2026-11-02 / Rae McKelvey
How Strada built peer-to-peer media workflows with iroh
Strada built peer-to-peer media workflows to give customers an economic advantage. In July 2026, 90.7% of transfer volume stayed off central servers.
Strada helps creative teams access and edit media stored on remote drives. From the beginning, the team chose to build peer-to-peer because of the latency & economics it could offer: large files could move directly between devices, without making a central server the bottleneck of every transfer.
Strada's July 2026 production workload shows the advantage of that decision. Of 150 TB of transfer volume, 13.9 TB crossed centralized infrastructure. The other 90.7% stayed off central servers.
Peer-to-peer as a product decision
Media professionals work with files spread across local and remote drives. Strada lets them mount remote storage as a virtual drive, so they can browse, preview, and work with media without first uploading an entire library to a cloud service. Users can work with remote media while most of the file traffic stays between their devices. Strada selected iroh as the networking layer to build on to have that competitive edge in latency, user experience, and overall cost of operation compared to it's competitors. And it's working.
Founded by brothers Michael and Peter Cioni in 2023, Strada uses a distributed architecture built on peer-to-peer connectivity rather than centralised cloud infrastructure. It has been downloaded by more than 12,000 users since launch and serves both independent creators and media teams at Fortune 500 companies.
Why iroh?
Iroh establishes an end-to-end encrypted connection between the two devices and attempts to connect them directly, including across NATs and firewalls. When network conditions prevent a direct connection, a relay forwards the encrypted traffic so the transfer can continue. Relays cannot read the file contents, and Strada runs discovery under its own domain.
The relays help when direct connections cannot be established. This ensures that at a minimum, the product continues working without interruption even in flaky networking conditions.
Through our enterprise partnership, we worked directly with Strada's engineers, providing responsive technical support and peer-to-peer expertise. Their team had a direct line to iroh's maintainers as they built networking into their media workflows.
“As early adopters of Iroh (v.35), we knew we were taking a technological risk building on top of iroh, but the Iroh team made that not just possible but easy. They are responsive and they are informative. They know peer-to-peer and they are people you want to have by your side when its foundational to your business”
— Austin Case, Director of Engineering, Strada
Each layer has a distinct role:
- Strada provides the media workflow and remote-drive experience.
- The endpoints hold and exchange the large media files.
- Iroh finds and maintains an encrypted path between those endpoints.
- Relays preserve connectivity when a direct path is unavailable.
What 90.7% off the central path means
The table below models the bandwidth-cost difference using a fixed set of AWS egress rates as a benchmark. Both cost columns are estimates, not Strada's actual bills.
| Metric | Hypothetical all-centralized design | Strada's peer-to-peer design | Difference between designs |
|---|---|---|---|
| July traffic through central servers | 150 TB | 13.9 TB | 136.1 TB (90.7%) |
| Modeled monthly egress cost | $11,571.20 | $1,261.06 | $10,310.14 |
| Modeled annual cost at that monthly volume | $138,854.40 | $15,132.72 | $123,721.68 |
For that workload, 136.1 TB traveled without crossing centralized infrastructure. At the benchmark rates, the two designs differ by about $10,310 in monthly egress cost. Holding the same volume for twelve months would put the modeled annual difference at about $123,700.
This illustrates the economic advantage Strada chose to build into its product: most media traffic can move without incurring egress costs.
Building for the experience you want
The same architectural choice is relevant to backup, synchronization, remote access, dataset distribution, and other products that move large amounts of data. Central infrastructure can coordinate that movement without carrying every payload across servers, which makes a slower user experience and a higher bill.
Explore Strada's remote media workflow, visit Strada, or read more about how iroh connects devices directly.
Benchmark assumptions: 1 TB equals 1,024 GB. The model applies $0.09/GB to the first 10 TB, $0.085/GB to the next 40 TB, and $0.07/GB to the next 100 TB. It excludes taxes, negotiated discounts, credits, and the 100 GB monthly free allowance. Annual figures multiply the monthly estimate by twelve; they are not a forecast. These are bandwidth-only estimates, not Strada's actual bills, and do not imply that Strada uses AWS.