IronWall Protocol
Stop bots without CAPTCHA using 3KB Client-Side Proof of Wor
Hey Indie Hackers! 👋
I’m Clein, a solo founder based here in Nairobi.
Last month, I launched a simple AI wrapper, I woke up the next morning to a $50 OpenAI bill and 0 actual users. A botnet had found my signup endpoint and spammed it 10,000 times.
I tried adding Google reCAPTCHA v3, but:
It looked ugly on my UI.
My real signups dropped by ~20% (people hate clicking traffic lights).
The Pivot
I realized the problem wasn't "Identity" (Are you human?), but "Economics" (Is this request cheap?).
So I spent the last few months building IronWall.
It’s a client-side Proof-of-Work protocol. Before a user can submit a form, their browser has to solve a cryptographic puzzle (Argon2).
For Humans: It takes ~1-3 seconds in the background. Invisible.
For Bots: Sending 10k requests would cost them hours of CPU time and electricity. It makes the attack financially impossible.
The Reddit Roast
I posted this on Reddit yesterday and got absolutely roasted for using AI to help write my marketing copy (English isn't my first language). Lesson learned! I’m writing this one 100% manually. 😂
The Tech
SDK: 3KB Gzipped (WebAssembly).
Backend: Vercel Edge + Redis (Upstash) for atomic locking.
I’d love for you guys to try it out. It’s free for personal projects (up to 10k requests/mo).
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