Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Recently, the Layer1 IP blockchain Story officially announced the release of its project white paper, which states: “Story is committed to building a programmable market for knowledge and creativity, allowing all intellectual property assets to be registered on a universal ledger with customizable parameters. These assets are equipped with composable interfaces that can be called by any software application or artificial intelligence model, enabling the use and monetization of intellectual property on the internet. Story's native token IP will coordinate all value flows throughout the entire peer-to-peer intellectual property system.”
With approximately $140 million in funding and support from star investors such as a16z, Polychain, Hashed, and DAO5, Story has significantly raised the ceiling for the “IP + Crypto” track, opening up imaginative possibilities for the creator economy and the on-chain intellectual property ecosystem.
On the eve of Story's TGE, Odaily Planet Daily will conduct a systematic analysis of this project in this article, aiming to provide readers with a more comprehensive perspective on the project. Note: This article is for opinion sharing only and does not constitute investment advice, DYOR.
Envisioning the Future: A World Where IP Consumes Everything
With the rapid development of AI, content is exploding at an unimaginable speed—because this is a growth paradigm that completely transcends past historical patterns. Now that LLMs (large language models) are becoming increasingly mature, AI can generate thousands or even tens of thousands of words of corresponding content in just a few minutes or even seconds, covering various media forms such as text, images, videos, and audio.
In other words, we are about to enter a media world rich in content.
However, at the same time, as AI gradually permeates human information society, issues such as fake news, plagiarism, rewritten content, and imitative content will become increasingly severe, making the concept and value of IP (intellectual property) even more important. After all, not all content can reach the height of IP, just as not every book written can become a classic.
At that time, the value of IP will mainly be reflected in the following aspects:
Cultural Value: IP Carries Consensus Across Different Scopes
A good story is IP, an excellent application is IP, a widely popular movie is IP. It can be said that IP is a carrier of cultural consensus across different scopes, regions, classes, and systems. The reason why a series of superhero-related IPs, including Superman, Spider-Man, and the Marvel Universe, are so popular worldwide is that they encapsulate universal values regarding imagination for the future, expectations for hope, pursuit of goodness, and resistance against evil. A good IP can not only inspire consensus in people's hearts but also spread that consensus to a wider audience. It is no exaggeration to say that the infectious power of IP consensus can grow to infinity.
Economic Value: IP Directly Creates Economic Benefits
According to relevant data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), IP-intensive industries contribute more than one-third of global GDP. Taking the United States as an example, IP-intensive industries contributed $7.8 trillion in economic output in 2019, accounting for 41% of its GDP, with over 63 million industry personnel, making up 38.2% of total employment in the U.S.; in 2022, China's patent-intensive industries had an added value of 14.3 trillion yuan, accounting for 11.97% of GDP; the added value of the copyright industry also exceeded 8 trillion yuan; according to a joint research report by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), IP-intensive industries contributed over 47% of GDP to the EU between 2017 and 2019, valued at 6.4 trillion euros. In the future, the direct economic value related to IP will further increase. Intuitively, IP-related industries serve as a lubricant for the socio-economy, playing an important role in social innovation, job opportunities, and international trade.
Political Value: IP May Shape Political Landscapes
As the wave of AI gradually advances, the value of IP will further spread into the political realm. Whether it was the previous TikTok ban controversy or the recent panic in the U.S. political and business sectors triggered by Deepseek, even leading to the issuance of the latest bill “making the download of DeepSeek a crime, with a maximum sentence of 20 years and a fine of $1 million.” Behind IP often lies a struggle for multiple discourses such as technological intellectual property, capital transactions, and political standards. As the classic saying from World War II goes: “Science knows no borders, but scientists have their own countries.” In the future, IP may have no borders, but those who create, trade, and innovate IP will have different political stances and nationalities, which will often have varying degrees of impact on political situations.
In summary, as time goes by and technology develops, the value and influence of IP will only increase, thus a world where “IP consumes everything” is gradually taking shape, and this is precisely the direction Story is aiming for.
Team Reveal: The Idea of an IP Changing the World and Saving Creators
Let’s rewind to 2013, the now hot “IP story” of Story cannot be separated from the contributions of a man named “Gatsby.”
The Origin of Story: A Gatsby-style Startup Story
At that time, Story co-founder SY Lee founded a platform called Byline, and his classmate Gatsby (Seung Soo, translated as 成秀) also joined as the Chief Operating Officer. This was a crowdfunding platform for news aimed at saving the advertising-driven news industry that was being swallowed by giants like Google and Facebook. However, as online advertising became increasingly popular, the project soon fell into trouble. In desperation, SY Lee adopted a similar model and founded Radish in 2015, aiming to protect the IP works of creators and provide sustainable income for authors who painstakingly create stories. But initially, the market was also skeptical of this platform. Just weeks away from repeating Byline's fate, Gatsby stepped up and provided $200,000 in support for the project, obtained through personal credit loans.
