Announcing Iron Fish: Privacy for Everyone 

Today, Iron Fish enters its first public testnet phase—anyone (yes, you too!) can now run and mine a full Iron Fish node. After roughly two years of building Iron Fish, I am so excited to share our vision with the world. Iron Fish is a privacy-first cryptocurrency that anyone can use, without compromising on privacy or usability.

If you have feedback, questions, trouble running your node, or just want to drop in and say ‘hi’, please join us in Discord.

Many angels and organizations have helped us get here, and we’re thankful for the funding we’ve raised to date ($5.3M) from 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. We are honored to work with such amazing people.

A privacy coin that just works 

Iron Fish is a brand new cryptocurrency that protects every single transaction, using zk-SNARKs and the Sapling protocol (learn more in our whitepaper). Anyone can run a node and contribute to our codebase. As we continue to add features, Iron Fish will become a shielded layer for many assets, even ones on different chains, and provide a platform for true digital cash—the full realization of Satoshi’s vision.

In future iterations, you will be able to run Iron Fish directly in the browser: no installs, no messing with router settings, no installing arcane dependencies. For now, Iron Fish is a CLI tool, designed to be intuitive and easy to use. 🌈

Why focus on a fully private, accessible currency? Cash is disappearing, and we still have no digital cash alternative.

Life after cash 

To date, most cryptocurrencies provide the least private way of transacting, permanently saving all transactions in plaintext for the world to see. Privacy is even considered controversial, and yet privacy is critical for innovation, open communication, and social evolution. Most importantly, your entire life happens online (shopping, meetings, birthdays, and now even funerals)—with all your data logged, analyzed, and sold. Privacy protects you.

In 2021 it is apparent that people’s relationship with privacy is changing. Signal installs skyrocketed 4,200% after Whatsapp announced it would force users to share personal data with Facebook. ProtonMail saw a 3x rise in usage. DuckDuckGo’s growth has become exponential.

As cash continues to disappear, crypto will only become a viable alternative to traditional banking if we truly embrace privacy.

Interested in participating? Check out our Discord on how to get started with Iron Fish today and for future announcements, as well as our careers page for full-time positions. Incentivized testnet will be announced at a future date.

See you on the Iron Fish network!

📚 Tutorial: https://ironfish.network/developers/documentation/install-npm 🎤 Discord: https://discord.ironfish.network 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/ironfishcrypto 📢 Telegram: https://t.me/ironfishcryptochat

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