Iris: A Next-Gen Decentralized Storage Layer (Part 1)

Published in

iridium

2 min readDec 14, 2021

Overview: Iris embeds IPFS within the Substrate runtime, facilitating the emergence of a dual economy of content and of storage where content is treated as an asset class and access is treated as assets.

Introduction

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 content 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 (e.g. from a smart contract deployed to the shiden/astar network).

Vision

The initial motivation of Iris is to solve the “streaming problem”: As the number of streaming services with exclusive rights to content increases, the actual content to which consumers have access diminishes due to the arbitrary cloistering of content. In a decentralized approach, individual content owners can retain ownership of their content while doing away with a subscription based model. However, Iris may facilitate a plethora of applications whose scope is far beyond streaming. Iris’ goal is to be a general cross chain storage layer for parachains, smart contracts, or parathreads in the polkadot and kusama ecosystems.

How it works

Iris functions by embedding an IPFS node in the Substrate runtime, allowing us to encode the DHT status within transactions.

Owned data is treated as a unique asset class within the blockchain, while access to the data is controlled by an asset minted from the asset class. Accounts that hold a positive balance of an asset are authorized to access the underlying content that the asset class is associated with.

Demo

The Iris ui provides a way to view data you’ve added to iris, to provision access to other accounts, and to download data. To run the demo yourself, follow the steps in the documentation here: https://iridium-labs.github.io/chapter_2.html.

End to End Demo