1.How did I find out about the project.
Sitting at the computer in the evening and studying various innovative blockchains, I came across an interesting option, as it seemed to me, it was Iron Fish. It caught my attention that we have long needed a way to avoid total surveillance and control of our assets by the state, you can say that there is bitcoin and ethereum, but these transactions have long been easily tracked.
Iron Fish is a layer 1 blockchain that provides the strongest privacy guarantees for every single transaction. Using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARK) and the highest industry encryption standards, Iron Fish gives you complete control over who sees transaction details with account view keys or transaction decryption keys.
Meet Elena Nadolinsky and how the idea came about
Elena Nadolinsky grew up in Volgograd, which was a little revelation for me, a person originally from Russia, but emigrated to the United States. Nadolinsky was born to a software engineer in Volgograd, Russia. After studying in Russia in first and second grade, she moved to the United States and received a degree in computer science from Virginia Tech and State University in 2014. Turning an internship at Microsoft into her first engineering job at the tech giant, she went on to work on the autocomplete feature on real estate site Airbnb before discovering cryptocurrencies.When she returned to her hometown on a recent trip from her new home in Silicon Valley, she said she was amazed at how rising authoritarian surveillance in Russia continues to influence the very nature of innovation.
“The lack of privacy and the expectation that I am being watched and that I have to hide what I have because I don’t really have privacy guarantees has changed the culture in a way that I think has a negative effect on innovation and entrepreneurship. in the country. Nadolinsky says from his San Francisco office.
To help combat this chilling effect, the 29-year-old founder of anonymous cryptocurrency startup Iron Fish has raised $27.6 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz of az16, which is already saying a lot to help ensure that next generations of Russians and citizens of a growing number of authoritarian states around, the world must continue to live a private life, even if all transactions in the world go to a common distributed ledger.
What is at stake in her work and the growing wave of other privacy innovators using blockchain goes well beyond what is happening in the once-niche world of cryptocurrencies. In fact, this could have ripple effects affecting the very nature of money, as well as whether online payments of all kinds — cryptocurrency or fiat — retain any sense of privacy offline when paying for goods in cash.
“The reason I’m working on Iron Fish is because right now we’re moving towards total payment transparency,” says Nadolinsky. “If you are happy with surveillance, this is the future you want. And for us, this is some kind of terrible future.”
Together with other Series A investors, including Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner, Met billionaire owner Alan Howard and others, the firm plans to spend capital to nearly double the size of its team, create a treasury to provide grants to companies building on the platform, and pay for legal costs to ensure the best possible process compliance.
What they don’t do is add no one to the board, which Nadolinsky says becomes more and more natural when crypto startups rely on a governance model built into the very fabric of the code. “If (network members) like or dislike the update, they either run the updated software or they don’t,” she says. “As with any cryptocurrency project, there is action management.”
In 2017, the rising star was invited to a birthday party at the home of Ethereum developer Juan Benet in Palo Alto, California. Three years earlier, Benet founded Protocol Labs to create technology that could power a new version of the Internet without central servers called Web 3. Unlike where she grew up, Nadolinsky was amazed at the openness of blockchain developers. In particular, the developer of the Web 3 MetaMask portal, Dan Finlay, who, without even knowing her, helped her debug a smart contract at 3 am. “I thought, ‘This is like a magical open community,’” she says. “Where there is so much potential and so much to build.”
A year later, she began working on the original version of Iron Fish and then a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency using the Sapling protocol originally developed by Zcash. With early funding from Benet, Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni, Slow Ventures’ Jill Carlson, Scalar Capital’s Linda Xie, and others, cryptocurrency has evolved into a system where almost any cryptocurrency can be deposited in a smart contract that “wraps” it to the same anonymity as Iron Fish itself. Think of it like the secure socket layer (SSL) of the internet, except instead of keeping a website secure, it helps protect the privacy of just about any cryptocurrency.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Delaware C Corp currently employs nine people worldwide, including six developers. In April 2021, the firm released an early version of its open source code, allowing anyone to build the network, which is currently verified by 1,800 node operators. Earlier this month, they opened pre-registration for an incentive testnet that will reward validators and other network members with points that qualified users can eventually redeem for Iron Fish’s native currency, iron.
This is at least Andreessen Horowitz’s sixth investment in cryptocurrency privacy startups in the last four years. More recently, earlier this month, the firm led the Series A in the Swiss Nym, which uses cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, to reward users who run nodes like the Tor network. According to Crunchbase, $3.1 billion has been invested in privacy startups, more than three-quarters of that in the last four years.
To give an idea of the potential value of privacy, research firm Fortune Business Insights predicts that identity-hiding technology will grow into a $17.75 billion industry by 2028, and analytics site ResearchAndMarkets.com estimates that by 2027, the related VPN industry will reach $107 billion.
If technologies like Iron Fish catch on, they could potentially bring anonymity to more than just cryptocurrencies. Perhaps the biggest threat to financial privacy in recent years is the nascent and largely experimental concept of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), with traditional issuers of government-backed currencies looking to leverage the best their new decentralized competitors have to offer. in terms of speed and efficiency.
While everyone from the Bank for International Settlements to David Chaum, whose work on e-money was cited by bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, raised concerns about what this new kind of currency could mean, the world’s second-largest economy, China, is slowly adopting own digital currency, and dozens of similar projects are in development.
Proponents of greater transparency say such hybrid cryptocurrencies could undermine terrorist financing and money laundering, while detractors are concerned about some of the same deterrent effects on innovation that Nadolinsky experienced. “Right now,” she says, “whether you are a believer, a non-believer regulator, a builder or whatever, you are inadvertently helping to shape the inevitable future of cryptocurrency-based digital payments.”
After studying Elena’s twitter, and also checking it with the help of Coinsguru, I was surprised how many well-known people in the world of cryptocurrency follow the project and Elena, not everyone has such a rating.
3.Funds and project support
In addition to the mentioned az16, the other investors in the round were Sequoia, Electric Capital, MetaStable, Arrington XRP, Terra co-founder Do Kwon, Thesis CEO Matt Luongo, and Anchorage co-founder Nathan McCauley. San Francisco-based Iron Fish launched its first testnet in April and says it has since attracted nearly 2,000 self-identified miners to its community. Testnet is an alternative blockchain used for experimentation and testing while the mainnet is used for real transactions.
The company is currently running an incentivized testnet that will reward participants with leader points that will lead to the future Iron Fish main coin. The Iron Fish roadmap starts with a proof-of-work blockchain and native cryptocurrency, and will then expand to more assets, stablecoins, and cross-chain bridges, including L2 support.
Incentivized testnet
Going to the Iron Fish website, we will see a big pink button offering us to participate in the testnet with rewards, but first you need to register and create your own graffiti, this is your nickname that will be used in the nodes and leaderboard. What are the categories for participation, you can see the link, I will consider how to earn points below: The first way is to install a node, for each mined block you will be given 100 points, but at the moment the difficulty is quite large and I would only consider this option if you are good at nodes. I’ll leave the Nodes Guru guide here.
For all questions and information, you can safely contact the Discord chats, the community is quite close-knit and ready to help you. In the future, Iron Fish plans to increase the number of categories available for earning points.
Conclusion
The project is extremely promising, it is followed and supported by many well-known personalities and funds, the CEO has the experience and knowledge to develop and promote a project of this level, well, the Forbes 30 to 30 list just doesn’t get there, I will personally participate in the testnet, and I advise you to do this to do, because perhaps this is a new stage in anonymous blockchains. Thanks for attention!
