Since human beings have a sense of self-protection, the exploration of privacy topics has never stopped, especially at the moment when technology is highly developed.

Just like Eric Hughes stated in his famous “Punk Manifesto”:

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

Cypherpunks have done a lot of great exploration in this area, trying to find the optimal solution in decentralization, privacy and user experience. During this period, they made countless efforts — blind signature, CryptoNote, TEE (Trusted Execution Enviorments), zk-SNARKS, etc.

Before talking about the protagonist of this article, let us think about a question:

• If privacy is so important, and it seems that privacy is an inherent property of cryptocurrencies, why is it being taken seriously until now?

Let us pay attention to the price of the digital currency on the privacy track in Q1 2022, we will find that the prices of Monero (XMR), Dash (DASH), and Zcash (ZEC) have all experienced impressive increases. Aside from speculative properties, the existence of these “ancient” privacy projects means that privacy does have its market vitality.

Through our research, we found that two main macro-level factors can support the price surge of privacy cryptocurrencies. The first is the regulatory pressure surrounding more “mainstream” cryptocurrencies due to the Russian-Ukrainian war and the resulting suspicions that Russia can use cryptocurrencies to evade financial sanctions; the other is an executive order from US President Biden, the fact that On the other hand, its roadmap or report did not cause any immediate harm to the industry, and the end result was a clear regulatory framework for digital assets in the United States.

We consulted a number of senior experts from the crypto community, who told us that the recent price surge in privacy cryptocurrencies has been driven by more household funds and individuals holding them as a store of value, spurred by recent market and political turmoil, as well as may be the result of high volatility in Bitcoin price.

So we can see that privacy is not a concern only just now.

Initially, anonymity was one of the core promises of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. However, as the industry matures and gradually integrates with traditional financial markets, digital currencies face demands from institutional investors and regulators everywhere to comply with KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) standards. This sacrifices user anonymity, at least for withdrawal/exchange operations on compliant platforms.

From this we will lead to the protagonist of this article — how to balance regulation and privacy in this increasingly unstable real world, Iron fish seems to have given an answer.

For the average person, concepts like zk-SNARKs, Sapling protocols, Jubjub curves are such a headache. So here we won’t discuss too much technical details, you can refer to Iron fish’s white paper.

We only give the biggest highlight of Iron fish — the network wants to protect privacy without compromising the accessibility of on-chain transactions, for this purpose, Iron Fish is equipped with an additional view key for each on-chain address (view key), the address holder can use this key to grant others read-only permissions.

Iron Fish aims to be a common privacy layer for all assets in the crypto industry, building bridges that allow users to transfer assets from other blockchains to Iron Fish to transact completely privately on any asset.

Currently, Iron Fish is still in the incentivize testnet stage. If you want to join the event, you can follow our tutorial 🔗.

Comparing the privacy projects currently under development, we can find a lot of very creative work: Aleo, Nym, Espresso Systems, Aztec Network (already mainnet) and many more. Iron fish is definitely better at integrating with the real world. But other projects are also working in their own direction, we still don’t know what is the best solution, maybe anonymity is inherently antithetical to society, but for our life, any attempt is worthwhile.

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