Volumetric scaling

Irys’ scaling is volumetric because it can independently scale across three vectors: writing, reading, and verification. This scaling architecture enables each axis to adapt to meet fluctuating demand.

Bundlers (writers)

Arweave has a limit of 1,000 transactions per block. When demand surges, fees shoot up, and spikes in network traffic can cause fees to increase exponentially, rendering permanent data unaffordable for many users. To solve this problem, Irys uses bundlers to collate transactions together into a bundle before submitting them to Arweave as a single transaction. Irys handles over 90% of all traffic on Arweave, has been tested at 50K TPS, and could easily scale to over 1,000,000 TPS (opens in a new tab).

Gateways (readers)

Gateways are responsible for indexing, serving, and making data and transactions on Arweave available to users.

While many users rely on well-known gateways such as arweave.net and gateway.irys.xyz, it's also possible to run your own gateway using the AR.io (opens in a new tab) open-source offering. This means that anyone can spin up a new gateway at any point in time to meet their unique demand requirements.

Verification

When you upload a transaction to Irys, you’re given a receipt containing a millisecond-accurate timestamp, authorship details, and other metadata. This receipt can be permissionlessly verified either by manually creating a deep hash of all its fields and comparing it against the receipt's signature or by using the SDK function irys.utils.verifyReceipt(), an abstraction of the manual verification process.

Transaction verification

In addition to verifying receipts, you can verify transactions by creating a deep hash of all transaction fields and verifying that the transaction signature was generated using the deep hash.

Volumetric scaling now and in the future

Irys is a fully unconstrained point of entry to Arweave, making permanent data with strong provenance accessible with just a few lines of code. Irys can handle millions of transactions per second (opens in a new tab) and limitless data volumes, all while being permissionlessly verifiable. Arweave scales horizontally by increasing the number of miners storing data; therefore, more miners on Arweave means more bandwidth on the network.

Irys is designed to handle more than just current demand; we're built for growth. Our scalability tests go beyond today's needs, ensuring we're prepared for what comes next.

We're future-proof.