Everyone says: "Data is the new oil". But in the real world, most people are just bystanders at the gas station, watching the excitement, but never truly owning the "data oil field".
We create content, provide behavioral data, and even provide training materials for AI every day, but very few can gain value from it. Currently, 95% of global AI training data is controlled by five major tech giants, who possess the most complete "data asset pool" and are defining how the world operates through these "data walls".
In the Web3 world, data infrastructure is still far from mature.Ethereum storage costs up to $900,000 per GB, and Rollup projects burn millions of dollars in minutes just to temporarily store off-chain data. Meanwhile, many AI companies are still collecting low-quality data from public web pages through crawlers, with data authorization, copyright management, and content incentives almost non-existent.
In one sentence:This is an economic body with an annual value of $3 trillion, yet it lacks its own "operating system"
At the same time, a more fundamental question is being raised:
What kind of data is truly valuable?
Is it a pile of static files, or data assets that can be read, authorized, called, and traded? The answer is becoming increasingly clear. Future competition will no longer be about "how much data I can store", but "how I can use data and release its value".
The Underestimated Trillion-Dollar Market: Data Usage Rights and Monetization
In this highly digitized era, each of us generates massive amounts of data daily: statements on social platforms, creative content, product usage behavior trails, uploaded images and videos, and even massive public materials inadvertently "fed" to AI models.
A thought-provoking phenomenon is that even though Web3 advocates "user ownership" and "decentralization", in terms of data, truly usable, controllable, and monetizable data infrastructure is almost blank. In other words, on-chain assets can be traded, combined, and incentivized, but data remains in an "isolated island" state, unable to flow effectively or generate revenue.
Several typical problems have always existed:
Developers cannot upload data on-chain at a reasonable cost, especially with large-volume data having extremely high costs under the current infrastructure, unable to support daily use or commercial implementation;
Even if data is successfully uploaded on-chain, it is difficult to efficiently call and combine usage, with high latency and weak interfaces, making "data usage" costs still high;
Lack of standardized data authorization and charging mechanisms means content creators or platform providers cannot establish a trustworthy "data commodity" trading model, unable to truly "sell" a piece of data;
Separation of storage and computation means that when using data, one still needs to rely on centralized tools or off-chain logic, making the Web3 data experience incomplete.
These structural problems directly lead to the difficulty of implementing the concept of "data as an asset". We always talk about "empowering data", but once it involves specific behaviors like authorization, calling, and trading, we find no on-chain platform that can truly bear these needs.
And the emergence of Irys is to solve these core contradictions.
It is not simply doing "cheaper storage", but redefining the role of data on-chain from the perspectives of programmability, executability, and incentivization. Making data no longer a passively stored file, but a "native on-chain asset" with rules, value, and behavioral capabilities.
(Translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text)Data Infrastructure Becomes the New Core Battlefield
In the past few years, the crypto industry's attention has been mostly focused on public chain performance, DeFi innovation, and Non-Fungible Token applications. However, with the rapid development of AI, large models, and content creation, "data" - the most fundamental yet strategically valuable resource - is becoming the new "hard currency" in industry consensus.
Especially in the Web3 context, the role of data is no longer just information recording, but the raw material for a series of core mechanisms such as smart contract execution, AI model training, identity mapping, and content rights confirmation. Data infrastructure is no longer a marginal supporting role but is moving towards the industry's core.
We can clearly see this trend from a series of recent events:
Celestia raised $100 million, focusing on the "Data Availability" track, attempting to solve data transmission and verification problems for modular chains like Rollup;
Story Protocol raised $140 million, dedicated to building an "IP on-chain protocol", with the core aim of establishing a traceable, authorizable, and tradable data structure for creators' content;
Ethereum's blob space (temporary data storage space) is facing capacity pressure, meaning mainstream Layer 1 can no longer bear the continuously growing data interaction demands;
The number of AI-related copyright lawsuits has surged by over 200% since 2023, with creators rapidly awakening and demanding platforms compensate them for data "used for training";
Multiple Rollup solutions are stuck in expansion bottlenecks due to high temporary data storage costs, indicating that existing data infrastructure capabilities are constraining the further expansion of upper-layer applications.
These seemingly independent events actually point to the same reality: Web3 is entering a new phase where "data is the core asset", with exponential growth in demand for on-chain data that is "usable, controllable, and monetizable".
However, we still lack a universal, stable, and large-scale callable data infrastructure.
Current solutions are either focused on storage without callability (such as Filecoin, Arweave), or only solve specific vertical problems (like Story Protocol for IP authorization), with no full-featured base chain designed for "universal data assets".
This is why Irys's entry point is so critical. It not only fills the blank of "data storage + calling + trading" but also provides the entire ecosystem with a combinable, expandable, and scalable solution through programmable data and smart contract execution mechanisms.
In other words, this is the "data main chain" the market has been waiting for.
Data Is More Than a "Resource", It Should Be an "Asset"
Storage is the starting point, but not the endpoint. Truly releasing data value requires a complete set of technologies and architectures around "usage rights, incentive mechanisms, and contract control".
What Irys is building is precisely a blockchain infrastructure that transforms "data" into a true "asset".
From content creators to AI model trainers, from decentralized social platforms to on-chain computing platforms, if you are building a Web3 product that relies on data, Irys may become an infrastructure option you must consider.
The future of data is not just about "putting it in", but "how to create and output value". And this process requires a chain specifically designed for this purpose.
