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FAQ

When did mainnet launch?

The Iron Fish Mainnet launched April 20, 2023. You can read more about it here

How do I get started?

Check out the Getting Started Guide

How often do I need to upgrade nodes and miners in Mainnet?

It's good practice to update within a few days of release, to get the latest improvements and bug fixes. Join the Iron Fish Discord and watch the #announcements channel for upgrade updates.

You will also need to follow your miner developer's instructions for updates to your miner.

How can I see my $IRON balance in my wallet, from Testnet rewards or mining on mainnet?

You need to run a node on the current version, synced with the mainnet blockchain.

• In the response to ironfish status, you’ll see that the Blockchain line says SYNCED, and Syncer is 'idle' when the sync is complete.

Else, it appears as 'In Progress'

To sync up faster, use our blockchain snapshot. The command to do so is: ironfish chain:download

• Ensure you’ve upgraded your node to the latest version of the network regularly. Ex: Version 1.70 and below will not run on current pre-mainnet blockchain network as of 24 March If you installed using npm you can upgrade to the latest version by running npm install -g ironfish

• Ensure that graffiti is set up. You can do so by running the command ironfish testnet. (Which also enables telemetry)

I'd like to share my node's health with Iron Fish. How can I do that?

Ensure that telemetry is enabled, by running ironfish status. To enable telemetry, use: ironfish config:set enableTelemetry true

Once telemetry is enabled, it will show "STARTED" in status.

Wen token, ser?

• Anyone offering to sell you $IRON is a scammer. The Iron Fish team cannot state when/where the token will be listed on an exchange.
• Please report the Discord user details (@name#number) in #report-scams
  • This helps the moderator ban them
• Advice: disable "allow direct messages from server members", in your Discord settings for Iron Fish
  • Gear in lower left in your Profile, Privacy & Safety tab

How can I get Iron Fish news?

• Follow #announcements Discord channel

• Monthly Pulse audio calls are held on the 2nd Friday of each month at 10:30a PT

  • Register in #choose-alerts Discord channel to receive an alert 1 hour before

• Sign up for newsletter updates

What are the minimum hardware requirements for running a node in mainnet?

Recommended minimum requirements:

• CPU 4 core
• RAM 8GB RAM
• SSD or HDD: 250GB - 512GB to run a node on mainnet for a year

What are the benefits of joining a mining pool?

You can earn Mainnet IRON. Earning rate will depend on HW, with GPUs most effective. CPU mining, even on a 16-core fast CPU, likely won't return much IRON for the electricity it costs.

Troubleshooting

I can't access my wallet.

Your node may not be in sync with the network. You can check this by running ironfish status command. You should see a row:

Blockchain 00000000003eaf7bf17d3a77bff7aea944ac0d487f31dd831dab66a95e166e5b (3629), Since HEAD: 1m 51s (SYNCED)

Make sure that your chain height (in the example above it is 3629) is close to the same height seen at the block explorer homepage. If it is not, wait for your node to sync.

I see insufficient balance errors when trying to send transactions quickly one after another.

Transactions use something similar to the UTXO model in Bitcoin (but not the same). Think of it this way:

• 1. You mine a block and you get a special $20 bill with all this cryptographic info inside.
• 2. You send $5 to an address using this special bill.
• 3. The $20 bill gets destroyed and then bills for $5 and $15 get created. Both have all the fancy cryptographic info inside as well.
• 4. To get your $15 bill back, the network has to confirm your transaction, which means that it has to verify that the cryptographic info is actually valid and then include that transaction in a mined block.
• 5. When all that happens, you will eventually receive the mined block with your transaction and your $15 bill will show up in your wallet. Then you will have sufficient funds.

As a more detailed explanation — when you have multiple 20-iron "notes" in your account from mining 3 blocks:

• Lets say you mined 3 blocks, so your balance is 60 $IRON, which you received in 3 different transactions (creating 3 notes)
• You deposit once, which would spend 0.1 IRON from one of those notes, which would make the entire 20 IRON note unspendable until the transaction is confirmed.
• You now have a remaining available balance of 40 (but a total balance of ~59.9 once its confirmed and change is returned).
• You could deposit again immediately, which would leave your available balance as 20 (but a total unconfirmed balance of ~59.8).
• If you deposit one more time before the transactions are confirmed, you'd have 0 IRON available until your transactions are confirmed
  • Which would result in an Insufficient Funds error if you tried to do ironfish deposit or ironfish send before confirmation.

I received tokens from airdrop, but I do not see them in my wallet.

Upgrade/update their wallet by following these steps:

1. Install npm install -g ironfish
2. Migrate to mainnet ‘ironfish mainnet’
3. Start your node on mainnet ‘ironfish start’

After this your node will start syncing the chain and your wallet will start scanning blocks for transactions.

I mined a block according to ironfish status, but I don't see IRON available to spend in ironfish accounts:balance Why is that? OR In the output of ironfish accounts:balance: why is "Amount available to spend" sometimes less than "Balance"?

Even if your miner successfully mined a block, there's a chance that someone else has mined a competing heavier block that the network has chosen over your block. This is the difference of a block being on a fork versus on the main (or canonical) chain. Only blocks accepted as part of the canonical chain earn you coins that are "available to spend.".

I have a pending transaction, how do I cancel it?

Pending transactions get processed or drop off on their own, they need not be canceled. We do not have a cancelation command for transactions as of yet.