Iron Fish is a decentralized blockchain built on proof-of-work (PoW), engineered to be censorship-resistant and publicly accessible. It aims to deliver strong privacy protections for each transaction.

Iron Fish is created as a cryptocurrency from scratch, with the goal of making fully-private payments simple to use by closely aligning with Sapling protocol. Each account includes a view key that provides the account holder with read-only access to the information tied to that account.

Through this design, Iron Fish looks to break away from earlier approaches to full node usability. Its networking layer uses WebRTC alongside WebSockets, allowing users to establish a genuine P2P connection with no extra setup. The initial Iron Fish implementation is structured so it can later be extended to support a full node running directly in the browser. The overall priority is to reduce the entry barrier, so anyone with a computer can feel comfortable running a full node.

Iron Fish’s blockchain algorithm automatically tunes mining difficulty to target an average block time of 60 seconds, adjusting difficulty upward or downward depending on whether recent blocks are arriving too quickly or too slowly.

For mining, a node must have synchronized both global data structures (the Merkle Tree of Notes and the Merkle Tree of Nullifiers), and it must know at least the two most recent blocks.