Data assetization, how does Irys unlock the trillion-dollar storage track?

Author: 0xResearcher

Everyone is saying, “Data is the new oil.” But in the real world, most people are just passersby at a gas station on the side of the road, watching the excitement but never really owning a “data oil field.”

Every day we create content online, provide behavioral data, and even provide training materials for AI, but very few people can get value from it. Currently, 95% of the world's AI training data is controlled by the five major technology giants. They have the most complete "data asset pool" and are using these "data walls" to define how the world works.

In the Web3 world, the construction of data infrastructure is still far from mature. Ethereum storage costs up to $900,000 per GB, and Rollup projects burn millions of dollars every minute to temporarily store off-chain data. At the same time, a large number of AI companies are still relying on crawlers to collect low-quality data from public web pages, and data authorization, copyright management, and content incentives are almost blank.

Bottom line: This is a $3 trillion economy without an operating system.

At the same time, a more fundamental question is being raised again:

What kind of data is truly valuable?

Is it a static file pile or a data asset that can be read, authorized, called, and traded? The answer is becoming clearer and clearer. The future competition will no longer be about "how much data can I put in", but "how can I use the data and release the value of the data".

An underestimated trillion-dollar market: data usage rights and monetization issues

In today's highly digital age, each of us generates a large amount of data every day: speeches on social platforms, creative content, behavioral traces of using products, uploaded images and videos, and even a large amount of public material that is inadvertently "fed" to AI models.

What is thought-provoking is that even though Web3 advocates "user ownership" and "decentralization", when it comes to data, there is almost no truly usable, controllable, and monetizable data infrastructure. In other words, on-chain assets can be traded, combined, and incentivized, but data is still in an "island" state, unable to flow effectively and unable to generate income.

Several typical problems always exist:

• Developers cannot upload data to the blockchain at a reasonable cost. In particular, large amounts of data are extremely expensive under the current infrastructure and cannot be supported for daily use or commercialization.
• Even if the data is successfully uploaded to the chain, it is difficult to call and use it in combination efficiently. The high latency and weak interface make the cost of "data use" still high;
• The lack of standardized data authorization and charging mechanisms means that content creators or platform providers cannot establish a credible "data commodity" trading model and cannot truly "sell" a piece of data;

The separation of storage and computing means that when using data, you still need to rely on centralized tools or off-chain logic, and the data experience of Web3 is not complete.

These structural problems directly make it difficult to implement the concept of "data as an asset". We always talk about "empowering data", but once it comes to specific behaviors such as authorization, calling, and trading, we find that there is no on-chain platform that can truly support these needs.

The emergence of Irys is to resolve these core contradictions.

It is not simply about making storage cheaper, but about redefining the role of data on the chain from the perspective of data programmability, execution, and incentives. Data is no longer a passively stored file, but becomes a "native asset on the chain" with rules, value, and behavioral capabilities.

Core logic: not storing data, but releasing the value of data

In the traditional blockchain context, when people talk about "data", the first thing they think of is "storage" - writing data to the blockchain or off-chain solutions to ensure its availability and non-tampering. This is exactly the main focus of protocols such as Arweave and Filecoin: emphasizing that data should be stored for a long time, stably, and cheaply.

But Irys has a completely different perspective. From the very beginning, it was not designed to be a "cheaper hard drive", but was designed around a core issue: how to make data truly an "actually capable" on-chain asset that can be circulated, used, and create value.

This is also the most fundamental difference between Irys and traditional storage protocols - it is not about storing data, but about releasing the value of data.

1. Lower cost, suitable for large-scale application scenarios

In the Web3 world, "storage" is always a high-cost operation. For example, the on-chain storage cost of Ethereum is as high as hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per GB, which greatly limits the development of data applications.

Irys significantly reduces storage costs by optimizing the underlying architecture and resource scheduling mechanism while ensuring data security and availability. This is very attractive for scenarios such as AI model training, content platforms, and social protocols that require processing massive amounts of data.

2. Real-time data reading to improve developer experience

Traditional storage protocols often emphasize that "data cannot be lost after being uploaded to the chain", but when the data needs to be read, there are often problems such as complex calls, high latency, and non-standard interfaces.

The design concept of Irys is more like a database: data is not "archived" but "available". Developers can read and process on-chain data with low latency and high efficiency in a familiar way. This experience is crucial for applications that require real-time interaction or high-frequency calls.

