Introduction

Iron Fish, an innovative cross-chain platform focused on privacy, is designed to enhance blockchain security and mainstream adoption by addressing the existing transparency issues in the systems. It also wants to explore the potential of privacy coins from user experience, usability, and accessibility.

Built on a Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, Iron Fish, as a layer 1 chain, ensures the privacy of every transaction. Sensitive user information, including payer, payee, and transaction amount, is encrypted, and each transaction is secured by zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) technology responsible for verifying its validity, and keeping every detail confidential.

The Iron Fish wallet is designed with a private key, a public key, and an optional viewing key. The private key secures user assets, while the public key generates wallet addresses. The viewing key makes the wallet flexible, allowing wallet holders to share their transaction history with others if they want to. This design enhances user control over privacy while also adding the ability to demonstrate transaction transparency when necessary.

Recognizing privacy as crucial for widespread adoption, Iron Fish unlocks various use cases, such as crypto-based employee salary payments, secure peer-to-peer payments, and asset digitization by financial institutions. Additionally, the platform aims to mitigate the negative impacts of MEV (Maximum Extractable Value), a prevalent phenomenon due to blockchain transparency that could lead to losses for retail investors.

Iron Fish builds a new infrastructure layer to achieve deeper privacy and data security rather than deploying smart contracts on existing chains. This approach doesn’t rely on relayers or batchers that might leak user data and charge high transaction fees. Iron Fish aims to deliver privacy and security comparable to HTTPS-encrypted websites, without imposing additional technical challenges on users. Developing an L1 solution guarantees the platform’s decentralization and robustness, removing the single sequencer issues in all current L2 designs.

Iron Fish is redefining privacy and security standards in the crypto space, paving the way for its long-term evolution and extensive adoption.

Source: Iron Fish Official Website

Establishment

Iron Fish is aware that the transparency of blockchain, while beneficial, can also compromise sensitive financial information, thereby heightening the risk of cyber attacks and fraud. Iron Fish responds to these challenges by focusing on privacy measures that keep users’ personal information confidential during transactions, which helps in minimizing the risk of being attacked.

Background

Elena Nadolinski, Iron Fish’s CEO, has worked at Airbnb, Tilt, and Microsoft, and the core team members also have development experience at companies like Uber.

Iron Fish raised $5.3 million in a seed round on April 6, 2021, with contributions from investors like Electric Capital, Elad Gil, MetaStable Capital, A.Capital, Slow Ventures, and notable figures such as Dylan Field, Jack Abraham, Juan Benet, Jack Chou, Balaji Srinivasan, Lemniscap, and John Lilly.

On November 30, 2021, it completed a $27.7 million Series A round led by a16z, with participation from Elad Gil, Sequoia Capital, Electric Capital, Dylan Field, Alan Howard, Do Kwon, Matt Luongo, Nathan McCauley, Arrington Capital, MetaStable Capital, A.Capital, Jeff Weiner, and Divesh Makan.

Technical Features

Proof of Work (PoW)

The Iron Fish team contends that Proof of Work (PoW) is generally more secure due to its well-understood attack vectors, more decentralized issuance, and superior potential for fair decentralization. Although Proof of Stake (PoS) systems can provide improved user interfaces, faster block times, and better overall user experience, these benefits do not compensate for their inherent drawbacks.

For PoW, attracting a greater number of decentralized nodes is essential to ensure effective blockchain network operation and security. Iron Fish’s design considers usability by allowing users to run full nodes from desktops or browsers. This approach helps to increase node decentralization and network robustness, enabling more users to help maintain the network and enhancing the blockchain network’s decentralization and security.

Source: Iron Fish Official Website

ZK Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Iron Fish uses zk-SNARKs to enable easy-to-use, fully private payments. Iron Fish uses zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge) as the underlying technology for privacy because it can be applied in blockchain and cryptocurrency to protect user privacy and ensure transaction anonymity. This cryptographic technique encrypts and transforms raw data to verify transactions without exposing the original data.

Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Iron Fish can hide transaction details—such as sender, receiver, and transaction amount—thereby safeguarding user privacy. Additionally, these proofs allow for verifying transaction correctness quickly, achieving faster transaction speeds on the blockchain network and reduced transaction fees.

Accessibility

Accessibility, a significant concept in financial transactions, requires that transaction details can be viewed when needed while protecting privacy from unauthorized access. Iron Fish achieves this through ZK encryption, ensuring controlled access to transaction details.

Users can always view their transaction history and authorize others to do so (e.g., for loan applications or state investigations) when necessary. The “view key” mechanism allows encrypted information decryption, enabling holders to view transaction information of the address. Moreover, only the wallet creator can access the view key, ensuring no backdoors.

