Firn Protocol@firnprotocol
hi all, I have made the difficult decision to begin winding down Firn. as recent events (see quoted tweet) have made clear, the personal risk to meโi.e., @captainmcateerโof continuing to singlehandedly run, host and manage Firn is simply too great. I have transitioned firn.io to be a withdrawal-only service. I will continue running the relay, in order to facilitate withdrawals, until the end of this year. I have readjusted liquidity, so as to create a uniform buy wall at the fixed cashout rate of 0.0014 ETH / FIRN. every FIRN Token holder can feel free to sell at his leisure; it does not matter the order that you sell, or when you sell. Shortly, I will fully open-source the Firn codebase, including its front-end. Firn will continue to live on as a public good. Anyone will become free to spin up his own Firn pool and run his own relay, if he wishes.
creating and running Firn was difficult, and I am grateful to our devoted, enthusiastic and smart community members. as the recent events showed, it is simply impossible to please everyone while running a privacy service. I made Firn because I love math, cryptography and privacy. I never bargained for the level of risk and stress that I would be personally undertaking. I never personally participated in buying or selling FIRN, and strictly wrote, deployed and maintained code throughout.
the cashout rate of 0.0014 ETH / FIRN may lead to ETH-denominated losses for some token holders. to explain these losses, I must recall an event that happened two years ago, which some already know. in late 2022, an initial cofounder of Firnโwho was promptly removed from the teamโembezzled about half of Firn's initial fundraise into his personal control, without my knowledge, permission or consent. though I fought this theft vigorously, I was ultimately unable to recover the funds. The evidence that this embezzlement was carried out by my cofounderโand not by myselfโis visible publicly onchain for everyone to examine. As a result, 0.0014 ETH / FIRN represents what I am currently able to return to FIRN Token holders. this is the vast majority of the remaining half. as I already said, everyone will receive the same cashout rate. If I am able to eventually recover some or all of my former cofounder's funds, I will correspondingly increase the cashout rate, as well as retroactively reimburse those token holders who have already sold.
Once again, I am grateful to all of you! Let me know if you have any questions.