Abstract The European Integrated Data Archive (EIDA) is the infrastructure that provides access to the seismic-waveform archives collected by European agencies. This distributed system is managed by Observatories and Research Facilities for European Seismology. EIDA provides seamless access to seismic data from 12 data archives across Europe by means of standard services, exposing data on behalf of hundreds of network operators and research organizations. More than 12,000 stations from permanent and temporary networks equipped with seismometers, accelerometers, pressure sensors, and other sensors are accessible through the EIDA federated services. A growing user base currently counting around 3000 unique users per year has been requesting data and using EIDA services. The EIDA system is designed to scale up to support additional new services, data types, and nodes. Data holdings, services, and user numbers have grown substantially since the establishment of EIDA in 2013. EIDA is currently active in developing suitable data management approaches for new emerging technologies (e.g., distributed acoustic sensing) and challenges related to big datasets. This article reviews the evolution of EIDA, the current data holdings, and service portfolio, and gives an outlook on the current developments and the future envisaged challenges.