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Josh Benaron
Josh Benaron is a British entrepreneur and the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Irys, a layer 1 datachain combining onchain storage with smart-contract execution. He founded Bundlr Network in March 2021 as an Arweave scaling service; Bundlr was renamed Irys in October 2023.[1][2][17]
Early Life and Education
Benaron has said that he began programming for fun at about age 16. After qualifying in the United Kingdom, he worked on mobile applications using React Native, then moved into server-side development with Node.js and Rust. He also did contract work and built applications for small businesses.[3]
He attended Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School from 2013 to 2018, studying mathematics, computer science and further mathematics and earning A-level grades.[4]
Benaron studied computer science at the University of Surrey from 2020 to 2021.[5][6][7]
Career
Benaron has said he entered cryptocurrency in 2020 as a self-taught developer. He became interested in Arweave after encountering it in February 2021, studying its distributed-systems design and communicating with Arweave founder Sam Williams.[6][3]
In an interview published June 25, 2025, Benaron recalled being laughed out of a meeting with the chief technology officer of a large European centralized cryptocurrency exchange when he was introduced as a prospective founder. He said he later secured $200,000 in pre-seed funding. Reflecting on the experience, he said investors could associate young founders with inexperience, while also acknowledging that young founders might lack established approaches to managing teams.[8]
Bundlr Network
Benaron founded Bundlr Network with Sam Williams. The project was created to help scale Arweave by facilitating transactions and data uploads to the network. Benaron has described Arweave as the only solution for “truly decentralized permanent storage,” and said that he was drawn to it by decentralization and distributed-systems design.[9][3]
The project’s origins were connected to expectations that non-fungible token activity would increase Arweave’s transaction volumes and fill its blocks. Benaron and Williams developed an initial prototype in response. In a May 2022 podcast announcement, Benaron was identified as Bundlr’s founder and CEO, and the network was described as an Arweave scaling solution.[3][5]
Bundlr became a major route for Arweave transactions, and CoinFund later credited it with helping scale network activity.[10]
A July 2022 account reported that Arweave’s daily transactions had risen from a previous peak of 40,000 to 2 million within a year, with non-fungible tokens accounting for 95% of transactions as of January 2022. In June 2022, Benaron shared a report that Bundlr had conducted more than 250 million transactions. He also shared an announcement in July that the network’s testnet was planned for launch on July 13; an account published later that month reported that the testnet had launched on that date.[3][5][4]
Benaron described Bundlr’s longer-term goal as supporting millions of transactions per second across multiple currencies. In March 2023, he shared an announcement of a partnership with Polygon involving its Supernets technology.[3][4]
Irys
Bundlr was renamed Irys in October 2023. Benaron described the change as more than a name change, connecting it to data provenance—the ability to establish where data came from—and to efforts to address misinformation.[5][4]
Irys is designed to store large volumes of data onchain for flexible periods and let smart contracts use that data. Storage pricing depends on the amount of data and its retention duration and is designed to reflect physical storage costs; smart-contract execution is charged separately. Miners stake $IRYS and pledge storage partitions, generate storage proofs from those partitions, and other nodes verify the proofs; failures may result in slashing.[17][18][19] Benaron has described Irys as a “datachain,” a layer-1 blockchain intended to make data more valuable.[4][11]
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