3. EVM-compatible smart contract layer, lower development threshold

Irys is fully compatible with EVM, allowing developers to use Ethereum ecosystem tools such as Solidity, Hardhat, Foundry, etc. to directly build data-related contract logic.

This not only lowers the threshold for migrating from Web2 to Web3, but also allows existing Ethereum developers to seamlessly build DApps around "data assets" and expand new application scenarios, such as licensable data markets, on-chain AI processing platforms, content royalty management systems, etc.

4. Multi-ledger architecture, more flexible data

Unlike a single chain structure, Irys uses a multi-ledger architecture, which allows different types of data to have different storage periods and access permissions. For example, some temporary data can be set with an automatic destruction time, sensitive data can be configured with access verification logic, and public data can be opened for query permissions.

This flexible "data lifecycle management capability" allows Irys to meet the complex needs of different fields such as AI, content, social, and finance.

5. Programmable data + contract enforcement make data truly "viable"

This is the most differentiating point of Irys. On Irys, data is not just a "passively stored" block of information. It can embed pricing, authorization, usage and other rules, and automatically execute through smart contracts.

In other words, every piece of data carries a "contractual consciousness" that can:

• Only authorized users are allowed to access
• Billing by time and frequency
• Automatic tracking of usage behavior
• Automatically settle fees or revenue sharing when transferring or calling

This form of "programmable data assets" makes data no longer static content, but a new type of on-chain asset class that is truly tradable, incentivized, and composable. Irys is no longer positioned as a "decentralized storage protocol" in the traditional sense, but an infrastructure platform for the future data economy. It integrates storage, use, trading, and execution, creating a complete closed loop for data from generation to circulation to monetization.

For developers, it is a low-threshold, high-efficiency tool platform; for creators, it is a reliable and controllable channel for value release; and for the entire Web3 ecosystem, it may be the key to opening up the new paradigm of "data as an asset."

Data infrastructure is becoming a new core battlefield

In the past few years, the crypto industry has focused on public chain performance, DeFi innovation, NFT applications, etc. However, with the rapid development of AI, big models and content creation, "data", the most basic but most strategically valuable resource, is becoming the "hard currency" in the industry consensus again.

Especially in the context of Web3, the role of data is not only to record information, but also the raw material for a series of core mechanisms such as smart contract execution, AI model training, identity mapping, content rights confirmation, etc. Data infrastructure is no longer a marginal supporting role, but is moving towards the core of the industry.

We can clearly see this trend from a series of recent events:

• Celestia raised $100 million, focusing on the "Data Availability" track, trying to solve the data transmission and verification problems of modular chains such as Rollup;
• Story Protocol has raised $140 million and is committed to building an "IP on-chain protocol", the core of which is to establish a traceable, licensable, and tradable data structure for creator content;
• Ethereum’s blob space (temporary data storage space) is facing capacity pressure, which means that the mainstream Layer 1 can no longer bear the growing demand for data interaction;
• The number of AI-related copyright lawsuits has surged by more than 200% since 2023, and creators are rapidly awakening and demanding that platforms repay their data "used for training";

Multiple Rollup solutions have run into expansion bottlenecks due to the high cost of temporary data storage, indicating that existing data infrastructure capabilities are restricting the further expansion of upper-level applications.

These seemingly independent events actually point to the same reality: Web3 is entering a new stage where "data is the core asset", and the demand for "available, controllable, and monetizable" on-chain data is growing exponentially.

But we still lack a universal, stable data infrastructure that supports large-scale calls.

Current solutions either focus on storage but cannot be called (such as Filecoin and Arweave), or only solve specific vertical problems (such as Story Protocol for IP authorization). There is no full-featured basic chain designed for "universal data assets" yet.

This is why Irys’ entry point is so critical. It not only fills the gap of “data storage + call + transaction”, but also provides a solution path for the entire ecosystem that can be combined, expanded and scaled through programmable data and smart contract execution mechanism.

In other words, this is the "data main chain" that the market is waiting for.

Data is not just a "resource", it should be an "asset"

Storage is the starting point, but not the end point. To truly unlock the value of data, a complete set of technologies and architectures centered around “usage rights, incentive mechanisms, and contractual control” are needed.

What Irys is building is a blockchain foundation that truly transforms "data" into "assets."

From content creators to AI model trainers, from decentralized social networking to on-chain computing platforms, as long as you are building a Web3 product that relies on data, Irys may become an infrastructure option that you must consider.

The future of data is not just about “putting it in”, but about “creating value and then outputting it”. And this process requires a chain that is specifically designed for this purpose.