Decentralizing and making IP programmable: some thoughts on Story Protocol

I first came across the name “Story Protocol” when it raised $80 million in a Series B funding in August, 2024 and became popular on X as the raise was followed by several social movements that brought a lot of public attention to the project.

Investors included a16z and Polychain Capital and being a time where airdrops were a top topic due to line-ups of past big launches in the year, lots of speculations were about the potential of there being similar opportunities with Story Protocol, but if memory serves me right, it was clarified at the time by the team that an airdrop wasn't in the books, and given that it's native token with the ticker “IP” is now tradable, it's evident an airdrop did not happen.

That being said, stumbling on Story Protocol was just another Wednesday on crypto Twitter for me and I didn't read much into the project until recently.

Given its focus was on IP, and having never looked deeper, I had always assumed it had something to do licensing and protecting software — as most L1 blockchains at the time mostly focused on software related services — and in some form, I was right, but further reading into it reveals something much bigger from my first impression.

This is not going to be a technical exploration of the project, if anything, it will be a surface look at the concepts of IP programmability and what that might mean for the industry it's looking to onboard on-chain.

Speaking of industries, IP is widely reported to be a $61 trillion industry and the Story Protocol emphasizes how illiquid, siloed and static the multi-trillion dollar industry is. Story aims to liquify, make flexible and programmable, all IPs, essentially tokenizing the world's creativity, making the chain of value creation and consumption an incentive-bearing system, autonomously.

At this point, it sounds like I'm shilling this one, but as always, this is not an attempt at promoting the project, but exploring the concept is crucial to understand where we're headed with blockchain technology bringing programmability to everything.

What are IPs to start with?

Intellectual Property (IP) refers to legally protected creations of the mind, including inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. It is divided into categories such as patents (protecting inventions), copyrights (covering creative works like books, music, code and films), trademarks (safeguarding brand names, logos, and slogans), and trade secrets (confidential business information like formulas or processes).

IP rights grant creators exclusive control over their work for a limited period, encouraging innovation and economic growth while balancing public access and fair use. — GPT

Just as everything that involves money, Big Corps tend to reap all the benefits. In essence, IP is just data. In whatever form, solid, virtual, spiritual(if you wield the expertise), it's all just data, and when we look it how the internet made data almost instantly a free-use good, once uploaded, it's hard for individuals that make up the vast informal IP sector to monetize their creative creations.

Think about generative AIs like ChatGPT and all the lawsuits it attracted. Companies are able to almost comfortably make money via lawsuits on AI’s use of their data but individuals, to which AI has exploited far more of their IP, cannot do anything about it.

The formal IP sector is recognized to be worth $61 trillion by estimates, but the broader spectrum reveals that there's far more data leaking value that could be recalled to creators through the use of blockchain technology.

Decentralizing and making IP programmable

Story Protocol emphasizes the role IP plays in the growth of AI and promises giving control back to creators to earn whenever their IP is being used.

By tokenizing both digital and real world IPs to enable fractionalized ownership of IPs, what's being offered here is a complete restructuring of major industries such as entertainment, where big Studios and Corporations control all the value flow.

IP is the scarce and invaluable asset of today's intelligence economy. Story is a purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain that tokenizes intellectual property into a programmable store of value in an AI-driven world. — Story

One of the things that caught my attention was the mention of an IP transaction layer for AI agents.

I was intrigued by this specifically because a couple of days ago I wrote a piece on the advancement of AI with a focus on its effects on the job market. A lot of people expect a grand elimination of jobs and I signaled that this process will only lead to more jobs being created and in the long term, most people will have personal AI workers that create value for them.

Now how does this relate? Well as humans, if everything we do creates data(IP) in some form and it all adds up to something that can be used to train AI, it's my understanding that just as physical AI workers will be something most people will personally have, AI Agents, which are mostly digital, will also be something most people will own.

Certainly, there's the likelihood of a convergence where both the digitally functioning AI agents are the same with or connected to the physical workers.

In this scenario, a protocol like Story allows us to monetize the data we feed our AI agents and they in-turn can autonomously build value out of it, creating new unique IPs that can be traded amongst millions of AI agents, creating a value flow at an extensive level.

Story enables AI agents to seamlessly trade and monetize their IP for the first time. Agents can reportedly monetize their creative outputs — essentially derived from unique human IPs — or purchase training data to autonomously upgrade their capabilities.

From voice models to training data, to data-driven insights, everything AI agents ingest and create is a form of intellectual property. The more fine-tuned the agent, the more valuable their outputs. With Story your agents can control and monetize their intellectual property seamlessly.

When agents borrow specialized know-how and capabilities, Story's programmable licensing ensures terms are respected and every voice, dataset, and strategy is accounted for, attributed and rewarded through ironclad contracts and agreements. — Story

Truly, there are virtually no limits to what we can achieve with blockchain and smart contracts. Story is just one of many protocols that will emerge to make data more valuable. The world is set to witness a scale of ownership and monetization that's on another level. People are in for a surprise on just how much they've been giving away for free to big corporations that they can now individual own and control the incentives.

It's important to note that Story Protocol remains a VC funded project, as such, this is not a promotion for its native token “IP” — DYOR before making any financial commitments.

Tokenize, decentralize and automate — this is the future and blockchain technology is securing it.