In recent days a new coin has become minable, Iron Fish. I thought I would try and do a little post about it. Thus you know if you want to take a closer look at it or perhaps mine it yourself.

What is Iron Fish, or perhaps why is Iron Fish?

This is perhaps a more prudent question to ask oneself. Why is Iron Fish, or $IRON as the coin is called? With so many tokens and coins already in the crypto space. Do we really need another one? I mean sure it is GPU minable, and that space is fairly small at the current moment. But that is probably more due to the market being "down" in general. More broadly affecting mining profitability.

Iron Fish is a decentralized, proof-of-work (PoW) based, censorship-resistant, and publicly accessible blockchain project. It is designed to support strong privacy guarantees on every transaction. Similarly to how the invention of the SSL/TLS layer in the '90s paved the way to e-commerce and benefited countless industries, we believe that privacy is a fundamental requirement to protect the user and expand the use of cryptocurrency.

That is the first paragraph of the abstract of the whitepaper for Iron Fish. And if we take them at their word, the coin is looking like it is a fusion of a privacy coin and a coin that is looking to facilitate transactions, trade, or commerce with crypto. And at least to my ears that sounds like a wonderful combination. To that, I will also add it is a Layer-1 chain based on Proof of Work. Every single Iron Fish transaction is encrypted, hiding sensitive user information on who the sender, recipient, or the amount of transaction was with an accompanying zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). Every Iron Fish wallet has a private key, a public key, and a viewing key.

The whitepaper does go into a lot more technical detail of how it all works, much higher detail than I am able to take in and understand. But it does omit some stuff, there is no mention of any of the team members behind it. But that might be in the nature of the beast. There are however some people, or I should say developers, linked to the project over on GitHub. That at least, to me, tells me that all the stuff from the project is available to anyone who wants to look at it. Aka, pulling a fast one is way less likely. 

Second, some of the devs have worked on other projects as well. Lending further credence to this project. There is also the fact that it has been in the works for quite some time now. Personally, I first heard it mentioned at the end of last year. 

Tokenomics

Let us take a look at the tokenomics of Iron Fish, meaning the planned distribution of the coins and how many coins there will be along with any possible pre-investments. The plan for the coin is to reach its maximum total three years after its release. The total is planned to be 256,970,400 coins. Of these 42M, will be or already have been, distributed to insiders, foundation, and community members.

This is the breakdown of the planned distribution of all the coins after year 4. There is also a breakdown of the distribution for every 12-month period over at Iron Fish´s website, you can find it linked here or at the bottom. Along with some further details and information.

There has also been a presale where they raised a total of $32,900,000. I however could not find any information about which category this would fall under. My best guess is that it is the Series Pre-Seed. 

For me, the big takeaway tho is that we are not talking about a blockchain that will be controlled by one or a handful of people. As 83.7% of the total supply of coins will, over the 4-year period, be in the hands of miners. And that is in my book a huge plus.

Starting mining

As I said earlier, this now Iron Fish is GPU minable. And if you want to get in on it then Sebs FinTech got an excellent video covering all the bases of how you can get the ball rolling.

An overall excellent channel if you are into crypto mining. 

The drawbacks

There are however drawbacks. And It would be pretty bad if I at least do not try to talk about them. So here we go. The biggest drawback currently is the fact that the coin is so new it is virtually unlisted everywhere. Meaning that you pretty much can not buy or sell it, if you were looking to invest early or sell what you have mined.

There is also the fact that the wallet was pulled from the GitHub site. Apparently, it was done preemptively as it was not up to their standard. So to preempt a lot of complaints they pulled it. At least that is how I understand it. There is still the option to set up a node wallet. It does however mean that there are some extra hoops for you to jump through if you want to get a wallet early. 

Then it is the lack of information about the developers, as I mentioned before. There are some, on GitHub, but I do not really know if that is all of them. Who has what roles or who is in charge? That is something you should be aware of. 

In conclusion, I would say that if you are into privacy or mining. This at the very least should be a project that you should have on your radar and keep an eye on. And if it sounds interesting to you you most definitely should start by digging into it on your own, and get a better picture of it that way.

What are your thought on this new coin, do it sound in any way interesting to you? If so what part, and if not why not? Please share your thoughts in the comment section down below. If you would like to support me and the content I make, please consider following me, reading my other posts, or why not do both instead.

See you on the interwebs!

Picture provided by: fair use