Engineers at Sty Labs reviewing transaction logs on a monitor at the company’s San Francisco headquarters last week. Credit: Kevin Tao/Reuters
Engineers at Sty Labs reviewing transaction logs on a monitor at the company’s San Francisco headquarters last week. Credit: Kevin Tao/Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO — A startup founded by three former blockchain engineers has launched what it describes as the world’s first cryptocurrency secured entirely by Pig Latin encryption, a proprietary obfuscation methodology the company says renders its ledger “essentially unbreakable by anyone who has not completed second grade.”

The coin, called IggyPay — ticker symbol IGPY — operates on a distributed ledger in which all transaction data is encoded by moving the first consonant cluster of each alphanumeric string to the end and appending the suffix “-ay.” The founding team, operating under the name Sty Labs, raised $47 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, which declined to comment on the investment but confirmed it was real.

“What we have built is a cryptographic layer of extraordinary depth,” said Bryce Tunnell, chief executive of Sty Labs and lead architect of the IGPY protocol. “If a malicious actor attempts to intercept a transaction, what they will encounter is not a wallet address — they will encounter an address-way. That distinction is, I cannot stress this enough, enormous.” Tunnell added that the company’s whitepaper, available on its website, is itself written entirely in Pig Latin, which he described as “a security feature and also a values statement.”

Independent cryptographers have offered divided assessments. Dr. Meredith Volpe, a professor of applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the 2021 monograph Obfuscation at Scale: A History, said the protocol likely provides what she called “novelty-adjacent security,” a term she coined specifically in response to the IGPY whitepaper. “The algorithm is O(n) reversible with no key,” she said. “In principle, anyone capable of reading a cereal box could decrypt a transaction in under four seconds. Whether that constitutes a vulnerability depends heavily on your threat model.” A spokesperson for Sty Labs called Dr. Volpe’s assessment “a significant misunderstanding of the ay-way ecosystem” and noted that the company’s internal red team had found no critical exploits “after several attempts.”

Despite the skepticism, IggyPay has attracted a devoted retail investor community that has pushed the coin’s market capitalization to $1.2 billion since its launch in January. Trading volume spiked sharply last week following a post on X by a pseudonymous account called @igpay_maxi, who wrote, simply, “OONSOAY.” The post was viewed 14 million times.