Announcing the Conclusion of Testnet Phase 2

Time flies when you’re shipping code!

We are nearing the end of Phase 2 of our incentivized testnet: block 274,000, approximately 12:45 pm PT on November 15, 2022. The Iron Fish network is a product of its community. Since Phase 2 launched in May, over 25,000 (!) participants have made their way onto the leaderboard for finding bugs, adding to the open-source codebase, hosting nodes, and sending transactions. More importantly for the advancement of the zk space overall, our community has now processed over 32 million fully shielded transactions, including well over 100 million zero-knowledge proofs. That is more than every other blockchain, testnet and mainnet, combined. Why does that matter? The Iron Fish testnet is the largest scalability test of privacy preserving crypto transactions ever conducted. Our testnet proves that our network is ready to tackle our larger goal of providing privacy across blockchains and securing hundreds of thousands of transactions every day.

Our mission at Iron Fish is to create the universal encryption layer for web3. Phase 2 served that mission by stress-testing our network to handle as many nodes and transactions as possible. At its peak, the Iron Fish community hosted 11,000 concurrent nodes, second only to Bitcoin’s 15,000 typical concurrent nodes. In addition, Phase 2 averaged 300k transactions per day.

Looking ahead, Phase 3 begins January 18, 2023. It will be the most important step in realizing our long-term mission of bringing encryption standards to all of web3. We will test our network’s ability to allow anyone to mint and burn non-native tokens. By the end, Phase 3 will confirm that the Iron Fish protocol can bring base layer encryption to any bridged cryptoasset.

Everyone deserves to be safer on-chain than they are online. TLS, HTTPS brought encryption to hundreds of millions of web2 users. However, so many consumer safeguards exist at the whims of a handful of tech companies. Our community is ensuring that stronger consumer protections will exist for the future billions of web3 users, forever enshrined into code. If that mission resonates with you, we’d love for you to get involved. It’s still early–both at Iron Fish and in web3.

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