Privacy is a right.
A financial ecosystem built on one conviction: privacy is a right.
Programmers, cryptographers, artists, and engineers.
Fire is a San Francisco company backed by Y Combinator. Our team spans cryptographic protocol design, browser extension engineering, financial systems, and product design.
We came together around a shared belief: the infrastructure for private money exists, but no one has made it usable. We are building the wallet people actually want to use, the payment system merchants actually adopt, and the business tools that make private finance viable at scale. We ship software.
Privacy is dignity.
Financial privacy is about personal sovereignty. It is about autonomy and the ability to spend your money without being watched, profiled, or judged. Every person deserves that.
Privacy should be the default, not an option buried in settings. Transactions should settle in seconds rather than minutes. Fees shouldn't be something you budget for.No one — not us, not your wallet provider, not a chain observer — should be able to see your balance.
The best security is invisible. Private keys should never exist on your device. Recovery should not depend on a seed phrase written on paper. Cryptographic infrastructure should protect you without asking you to understand it.
Serious infrastructure, quiet interface.
Fire is built on a privacy-focused blockchain where ring signatures and encrypted fog make transactions untraceable. Settlement takes ~5 seconds. Fees are under a tenth of a cent.
Key management uses hardware-backed security through biometric authentication and a threshold HSM network. Your private keys are split across geographically distributed hardware security modules. No single point of failure. No seed phrase. No way for us to access your funds.
The wallet runs as a Chrome extension with full key isolation — private keys live in the service worker process and never touch the page. The payment API requires zero dependencies: one function call, one event listener.
None of this complexity reaches the user. That is the point.