Protocol Mechanics

Partitions

Storage on Irys is organized into fixed-size partitions.

Each Partition

• Represents 16TB of storage
• Is pledged by a miner
• Is associated with a specific mining address

A miner that pledges a partition is economically accountable for maintaining the data assigned to it.

Irys distinguishes between two partition roles:

• Capacity partitions
  Prepared storage held in reserve. These partitions are packed, verifiable, and ready to store data, but are not yet assigned ledger data.
• Data partitions
  Partitions currently assigned to store replicated ledger data (such as Publish Ledger replicas) and continuously verified for availability.

This distinction allows the protocol to onboard storage before it is needed. As usage grows, capacity partitions can be promoted into data partitions without requiring new mining capacity to come online at that moment.

In practical terms, this means large uploads are not delayed while waiting for additional storage capacity, and sudden increases in demand do not require emergency provisioning of new partitions.

This resilience is reinforced through replication.

Data in the Publish Ledger is replicated across multiple data partitions, with each ledger slot assigning up to 10 partitions for replication. As a result, multiple miners store distinct replicas of the same data, so if one replica becomes unavailable, others remain accessible.