Frequently Asked Questions

In short, functionality and adoption.

Existing privacy coins are limited in privacy, accessibility, or both. Iron Fish integrates privacy from the ground up. We adopt the highest privacy standards based on leading-edge zero-knowledge technology.

Privacy coins have faced an uphill battle gaining adoption in the face of government regulations. They have often been outright banned or their tokens removed from exchanges. At Iron Fish, we are committed to collaborating with legislators, policy makers, and other members of the public and private sectors to develop a robust, compliant, globally usable solution.

Web2 promises privacy but fails to deliver consistent and effective security guarantees. Consider digital payments systems, where payment processors and merchants aggregate vast amounts of user data that they use for targeted marketing, advertising, or monetization. Your spending habits are closely tracked on almost any online platform, often without notice or consent.

On most blockchain platforms, user addresses and transaction histories are publicly accessible, making holders of valuable assets easy targets for scammers and fraud. These factors severely limit the development of secure decentralized applications.

Privacy is pragmatic. It leads to innovation and social evolution. Much like HTTPS paved the way for entire industries through e-commerce, private transactions over a blockchain will enable frictionless global payments and new industries of borderless products and companies. We believe that privacy is part of a larger solution in which everyone has equal access to goods, services, and safe transaction channels.

Privacy also empowers you to protect yourself. You should have full control over your financial and personal data.

We build with ZKPs (zero-knowledge proofs).

ZKPs are a breakthrough tool in cryptography that prove honest computation. Using ZKPs, we can build private transactions that hide the sender, recipient, and amount while confirming that the transaction is valid. Every transaction on Iron Fish is private — no one sees the details of an account unless the owner grants read-only permissions via view keys.

When you create an account on Iron Fish, you get view keys that you can use to give others read-only access to your transactions records. When dealing with a tax authority or other entity, you can issue view keys to grant read-only access to establish compliance, settle a dispute, etc.

The Iron Fish network is multi-asset capable. This means that a trusted bridge operator can integrate Iron Fish support to enable users to bring their assets from any other chain to Iron Fish and transact on our privacy-enabled network.

Multi-asset functionality also enables users to mint custom assets on the Iron Fish network with the same privacy guarantees as the native $IRON coin.

We've completed thorough and extensive research on the merits and drawbacks of PoW, Proof-of-Stake (PoS), and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPos) systems. Ultimately, PoW systems are overall more secure, have much better-understood attack vectors, and have a better path toward being fairly decentralized. PoS systems can sometimes lead to better UI/UX and faster block times, but the pros do not outweigh the cons when looking at their algorithms holistically.

The $IRON coin is the Iron Fish network cryptocurrency. It serves as a medium of exchange, the currency for transaction fees, and as a reward issued to miners on the network.

Because Iron Fish is a US company, we are not able to have a public roadmap.

We are able to discuss and announce features that have defined release dates, or we're actively working on in the open source github repository.

Yes! We have an active, welcoming Discord channel. Join to stay up to date on Iron Fish news, and engage with fellow users and builders.

The Iron Fish Mainnet launched April 20, 2023. You can read more about it here.

Recommended minimum requirements:

• CPU: 2 Ghz, 4 Cores
• RAM: 8GB
• STORAGE: 50 GB

TPS depends on the size of the transactions. Note: Max block size is 0.5MB. If we are assuming an average transaction of 3 inputs and 2 outputs which is around 2.2 KB and a max block size of 0.5 MB, then a block could contain about 225 such transactions. Iron Fish network has a target block time of 60 seconds, which would imply about 4 transactions per second on average.

They are the same size! There is no way to determine whether a user is sending a transaction, an asset, how much IRON, to/from a user or whether the transaction was sent from a multisignature account. This is due to the nature of the privacy that is offered by Iron Fish—every single transaction on Iron Fish is encrypted from end to end!

Nope! The default is 60MB but can be increased dependent on the user's hardware.