Gatsby with SY Lee
Thus, Radish was able to sustain itself until 2017, securing a $3 million seed round of financing, with investors including Greylock, Lowercase Capital, SoftBank's media innovation fund Next Media Innovation Fund, United Talent Agency (UTA), Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (the parent company of Bertelsmann Group which owns Penguin Random House), Sherpa Capital, ITV President Peter Bazalgette, former Microsoft executive Charlie Songhurst, Nicolas Berggruen, LendingHome co-founder and CEO Matt Humphrey, BDA China founder Duncan Clark, Jeremy Yap, and renowned American-Chinese author Amy Tan, among others. The model established by Radish of “free trial reading for readers, paid reading, while authors retain content copyright” gradually gained high recognition in the market, achieving significant commercial success based on a win-win for the platform, readers, and authors, and was once hailed as the “Netflix of online novels.”
In 2021, South Korean mobile social giant Kakao's entertainment subsidiary Kakao Entertainment acquired Radish for $440 million (approximately 2.9 billion yuan, about 500 billion won). At that time, it had over 10,000 online novel IPs, with monthly users exceeding 1 million and annual sales of about 23 billion won.
Thus, SY Lee and Gatsby accumulated their “first pot of gold,” and their goals shifted to a more grand vision.
Story Development: Targeting the AI Content World
After concluding the entrepreneurial journey of Radish, SY Lee met Jason Zhao, the youngest product manager at Google DeepMind, in 2021. After a series of communications, the two hit it off and decided to “take the IP business to the end,” and this time, they chose a field that was both familiar and unfamiliar—intellectual property in the “blockchain and AI world,” situated at the intersection of humanities and social sciences and rational technology.
After experiencing initial setbacks, SY Lee and Jason Zhao finally opened the door to venture capital giant a16z with their strength, connections, and other means. At that time, SY Lee declared: “I want to completely change the entire copyright system that has existed for 400 years and cannot operate without complex legal documents and professional lawyers.” Additionally, since a16z partner Andrew Chen had previously commented that the Radish platform lacked network effects, Lee also expressed to Chris Dixon, the a16z partner leading this investment, the desire to create network effects in the content business.
Their proposed solution was to leverage blockchain networks and protocols to build an “IP Lego” for the content industry, ultimately constructing it into an “IP universe.”
Photo of the Story Protocol team members (yes, they were still just Protocol at that time)
In May 2023, Story Protocol (later rebranded as IP Chain Story) completed a $29.3 million seed round of financing, led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Hashed, Foresight Ventures, Samsung Next Fund, Two Small Fish Ventures, DAO5, Berggruen Holdings, Mirana Corp, and SLVC.
In September 2023, Story Protocol (later rebranded as IP Chain Story) had cumulatively completed $54 million in financing, led by a16z, with participation from Hashed, Endeavor, Samsung Next, dao5, Insignia Venture Partners, and others.
In August 2024, the core contributor team of the intellectual property blockchain Story, PIP Labs, completed an $80 million Series B financing led by a16z crypto, with Polychain as a strategic investor. Other investors included Scott Trowbridge, Senior Vice President and Board Member of Stability AI, Adrian Cheng, founder of K11, as well as digital art collector Cozomo de'Medici, No Capital, and others. This new round of financing brought PIP Labs' total funding to $143 million, with a valuation reaching $2.25 billion, entering the ranks of unicorn companies.
At the time of completing the latest round of financing, the Story developer ecosystem had over 200 teams providing services for more than 20 million IPs, covering multiple fields such as IPFi (IP finance), artificial intelligence, and consumer markets (such as Sekai, which completed a $3.1 million seed round of financing in December 2024, and the generative AI platform Ablo in the fashion sector). At that time, Story co-founder Jason Zhao stated: “Story will pursue a ‘win-win’ for creators and the AI industry; we are trying to create a turning point in AI history.”
The Climax of Story: TCP/IP and White Paper Release
In February 2024, Story released a programmable IP layer.
In August 2024, Story's first public testnet, Iliad, officially launched;
In November 2024, Story's final testnet, Odyssey, went live, with nearly 100 ecosystem partners participating in its construction.
In December 2024, Story officially released the “experimental framework that enables Agents to trade IP,” Agent TCP/IP. Through this framework, Agents will be able to trade their training data, creative styles, investment strategies, etc., ushering in a new era of the intelligent economy.
In January 2025, Story launched its developer mainnet, entering the final phase before the public mainnet launch; the IP RWA protocol based on Story, Aria Premiere Launch, reached a purchase cap of $7 million in just 9 minutes.
In February 2025, the Layer1 IP blockchain Story officially released its white paper, titled “Story: A Peer-to-Peer Intellectual Property Network,” authored by the Story Foundation.
As SY Lee mentioned in a previous tweet: “It is urgent to provide solutions for content creators against big tech companies; the emergence of AI is putting the entire internet culture in jeopardy. The economic contract behind the internet—content creators provide supply and content distributors provide demand—is being disrupted by the proliferation of AI. Story, as a programmable IP infrastructure, is expected to meet this challenge by protecting IP sovereignty in the form of IP Lego, allowing creators to set licensing and royalty sharing terms.”
In the near future, a UGC MMORPG world based on AIGC is already taking shape.
Of course, achieving this goal is not easy, and this is precisely the problem that the Story project white paper aims to address.
