Iron Fish, backed by a16z and Sequoia, aims to become the privacy layer for the entire crypto world

Author: Azuma, Planet Daily Odaily

On November 30, the privacy network Iron Fish announced the completion of a $27.7 million Series A funding round, led by a16z, with participation from Elad Gil, Sequoia Capital, Electric Capital, Dylan Field, Alan Howard, Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn Executive Chairman), MetaStable, A Capital, Divesh Makan (Iconiq), Do Kwon (Terra), Matt Luongo (Keep Network), Nathan McCauley (Anchorage), and Arrington XRP.

Iron Fish is defined as a Layer 1 privacy network, with its name derived from a cryptographic communication system developed during World War II based on Native American languages. Iron Fish aims to showcase the magical power of cryptography.

According to Iron Fish, privacy is a missing element in the current cryptocurrency world. Bitcoin and Ethereum, as the two most mainstream networks, have design directions (ensuring transparency and verifiability of on-chain transactions) that result in low privacy; while existing privacy protection solutions either fail to deliver on their promises or are too difficult to use, thus limiting their adoption.

To address this issue, Iron Fish has built a brand new PoW network that uses zk-SNARKs and the Sapling protocol to provide the highest level of privacy protection for every on-chain transaction. One of the highlights of Iron Fish is that the network aims to protect privacy without compromising the accessibility of on-chain transactions. To this end, Iron Fish provides each on-chain address with an additional viewing key, allowing the address holder to grant others read-only access through this key.

Iron Fish has outlined a significant use case for this feature. For privacy projects, compliance has always been a "difficult problem." Previously, financial regulators in jurisdictions such as Japan have ordered local exchanges to delist privacy cryptocurrencies like XMR. However, through the view key, Iron Fish will allow relevant institutions to view detailed information about corresponding addresses in a read-only state, thereby fulfilling necessary anti-money laundering (AML) obligations.

Currently, Iron Fish is still in the testnet phase. To incentivize early participants during the testing phase, Iron Fish launched a testnet incentive program on December 1 (Portal), where active participants can earn points through various contributions (finding bugs, running nodes, etc.), which will be redeemable for mainnet tokens upon the future mainnet launch. However, there are certain threshold requirements for participating in Iron Fish at this stage.

According to the plan, Iron Fish will eventually establish cross-chain bridges with other mainstream blockchains to provide privacy protection for other mainstream assets, thus achieving its ultimate vision—becoming the privacy shield for the entire crypto world.