Firo Spark Sync Monitor by panagot

Why?

Firo's light and mobile wallets don't talk to a full node directly - they sync through public Electrum (ElectrumX) backends. When a Spark sync is slow or fails, users and wallet developers can't tell whether the fault is a backend that's offline, one that's lagging, or one serving stale / inconsistent Spark state.

Existing trackers (e.g. 1209k) only check header height. But Firo's real pain is the Spark anonymity set: the active coin group is tens of thousands of coins / tens of MB and can take 15-40s+ to serve. A backend can look perfectly healthy on height yet be unusable for a real Spark sync. There is no neutral, public place to see this today.

How much?

• Total: $2,000 USD = ~3,200 FIRO (exchange rate $0.63/FIRO on 20 Jul 2026; final FIRO amount set to the live rate at approval).
• Effort: ~50 hours of engineering over ~3 weeks.
• Blended rate: ~$36/hr = $1,800.
• Infrastructure: domain + VPS hosting, 12 months = $200.

What?

A neutral, always-on health dashboard + public JSON API for the public Firo Electrum backends. It tracks reachability, chain lag, and latency - and, uniquely, Spark anonymity-set fetch health: how long each backend takes to serve the active Spark coin group, how large it is, and whether every backend serves the same set (setHash consistency). All probes are privacy-safe (server.version, blockchain.headers.subscribe, spark.getsparklatestcoinid, spark.getsparkanonymityset) - no addresses, keys, or wallet data, ever.

A working prototype already probes the live fleet: live preview -> https://firo-spark-sync-monitor.vercel.app. Representative live figures (active coin group 10): ~18,400 coins, 18-32 MB per full fetch, ~12-37s serve time, setHash identical across all 6 backends. All code will be open-sourced under MIT at kickoff.

Screenshots of the anonymity-set fetch-health view and a per-backend detail page are available on the live preview linked above.

Milestones?

Milestone 1 - Production launch - Week 1 - $1,000 (~1,600 FIRO) (released at kickoff; covers domain + 12-month hosting + core build)

• Public MIT GitHub repo (README, methodology docs, contribution guide)
• Own domain + HTTPS + always-on VPS hosting
• Production dashboard: reachability, height, lag vs reference tip, latency, version, TLS cert expiry
• Spark coin-group consistency cross-checked fleet-wide
• Live anon-set fetch-health (time, size/coins, setHash consistency)
• Durable history storage (SQLite/Postgres) -> real 24h/7d uptime %
• Public JSON API + Firo forum thread
• Acceptance: live public URL, public MIT repo, API returning real fleet data, anon-set health populated for all backends, continuous history recording.

Milestone 2 - Durability, alerting & upstream - Weeks 2-3 - $1,000 (~1,600 FIRO) (on delivery)

• Per-backend detail pages + 24h/7d/30d charts
• Anon-set growth tracker (coins / MB / fetch-time over time)
• Opt-in alerting (Telegram / Discord / webhook) for red status or inconsistent Spark state
• Operator tooling ("add/verify your server" + self-check page)
• Embeddable status badge for operator/wallet READMEs

• =1 upstream PR to Firo wallet/docs (e.g. a Spark health-check script)

• Public incident log + sustainability/handover runbook
• Acceptance: detail pages + 30-day charts live, alerting demonstrable within one poll cycle, >=1 upstream PR opened/merged, handover doc + incident log published.

Total duration: ~3 weeks of work, completed within one month of funding.

Outcomes?

• A live, public, MIT-licensed monitor at its own domain covering the full Firo Electrum fleet.
• The first tool to measure Spark anonymity-set fetch health and cross-check setHash - catching backends that are green on height but broken for Spark wallets, and forked/stale Spark state.
• A public JSON API wallet teams and operators can consume.
• Durable uptime history, per-backend detail pages, opt-in alerting, and an operator self-service flow.

• =1 upstream contribution back to Firo, plus a handover runbook so the tool outlives the grant.

Why you?

I'm an independent full-stack engineer focused on privacy-tech infrastructure (Node.js, serverless, TLS/Electrum protocol, data dashboards). I've already built and deployed the working prototype linked above - it probes the live Firo fleet today and demonstrates the Spark anon-set metric end-to-end. Running cost is a single small VPS + domain, and everything ships MIT-licensed and documented so it can be maintained or taken over by anyone, including the Firo team.