Iris: A Next-Gen Decentralized Storage Layer (Part 2)

Tony Riemer

Published in

iridium

3 min readFeb 18, 2022

Delivering a permissioned, private, decentralized IPFS pinning service.

Read Part 1 here

Introduction

In Part 1, we introduced how Iris treats data as on chain asset class, with access controlled by assets minted from some owned class. In Milestone 2, we deliver a module that enables new validators to join the network and to be rewarded for storing data, enabling an incentivized and decentralized pinning service on top of the embedded IPFS swarm.

Overview

Iris is a decentralized storage network that acts as a secure storage layer for Web 3.0. It is infrastructure for the decentralized web by providing a decentralized storage layer that can be leveraged by parachains and smart contracts in the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem, allowing access to data to be transferred across chains and monetized. It provides indexability, security, availability, and governance on top of IPFS, enabling data ownership, access management, and the commodification of latent storage capacity and content delivery. Built with IPFS and Substrate, Iris can be used by parachains and smart contracts to create dapps that leverage private decentralized storage. Iris intends to provide a simple and intuitive means of monetizing storage capacity as well as monetizing data access in a cross-chain environment.

How it works

Validators of Iris are responsible not only for finalizing blocks, but for providing storage to the network. Using a session-based approach, we introduce a naive schema where validators earn reward points for storing data that is deemed “valuable” (more on this in our technical documentation). When validators do not earn a sufficient amount of reward points over a preset numbers of sessions, the offending validator is removed as a validator.

We ensure storage capacity isn’t limited to a static set of validators by allowing existing validators, specifically the root of the network, to accept new validators into the network.

There are four roles that nodes can take in Iris:

data owner
data consumer
validator
storage provider

Data owners are responsible for adding data to the Iris and creating, managing and minting asset classes and assets.

Data consumers are capable of retrieving data from Iris when they hold an asset minted from some owned asset class.

Iris is a PoA network, so validators are responsible for finalizing blocks.

Any validator is capable of being a storage provider. A storage provider is a validator that is actively storing some data associated with an owned asset class. Validators are incentivized to store data by earning reward points when they process IPFS requests or when data they are pinning is accessed.

Below is a breakdown of an end-to-end flow between different node roles, from data owner, to storage provider, to consumer and storage provider.

What it Enables

The completion of this milestone enables a semi-decentralized pinning service on IPFS, bringing us one step closer to a general, reusable storage layer. This provides the foundations for storage in the Iris network by making the validator set mutable as well as incentivizing validators to provide storage to the network. It also opens the gateway to building a governance protocol on top of the storage layer.

Next Steps

Our third milestone will be the creation of a smart contract (on the Iris blockchain) that takes advantage of decentralized storage. Initially, this will take the form of the “Iris Asset Exchange”, a marketplace for buying and selling iris assets (i.e. monetizing access to data).