Use Cases

What smart contracts ask Iris for, and why.

Iris is for smart contracts that need to act on what's actually happening in a place, right now or at a specific moment, without trusting a single oracle operator. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Parametric insurance

A hurricane policy that pays out automatically once a named storm crosses a defined stretch of coastline at a defined wind speed — no adjuster visit, no claims process, no waiting on a report from the ground.

To trigger a payout, the policy contract posts a DataRequest naming the coastline as an Area of Interest polygon, a timestamp window around the storm's predicted landfall, and — if the insurer cares which provider services it — a preferred Data Provider such as Maxar, Planet, or Sentinel.

What comes back is a sealed panel: a reference to the medoid — the single real image, not a composite, that the committee determined most closely matches everything submitted for that stretch of coastline at that moment — delivered to the contract through IrisVerifier.

The insurer can hand that panel to a reinsurer, a regulator, or a policyholder's lawyer and prove the imagery it paid out on came from an actual satellite delivery at the claimed time — not a manipulated feed, and not a photo pulled from the wrong day.

Carbon credit verification

A carbon registry that releases credits to a reforestation or conservation project on a fixed schedule, as long as the forest cover inside that project's registered boundary keeps matching what was promised when the project was approved.

Each release cycle, the registry's contract posts a DataRequest for the project boundary as an Area of Interest polygon, a timestamp aligned to the monitoring interval, and a preferred Data Provider if the project has one.

The response is a sealed panel referencing the medoid GeoTIFF for that boundary and interval, delivered to the registry's contract through IrisVerifier.

A credit's auditability now extends past the auditor's signature and into the imagery itself. A buyer evaluating the credit — or a regulator auditing the registry — can verify the chain of provenance all the way back to the Data Provider that captured the image, not just trust that the registry's report is accurate.

Supply chain & commodity attestation

A trade-finance contract that releases payment once shipping containers are confirmed at a destination port, or a commodity DeFi protocol that adjusts how much collateral a borrower can draw against what's visibly sitting in storage.

The contract posts a DataRequest for the port terminal or storage site as an Area of Interest polygon, a timestamp tied to the settlement window, and a preferred Data Provider if the deal specifies one.

It receives a sealed panel referencing the medoid GeoTIFF of that site at that moment — the one real image the committee agreed best represents what was there — delivered to the contract through IrisVerifier.

Neither counter-party can dispute where the imagery came from. The TLS handshake with the Data Provider is part of the on-chain record — not a claim either side has to take on faith.

DePIN & geospatial dApps

Any DePIN application that needs ground truth about a physical location — a solar farm proving its panels are actually installed, a road-usage tracker counting real traffic, a yield estimate for a field of crops.

The application posts a DataRequest for the location as an Area of Interest polygon, a timestamp or a recurring window, and a preferred Data Provider if it has one.

It gets back a sealed panel referencing the medoid GeoTIFF for that location and moment, delivered through IrisVerifier.

The difference here is payload type. Most existing oracle networks are built to move a scalar price feed a few bytes wide, not a 0.5–16 GB GeoTIFF — Iris is built for exactly that.

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