The significance of CoinFund's investment in Irys and the transformation of Web3 data storage When I saw the news that CoinFund led a $10 million investment in Irys, to be honest, my first reaction wasn't "another storage project got funding," but rather I recalled the pitfalls I encountered in Web3 over the years. The pain points and real dilemmas of Web3 storage Back in 2021, when I was working on my first NFT project, I was really troubled by storage issues. If I put images on IPFS, they would be inaccessible every few days; if I put them on the Ethereum blockchain, the gas fees for a single image would be hundreds of dollars—who can afford that? In the end, I compromised: the core contract was on-chain, while the image data was secretly stored on AWS. At that time, I thought, isn't this ridiculous? We were promised decentralization, yet the most critical data still relied on centralized services. If Amazon's network goes down, our "decentralized applications" would immediately reveal their true nature. The innovation of Irys and the story of its founder That's why I find the Irys project interesting. What they aim to solve isn't just the issue of storage being expensive, but whether storage can truly serve on-chain applications. Think about it: Filecoin and Arweave are indeed cheap, but that data is like dead files, and smart contracts can't call it at all. Ethereum can read and write directly, but who can afford that cost? Irys's approach is clever: it needs to be cheap and programmable. Data is no longer just static files; it can be assets with logic. For example, a video file can automatically distribute profits to creators; a dataset can record how many times it has been trained by AI and how copyright fees are calculated. This reminds me of the story of founder Josh. This guy previously worked on Bundlr, and he managed to increase Arweave's daily transaction volume from 10,000 to 15 million, accounting for 98% of the network's activity. You could say that without him, Arweave might still be quietly in the corner. But Josh realized that even if Bundlr did well, the underlying architecture still had limitations. So he decided to start from scratch and built Irys from the ground up. Such determination is rare in the industry. The industry significance and future outlook of Irys I also agree with CoinFund's investment logic. In the AI era, data isn't just about being stored; it needs to be callable, conditional, and traceable. Today's decentralized applications may seem cool on the surface, but in reality, they are still held back by centralized storage. Without a truly decentralized data layer, this problem will never be solved. I believe Irys has the opportunity to become the AWS of the blockchain. I'm not saying its functions are completely the same, but it will play a similar infrastructure role in the decentralized world. Today it may just be cheap storage, but tomorrow it could be the flywheel of the entire data ecosystem. The more data there is, the more applications there are; the more applications there are, the stickier the ecosystem becomes. This logic is simple, but few projects can achieve it. For me, this isn't just a funding news; it's a signal that the entire on-chain data infrastructure is maturing. I'm already looking forward to Irys's official launch, and maybe next time I work on a project, I won't have to struggle with storage issues anymore! #KaitoYap @KaitoAI @irys_xyz @josh_benaron #Irys