For instance, Alice uses Iron Fish for daily transactions and wants to protect her privacy while being able to show her transaction records to banks or regulators. Alice’s transactions on Iron Fish are unlike the transparency seen on mainstream blockchains; her transaction details are hidden from the public, ensuring her financial privacy. When Alice wants to review her transaction history, she can use her view key to decrypt the information, allowing her to see each transaction’s details.

The “view key” mechanism thus ensures transaction detail privacy and controlled access, maintaining system security without backdoors. Its user-friendly node operation design encourages more users to help maintain the network, enhancing blockchain decentralization and security.

Technical Implementation

Privacy-focused technology centers on implementing accounts for transactions: each account contains a confidential private key, a set of spending keys for using funds, a view key for granting third-party read-only access, and a public address for receiving funds. In private payments, the spending and view keys are distinct, with the spending key being separate from the decryption key.

All transactions are protected, meaning no information is revealed to observers without explicit view key access. This is achieved through zero-knowledge proofs. Transaction details are encrypted and accompanied by zk proofs to verify validity.

Iron Fish does not support smart contracts. Instead, most functionalities are integrated directly into the core protocol, enabling users to perform various operations through transactions without needing to code. For example, users can issue a new token type and track its total supply by creating a “mint” transaction.

Tokenomics

About $IRON Token

$IRON is native to Iron Fish. The Genesis Block, the network’s first block, contains 42 million tokens (the initial supply).

Miners receive new tokens as they mine blocks, increasing the total supply according to an inflation schedule. That means the total supply increases with each block. Mining rewards (the number of tokens allocated to miners for successfully mining a block) are tied to Iron Fish’s issuance curve, starting with 42 million tokens in the Genesis Block.

The block reward decreases annually and reaches zero in 150 years, with the total supply capped at 256,970,400 tokens. In the first year, new tokens created through mining rewards are one-fourth of the Genesis supply, or 10.5 million tokens. Then, the annual creation of new tokens decreases yearly until reaching the ultimate supply of 256,970,400 tokens (approximately 115 years after Genesis).

Issuance Curve (Source: Iron Fish)

Token Distribution

Iron Fish’s initial supply consists of 42 million tokens distributed among insiders, the foundation, and community members. The total supply is capped at 256,970,400 tokens. As time progresses, most of these tokens will be held by miners and community participants, with the distribution as follows:

1. Mining Rewards: This category accounts for 83.7% of the token allocation. This allocation reflects Iron Fish’s strong emphasis on incentivizing miners to maintain the network and contribute to security through the mining process.
2. Core Team: It accounts for 6.1% of tokens and provides the founding team with sufficient incentives to develop and maintain the network.
3. Foundation: The foundation gets 2.9% of tokens for fund management, donations, ecosystem development, and other long-term strategic plans.
4. Future Endowment: This part takes over 0.8% of tokens. They will be used for future charitable donations or supporting causes aligned with Iron Fish’s values.
5. IF Labs: This also obtains 0.8% of tokens for the research and development department, promoting technological innovation.
6. Allocation for Investors:
   1. Series A: 2.4%
   2. Series Seed: 1.6%
   3. Series Pre-Seed: 0.8%
7. Allocation for Airdrops:
   1. Future Airdrop: 0.4% for future market promotion activities or community rewards.
   2. Testnet Airdrop: 0.4% for users participating in the testnet and helping improve the network.

Token Allocation (Source: Iron Fish)

Conclusion

After completing three testnet phases, Iron Fish has entered a new development stage with its successful mainnet launch. The Iron Fish ecosystem is rapidly expanding and improving, including infrastructure like block explorers, mining pools, and innovative applications and services, providing users with a richer and more convenient experience.

Iron Fish aims to heighten its leadership in the blockchain field in the future through continuous technological innovation and community building. It plans to develop more privacy protection use cases, attracting more developers and users to its ecosystem. We foresee a more diverse and vibrant Iron Fish ecosystem with more partners and applications.

Additionally, the Iron Fish team is focused on exploring innovative business models and economic frameworks to respond to dynamic market conditions. By refining tokenomics, incentive structures, and governance mechanisms, Iron Fish seeks to enhance community engagement in ecosystem development and propel the project’s growth.

As technology continues to evolve and new use cases emerge, Iron Fish is positioned to substantially impact privacy protection and financial services, offering secure and efficient solutions to users worldwide. Iron Fish will stay dedicated to transparency, innovation, and collaboration, working alongside the global community to advance blockchain technology.

Iron Fish Ecosystem Map (Source: Iron Fish)