Get Ready for Mining IronFish (IRON) In Time for the Mainnet Launch
IronFish (IRON) is a new privacy-oriented Layer-1 Proof-of-Work crypto project that is launching its mainnet tomorrow on April 20th 2023 and that is when the actual mining of the IRON coins will start. IronFish has been in development for a while now and has been running an incentivized testnet for quite some time in order to make sure that at launch everything will be operating properly and everyone will be ready to start mining and using IRON. Every single IronFish transaction is encrypted, hiding sensitive user information on who the sender, recipient, or the amount of transaction was with an accompanying zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARKs).
The IronFish genesis block will include 42M tokens that will be distributed to insiders, foundation, and community members and to incentivise testnet participants. So, do have in mind that there will be high initial number of coins generated even before mining actually starts, though these will be a 1-year lock-up period for most of these coins, meaning that no tokens can be traded or transferred by an insider for 12 months after the mainnet event. The mining will start with 20 IRON coins per block and a 60 second block time with the block reward going down a little by little every year (not halving every year!).
Now, let us get onto mining IronFish (IRON) coins. Due to the incentivized testnet there are already some pools and mining software available that support the Blake3-based IronFish mining algorithm and you can head on and give it a go mining with your existing GPU hardware. Currently you will be mining testnet coins, but the pools and miners should continue to mine with the launch of the mainnet when that happens tomorrow. This simply means that you can be ready ahead of time and start mining right at the launch, though for that you would need to get the CLI (needs to be compiled) or GUI wallet (node is not syncing) and install it and generate a wallet address that you can use to mine (the address should continue to work on the mainnet, though no coins mined from the testnet will be available there). Pools where you can mine IronFish (currently on the testnet) include HeroMiners, Flexpool and Kryptex and others will probably soon follow with support as the mainnet launches tomorrow.
There are currently three miners available for GPU miners to choose from for mining IRON coins – BzMiner v14.2.0 (AMD/Nvidia), Rigel 1.4.1 (Nvidia Only) and SRBMiner-MULTI v2.2.4 (AMD/Nvidia). Our advice will be to opt out for the SRBMiner-Muilti for the moment as it seems to be faster than the other two options, about 3 times faster on Nvidia RTX 3070 in our comparison tests with similar power usage. Another good thing about the IronFish mining algorithm is that it is a GPU-intensive one, being Blake-based, so memory can run at the minimum operating frequency and you can use a GPU offset to further lower the operating voltage and reduce power usage. In fact, if you have mined KASPA (KAS), Radiant (RXD) or any other of the more recent GPU-intensive crypto coins you should have a good idea on what settings to use for the GPU clock, offset and memory clock in order to optimize performance and reduce power usage (the same clocks should be a very good starting point).