Summary
Privacy and censorship is a topic that is highly political these days, see for instance twitter discussions. Therefore it is not surprising that privacy blockchains are not new and have been poplular for many years now, such as Monero (4bn MC), Zcash (2.5bn MC), and Grin (10m MC). There are also a few new layer 1 solutions in the pipeline such as Anoma (PoS, Tendermint BFT) and Espresso Systems (PoS, ZK Rollups). Comparing IronFish with their competitors, they claim that they are the only Layer 1 providing both accessibility while not compromising on privacy. Why is accessibility important?
Most cryptocurrencies are made by engineers, for engineers, which results in a high barrier to entry. There are over 4 billion internet users, on over 2 billion computers across the world. And yet, there are only around 10,000 fully active-listening Bitcoin nodes.
Where does the name IronFish come from? During World War II, the US Navajo Code Talkers "used it as a codename for a submarine — displaying the power of cryptography to protect and defend"
Despite crypto / blockchain generally having the reputation of being used by criminals as it in-transparent and easy to conceal criminal activities, the opposite is the case. Most protocols fundamentally work on complete transparency to verify transactions and each transaction can be monitored, see for instance ethplorer or etherscan data.
IronFish believes that similar to the "https" standard, private transactions will lead to innovation and social evolution. In order to achieve it, IronFish is working with Zero-Knowledge-Proofs (ZKP). This is a method used in cryptography, which enables you to prove sth is known, without actually revealing the known information directly. This way, the private information is kept secret and results in privacy. Iron Fish will use Proof of Work (PoW). Proof of Work has been facing criticism recently due to ESG considerations. IronFish explains in their whitepaper why they have nevertheless decided to go with POW.
Ultimately the conclusion we’ve come to is that Proof of Work systems are overall more secure with much better understood attack vectors and have a better path towards being more equal and fairly decentralized
Unique is that the blockchain algorithm of IronFish will adjust the mining difficulty dynamically, and the block times on average will always be 60 seconds. If blocks are becoming too fast, the mining difficulty is increased and vice versa to generate an average block time of 60 seconds.
Advantages of IronFish:
Transactions fully hide sender, recipient and amount, full privacy
no one sees detailed information except if the owner grants read only permissions
Accessibility: IronFish can be accessed from OS, like Windows, Linux, macOS to even Chrome OS.
Leveraging zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs, Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) and the highest industry standards for encryption (Zcash uses as well)
IronFish has launched their incentivized testnet part 2 here . Participants can earn points for running a node, transacting, finding bugs, submitting a pull request etc and 315k coins will be distributed to contributors. Part 1 distributes 420,000 total coins (1% of the initial supply) for Mining Blocks, Finding Bugs, Submitting Pull Requests, Community Contributions. I like the way they run their incentivized testnet and also how they publicly stated appreciation for their most active members in this tweet . Staying close to the community is key as layer 1 depend on their ecosystem to become adapted, and the community is the starting point and most essential part of the ecosystem. As per whitepaper, initial supply is 42m coins and max supply currently foreseen is 256,970,400 coins.
Team
Elena Nadolinski, Founder and CEO: Software Engineer at Airbnb, Microsoft and Tilt.com
Rohan Jadvani, Software Engineer: previously Citadel and Snap
Potentially I missed key information on IronFish employees, but I cant seem to find any other key senior employees such as CTO, CMO, CRO etc. Backers are Tier1 and seem to be convinced of the vision of IronFish but they potentially still have some hiring to be done.
Backers
IronFish raised 30m+ from tier 1 backers such as Alan Howard, Sequoia, Andressen Horowitz, Electric Capital, Slow Capital, Juan Benet and Balaji S. Srinivasan. Other investors included MetaStable as well as Terra co-founder Do Kwon and Anchorage co-founder Nathan McCauley. See more here
Links