The Difficulty of IP: A Bridge Connecting UGC and AIGC
As a former practitioner in the intellectual property industry, I must say that, in my personal view, the track chosen by Story is filled with numerous challenges. In addition to the AI-generated content, data, and the IP monopoly of tech companies mentioned earlier, IP itself faces many real-world challenges.
Real Dilemma: The Prisoner's Dilemma of On-chain and Off-chain
The past difficulties of IP mainly lie in the two words “rights confirmation.”
How do you prove that the copyright of a work, an application, or a set of technology belongs to you?
With the development of industrial society, the ownership and originality of the crystallization of unique human thoughts or patented technologies have gradually focused on a method that leads to the same conclusion—consistency proof.
One route is the credibility route, which transforms the rights confirmation process of IP into a reliance on the credibility certification of individuals, organizations, or government agencies. Whether it is guarantees between private parties or notarization by a notary office, it essentially relies on credit and reputation as the authoritative force for IP recognition, which carries many “human risks.”
The other route is the technical route, which confirms IP through technical means to clarify ownership and prove effectiveness. Whether it is decentralized blockchain technology or timestamp technology, it essentially generates an unalterable string of hash values from document records to achieve the initial record of an IP document, thereby completing rights confirmation.
However, the confirmation of IP on the blockchain also requires off-chain subject comparison, rights fulfillment, and other processes to connect with each other, completing the recognition of rights and asset ownership in the real world. Currently, just as RWA requires the involvement of real assets and the access of real regulatory agencies, the IP industry also finds it difficult to bypass this step.
The current situation is that original authors and IP works in the IP industry are like two “prisoners” residing in on-chain and off-chain spaces, where on-chain rights confirmation still requires off-chain verification.
Story was born to solve this prisoner's dilemma and bridge the gap between on-chain and off-chain.
Anonymous Economy: An Ecosystem Supported by IPFi
In the Story project white paper, we can see that the Story network is generally divided into three layers: execution layer, storage layer, and consensus layer.
Among them, the execution layer includes the main execution core and dedicated execution cores: the former mainly handles all transactions and smart contracts and activates the latter; the latter includes the existing IP core, oracle core (off-chain synchronization core), and bridging core (cross-chain communication core), as well as future AI cores, ZK cores, and more specialized core components.
The main function of the IP core is to track the rights, licenses, and monetization of original and derivative assets using the IP map;
The main function of the oracle core is to verify the authenticity of IP assets and licenses, including verifying the social identity of creators, receiving off-chain payments, and generating legal contracts for off-chain use;
The main function of the bridging core is to achieve cross-chain messaging, allowing IP assets to be used across different blockchains, thereby expanding the liquidity range of IP assets.
The storage layer draws on the design concept of NAND Flash Translation Layer (FTL), effectively balancing performance, scalability, cost, proof size, and redundancy, mainly providing storage APIs for the execution layer and its cores. At the same time, it integrates on-chain and off-chain storage solutions, such as IPFS.
The consensus layer adopts the PoS mechanism and the modern high-performance implementation CometBFT of Tendermint, featuring fault tolerance, liveness guarantees, instant finality, and modular design. With direct economic incentives, it ensures that node validators maintain the security and integrity of the blockchain, thereby providing assurance for the efficient and stable operation of the network.
Based on this, the Story network is expected to become a one-stop IPFi ecosystem that integrates IP management, authorization, trading, and revenue returns. With the previous AI Agent TCP/IP framework, Story has also incorporated AI content into its "ecological universe," greatly enriching the IP content landscape and tradable assets while allowing AI Agents to blend into the Story ecosystem yet maintain their own identity.
As a result, an anonymous economic system is expected to gradually establish itself on the Story network and become increasingly prosperous.
Future Expectations: A Token Named IP Participating in Value Flow
As Deepseek pierces the computing power bubble in the AI industry with algorithms, the value of data and content becomes increasingly important, thereby highlighting the value of IP.
Against this backdrop, the Story ecosystem token IP will also become a crucial part of the value flow within its ecosystem.
On one hand, IP serves as the gas fee token, staking token, and utility token of the Story ecosystem, as well as an intermediary for network transactions;
On the other hand, IP is also the incentive carrier and return performance based on the POS mechanism of Story;
Additionally, IP will be used in scenarios including royalty distribution, licensing fee payments, and usage compensation; it will also become the currency in the AI Agent trading process.
On February 7 at 9 PM, the IP token will soon be listed on the Bybit pre-market, where market expectations and price judgments for this token can be monitored in advance.
Conclusion: The IP Industry with a Market Size of Hundreds of Trillions of Dollars is Facing Change
It is certain that as the Story ecosystem gradually enriches, the market size in the hundreds of trillions of dollars for the RWA track and the IP industry is about to welcome a new round of changes.
Whether Story can drive more IP industry development through the IPFi system and AI framework, bringing a new paradigm of "IP trading and management" to creators worldwide, remains to be seen.
References:
https://x.com/storysylee/status/1828812173675843933
https://x.com/storysylee/status/1827363197265048019
https://x.com/StoryProtocol/status/1868696340156538959
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