy-first cryptocurrency unveils a new protocol that introduces several novel privacy-preserving features
Firo, a privacy focused cryptocurrency, is unveiling details of its new privacy protocol Lelantus Spark, Firo’s next major blockchain privacy protocol update that greatly improves the privacy and flexibility of its transactions. Since its founding in 2016, Firo has researched and built much of its own technology, which has resulted in next-level technological innovations that push the frontiers of blockchain privacy. Lelantus Spark is Firo’s latest innovation that furthers its mission of providing clear and consistent transactional privacy.
“Firo has always been at the forefront of privacy tech development and we believe Lelantus Spark represents a holistic balance of high anonymity, simplicity and flexibility while remaining true to the spirit of trustlessness in cryptocurrencies.”
Spark builds on Firo’s ground-breaking work in Lelantus v1/v2 that had inspired other privacy protocols such as Triptych (Monero) and Lelantus-MW (Beam) and retains many core benefits such as high efficiency and large anonymity sets. Unlike some other zero-knowledge proof schemes, Spark does not suffer from cryptographic “toxic waste” that needs to be disposed securely to prevent a backdoor into the system. Spark introduces several key new features to the user which are:
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- Spark addresses, which are addresses that can be shared out publicly without compromising privacy. These addresses cannot be looked up on a blockchain and amounts held in these addresses are hidden, greatly enhancing recipient privacy and private storage of Firo.
- Efficient multisignature operations allow for any use case where you want more than one party to have control over your funds such as custodians.
- Incoming and full view keys allow users to optionally grant third parties visibility into incoming and outgoing amounts. This can be used to simplify accounting, monitoring of funds without granting spend authority or for transparency of funds held for charitable or public purposes.
- Computational offloading allows low-powered devices, such as hardware wallets, to support Spark transactions by offloading transaction creation, chain scanning and balance computation to PCs and phones without delegating spend authority.
- A modular design facilitates straightforward security analysis and allows easier upgrade of Spark’s building blocks for e.g. if new more efficient zero-knowledge proofs are discovered.
The team behind Firo is continuing to explore ways to expand the functionality of Spark such as improved addressing and the ability to show proof of payment to merchants.
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Lelantus Spark will be undergoing audits and peer review with an anticipated final release in Q2 2022. A complete paper with full protocol security proofs will be submitted to the IACR preprint archive in the coming weeks for the cryptographic research and academic communities to comment on.
“There are only a handful of cryptocurrency privacy protocols in meaningful use today, each with different trade-offs,” notes Reuben Yap, Project Steward of Firo. “Firo has always been at the forefront of privacy tech development and we believe Lelantus Spark represents a holistic balance of high anonymity, simplicity and flexibility while remaining true to the spirit of trustlessness in cryptocurrencies.”
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