The concept of privacy coins or anonymous coins has undergone many iterations and updates in the cryptocurrency market. From the early Zcash, Monero, to the later Grin, Beam, and the recently publicized Iron Fish project, they all try to combine privacy and privacy. The property of anonymity is directly given to the native token of the blockchain network.
The Iron Fish project believes that a privacy-focused platform is worth exploring, so in addition to supporting the features of previous generations of privacy coins, they will also focus on accessibility. Their protocol architecture design will start from the network layer, allowing users to achieve point-to-point network connections in browsers, through WebRTC and WebSockets transmission protocols. The Iron Fish project will not only provide the basic functions of privacy coins, but also hope to explore the potential possibilities of privacy coins from other aspects such as user experience, ease of use, and accessibility.
Iron Fish is currently in public beta, and anyone can run a full Iron Fish node. Funding information has also been made public, with $5.3 million raised from angel investors and institutions including Electric Capital (Avichal Garg), Elad Gil, Metastable (Naval Ravikant and Lucas Ryan), A Capital (Kartik Talwar), Slow Ventures (Jill Carlson), Dylan Field (Figma), John Lilly, Jack Abraham (Atomic), Juan Benet (Filecoin), Jack Chou, Balaji Srinivasan, Lemniscap (Roderik van der Graaf), James Prestwich and Linda Xie.
However, there are still many details of the project that have not been disclosed, such as the specific consensus algorithm, token economics design, etc., and can only wait for the team to make it public later.
Iron Fish name origin:
submarine
The team stated that Iron Fish was named after the submarine code used by the “Navajo Nation” codebreakers during World War II, which is a metaphor for the protection and defense capabilities of encryption technology.
According to Wikipedia, the Navajo ethnic group has its own language, Navajo, which has no written language and can only be passed on orally. Its composition is quite complicated, and almost no one from outsiders can understand it. Therefore, in the Pacific War, it was used as a password for clear code calls, so that the Japanese army could not crack the US code, and it was not cracked until the end of World War II. In the Navajo language, “submarine” can be directly translated as “iron fish”.
The Iron Fish team said, “We chose this name because it can demonstrate the power of cryptography, a complex modern concept can be described in relatively simple words, and it has two tradable commodities in its name: iron and fish .”
Iron Fish core technology:
Zero-knowledge proof, Sapling, WebRTC
Unlike some privacy coin projects (such as Zcash), all transactions in Iron Fish are encrypted transactions, which means that users do not need to disclose any information to any third party.
In order to achieve this function, Iron Fish chose zero-knowledge proof technology in terms of privacy technology, especially influenced by the Sapling (sapling) technology invented by Zcash, but there are also some differences. The zero-knowledge proof technology they use is the Sapling proof of zk-SNARK Groth16.
Zero-knowledge proof has become the core and most worthy research technology in terms of privacy and capacity expansion in the industry. For the technical details of Iron Fish’s zero-knowledge proof, it is recommended to refer to the official white paper.
In addition, in order to design the cryptocurrency to be easy to use, any account can be equipped with a key with read-only permission, which can disclose the transfer information of the account. This may also be a mechanism designed to solve regulatory issues. For example, Tornado.Cash also designed such a mechanism, so that users can prove the source of their assets.
In order to make it easier for users to access the network, Iron Fish uses a combination of WebRTC and WebSockets as the transport layer to solve the problem of router port forwarding.Iron Fish uses a lot of technology to help nodes establish direct communication, and it can be used out of the box. Whether it is in a CLI (command line interface) environment or in a web browser, anyone can easily access Iron Fish.
consensus:
PoW with 15-second block generation, and the mining algorithm has not yet been disclosed
Iron Fish uses a PoW consensus that requires computing power, similar to Bitcoin. They will also dynamically adjust the mining difficulty through algorithms to provide an average block time of 15 seconds, which is similar to Ethereum.
As for the specific PoW algorithm, the specific details have not been disclosed in the white paper, and will be disclosed close to the launch of the project.
planning:
Custom Assets, Layer 2, Mobile
Privacy is of course important as a function, but the ecology of the blockchain network is also the core competitiveness of building barriers. So judging from the next step of Iron Fish’s work, they also realized that they need to continue to explore ecological construction.
If you look at the asset side first, there is not only Iron Fish’s native token “IRON” in the network, but it also needs to support the issuance and circulation of other assets, such as stable coins or other types of third-party assets. In addition, the team did not disclose whether there is a “FISH” token, but there is a possibility.
In addition, Iron Fish also considers the issue of scalability, and will promote the construction of the Layer 2 network and plan ahead. And they said they will also explore richer web support and mobile support, so that more people can easily access this network.
