Architecture Overview

Execution Model (IrysVM)

IrysVM is Irys's EVM-compatible execution environment. This page explains its execution design and planned relationship with stored data.

Programmable Data, the native interface for accessing stored bytes during execution, is in development and is not live yet. The native-data sections below describe the intended design.

• Native execution environment
  Irys provides a native, EVM-compatible execution environment. Smart contracts are written and deployed using familiar Ethereum tooling and semantics.
• Planned execution with data access
  Programmable Data would make stored bytes available as inputs to a running contract, allowing application logic to work directly with shared datasets.
• Deterministic execution
  Execution on Irys is deterministic. Given the same inputs and the same referenced data, smart contract execution produces the same result across the network. This determinism is enforced by the protocol and is a prerequisite for verifiability and consensus. Execution results can therefore be relied on by other applications without ambiguity.
• Potential coordination through stored data
  Contracts could use the planned interface to apply logic to shared records, with each application defining how to interpret the data and coordinate its behavior.
• Execution and performance isolation
  Execution is isolated from storage throughput. Increases in stored data volume do not reduce execution capacity or introduce unpredictable congestion. Execution fees reflect computation costs rather than storage demand. This separation ensures that data-heavy systems can grow without degrading performance.

From the perspective of a smart contract, execution on Irys is straightforward:

• smart contracts run in a familiar EVM environment
• native access to stored bytes is planned through Programmable Data
• execution is deterministic and verifiable
• performance remains predictable as data grows

The next section describes how verifiability and trust are enforced across execution and storage, and how the protocol ensures these guarantees over time.