Iron Fish Use Case: Digital Transactions
Elena Nadolinski
CEO & Founder @ Iron Fish
Over the last several years, the need for privacy has only grown — 2020 accelerated the need for private, safe digital transactions. Fewer businesses wanted to accept cash, and use of digital payments soared.
During our AMA held in February, the community asked about Iron Fish use cases. A clear one is supporting digital payment acceleration to meet the rising demand for safe and secure electronic payment methods.
The future is encrypted
Web2 values privacy, but when it breaks its promise of privacy, there are catastrophic consequences of data breaches, hacks, or illegal/controversial monetization of customer data.
The rise of e-commerce, increased demand for touchless payments, and adoption of smart mobile devices have seen numerous payment solutions enter the market. These include payment processors like PayPal or Venmo and mobile phone money transfer services like M-Pesa.
These solutions offer varying degrees of accessibility and stability, but the one major limitation they all share is ensuring trust via privacy controls and data protection. How? It's known that PayPal tracks user data and contends with data breaches that directly impact end users. Users of services like M-Pesa must contend with the providers' opaque practices.
Web3 to the rescue? Not yet.
Web3 has no privacy — it hides nothing. For the majority of blockchains, transparency is necessary for trustless transaction validation. The consequence is that crypto users are forced to reveal all information about their activity: balance of assets, whom you interact with, the protocols you use, to whom you donate, what organizations (DAOs) you’re part of, and much more.
Iron Fish: encrypted transaction
All Iron Fish transactions are fully encrypted and private to the outside world, and transaction validation happens through zero-knowledge proofs. Every Iron Fish account comes with a private key, a public key, and a view key. Iron Fish's view keys are complete, granting read-only permission to see all incoming and outgoing transaction details. Using view keys lets regulated entities stay compliant with regulatory obligations while supporting private assets. Unlike the unverified paper trail of funds that banks provide in case of an audit, view keys give access to information guaranteed to be accurate.
Iron Fish aims to become the privacy platform for all crypto assets and transactions. With fully private custom asset support and future bridge integration, we are building Iron Fish to be the fundamental Lego piece of crypto that provides safety to crypto users through privacy.
Mainnet launches on April 20, 2023; follow us on Twitter and keep up with announcements.
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Elena Nadolinski
CEO & Founder @ Iron Fish
Elena is the Founder and CEO of Iron Fish — previously worked at Airbnb, Tilt, and Microsoft. Fell down the cryptocurrency rabbit hole in 2017. Really didn't want her insurance to know she eats pizza.