With contributions from Investors Michael Bosworth and Jonathan Rotbard

Data storage is one of blockchain’s earliest use cases. As seen in early crypto projects like Filecoin and Arweave, developers have historically built decentralized storage solutions through datachains, which are networks optimized for storing data. 

But in recent years, datachains have struggled to scale due to a variety of challenges. Decentralized apps today have to choose between two extreme options: use programmable data such as smart contract storage on Ethereum, which costs tens to hundreds of dollars per megabyte, or use cheap but opaque “blobs,” which are chunks of data that can neither be read nor written by programs running onchain. In addition to settling for the latter approach, many datachains also provide misaligned token incentives that inflate costs or hamper usability, and they don’t usually offer flexibility between permanent and temporary data storage. 

After speaking to a number of teams in web3, it’s clear that there’s demand for onchain data storage that offers a similar user experience to centralized solutions. It’s why we’re excited to announce we’ve led the $10M Series A funding round for Irys, a decentralized platform that enables developers to store and perform computation on data at a low cost. 

As a programmable L1 datachain, Irys takes the standard datachain architecture a step further and allows smart contracts to natively read, modify, and act on stored data. This enables capabilities new to crypto such as automated licensing agreements, verifiable AI training processes, and programmable intellectual property rights. Costing multiple times less than Amazon Web Services, Irys’ user experience is a cheaper, decentralized alternative to Web 2.0 solutions, and over time, we believe it can come to rival centralized competitors’ broad suites of data tooling through the combined efforts of the team and an ecosystem of third-party projects building on top of Irys. 

Behind Irys is a strong team of developers led by web3 data storage veteran Josh Benaron. Josh dropped out of college to build Bundlr, which was the scaling layer for Arweave. Bundlr helped grow Arweave’s daily transaction count from 10,000 to 15M, and powered 98% of all its network activity. Josh already has the experience of scaling a decentralized storage solution, and he concluded that in order to fully enable his vision to cater to the wave of AI, he needed to design a new system from scratch. This system needed to include first-class support for programmable data, customizable time windows, low-latency uploads, customer-aligned miner incentives, and dollar-pegged payments. That’s how Irys was born, with usability and implementation easier than existing decentralized alternatives. 

CoinFund’s thesis on decentralized programmable data storage is that in the age of AI, developers will need to store data that’s readily available for performing computations. A platform is only as decentralized as its most centralized element; in the status quo, many protocols have opted to use centralized data solutions. Irys gives protocols a strong decentralized choice, and we’re honored to partner with Josh and the rest of the Irys team who are building out what has the potential to serve as an industry standard for onchain data storage. 

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