Introduction:
Iron Fish is a Layer 1 blockchain that provides privacy using zk-SNARKs. Elena Nadolinski, the CEO of Iron Fish, compares Iron Fish to other projects such as Aleo below:
“Aleo is more of a generic project for development with privacy features, while Iron Fish is for private transactions. Aztec is focusing on Ethereum chain, while Iron Fish is going to be multichain. In compares with Z Cash or Monero that are Silo chains, Iron Fish has more collaborative principles. Oasis appeared to be no that safe to use, as it uses Enclave technology. This technology already proved itself badly.”
https://medium.com/@ValSavchuk/iron-fish-q-a-privacy-competitors-challenges-part-1-790005fdc0e9#Iron Fish raised $5.3M in April 2021 for Seed Funding, and $28M in November 2021 during their Series A. Since 2021 they have been running testnets with phase 3 ending recently. They plan to launch mainnet April 20th, 2023. There is no official ticker for Iron Fish yet so I will call the coin IRON as a placeholder.
Issuance:
There is a 42,000,000 pre-mine which will slowly be unlocked which is approximately 16.345% of max supply (256,970,400 tokens). There are 1440 blocks a day, approximately one every minute, with block rewards of 20 tokens for a total daily issuance of 28,800. As blocks come every minute, miners will notice less steady rewards compared to ETH and other coins that have four or more blocks a minute.
Valuation:
It is impossible to know what IRON is worth before mainnet. However, there are some estimations that can be applied. In 2021 they raised $27,600,000 during their Series A. Assuming they sold 20%, that would give them a valuation of $138,000,000 in 2021 before they had a working network. A base for coin valuation could be estimated using this number, which would mean each coin is valued at $0.537 with a total daily issuance of $15,465.60.
This is a pessimistic number that assumes their company is worth the same post-mainnet as it was back when they were just starting out and then values the coin based on the value of the company. A similar company based in California is Chia Network. Chia Network currently has 4608 blocks of 2 XCH each a day for a total daily emissions of 9216 XCH valued at $38.26 each. At $352,604.16 daily emissions, that gives a value of $12.2432 to each IRON.
Obviously there is a large gap between $0.537 and $12.2432, it is likely that the accurate number is inbetween these two. However, new coins tend to have pump and dump cycles so it may take time before a stable price is reached.
How to Mine?
Iron Fish currently uses the Blake3 algorithm for its PoW. This can currently be mined using CPUs and GPUs, primarily using the core. CPUs will be inefficient in terms of hashrate and power use compared to CPUs. Nvidia GPUs appear to do better although it is mineable with AMD. Bzminer is currently the best miner for Iron Fish in terms of hashrate and power efficiency although SRB also supports Iron Fish. HPool has its own miner exclusive to their pool as well. Iron Fish can be mined solo by spinning up a nodded and running the software released by the core developers. Please note that this software requires technical knowledge, it is not for beginners. Please check their Github and Discord for instructions. As Iron Fish is a core heavy algo, it can be dual or triple mined with a memory intensive algo. Iedoc of Bzminer believes that 80%/80% is possible with the right overclocks on some cards meaning that you can get 80% of Iron Fish hashrate and 80% of a memory-intensive algo such as ethash or autolykos. Bzminer has added CPU mining along with IRON/ETC/ZIL support, please checkout his discord for details
https://discord.gg/Qz84q3Akus. Please be warned that maximizing your card will make it hot as if you were mining RVN. Iron Fish can also be mined on pools.
Pools:
There are currently 4 pools that have confirmed they will support Iron Fish listed below. The core developers have also launched a pool for testnet that they may support after mainnet. You cannot currently mine Iron Fish as mainnet has not launched, but there is a testnet running that some pools are running servers for. Note that there is no benefit to mining on testnet, all airdrops have ended and coins mined will not transfer to mainnet. Links to the below pools social media can usually be found at the bottom of their website. I encourage everyone to join their telegram/discord/other social media.
Name Location Website
HPool China
https://www.hpool.in/ZK.WORK China
https://www.hpool.in/Hero Miners Unknown
https://herominers.com/Flexpool Canada
https://www.flexpool.io/Links:
Iron Fish Installation (A web wallet is coming but is not currently out, you will need to install the Iron Fish client and spin up the node to create a wallet to mine to for mainnet. Your seed from testnet will create the same wallet address on mainnet)
https://ironfish.network/docs/onboarding/installation-iron-fishWallet commands are here
https://ironfish.network/docs/onboarding/iron-fish-wallet-commandsIron Fish discord
https://discord.gg/zSg4WvATY5Rabid Panda and Digital Spaceport has some YouTube videos that may be of help when setting up:
How to Mine Iron Fish:
https://youtu.be/EARiBx5vuXA Windows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoh6J1yRJVk&t=397s WSL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg-vYGtKLNw Ubuntu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FttKzQSTLu8
