Story Protocol Debuts Mainnet to Bypass IP’s ‘Rent-Seeking Intermediaries’

The public mainnet for Story Protocol, a layer-1 network for licensing and maintaining intellectual property, is now up and running following a nearly six-month testnet phase.

Developed by PIP Labs, the project seeks to reduce legal friction for creatives and academics by hosting a platform for registering IP and leveraging it in commercial settings.

Allowing IP owners to set programmable terms for how their content is used, Story’s whitepaper says that “any two willing individuals can trade, extend, and monetize their ideas directly on Story without interference from rent-seeking intermediaries.”

Story’s testnet phase began on August 27 last year, with the launch of the “​Iliad”​ testnet.

Its mainnet kickoff comes after PIP Labs raised $140 million in total funding, backed by venture capitalists including a16z and Samsung Next. With Story out in the wild, the public may get a better sense of what drove PIP Labs’ reportedly $2.25 billion valuation in its Series B round.

Alongside the debut of Story’s public mainnet, a PIP Labs spokesperson told Decrypt a native token called IP is launching with an initial supply of 1 billion. 

Tokens allocated to core contributors and early backers are locked for one year, according to a blog post published by the Story Foundation earlier this week.

The token will serve as Story’s “underlying medium of exchange” for facilitating transactions between users while also being leveraged as a way to secure the network through a process known as staking, according to its whitepaper.

Last year, Story co-founder Jason Zhao told Decrypt the network could help establish a new form of decentralized finance, or DeFi, called IPFi. Since IP assets are represented as NFTs, he said they could become fractionalized or serve or even serve as collateral for loans.

Zhao told Decrypt more recently that some of the network’s most significant users may come from the field of artificial intelligence. He recalled one example of an AI agent augmenting itself with training data purchased autonomously through Story’s platform.

As a layer-1 network, Story supports protocols being developed around IP. One project called Aria raised $7 million to purchase the rights to Justin Bieber’s song “Peaches,” sharing revenue with people who own a fraction of the linked IP asset, Zhao said.

“Anyone who has Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat, they produce and own IP, but that’s really opaque and inaccessible,” Zhao told Decrypt in an interview last week. “So you have the $61 trillion market that is essentially only accessible to centralized intermediaries.”

Story’s whitepaper specifically mentions pharmaceutical companies and media institutions as entities that can turn IP catalogs into relatively productive assets using the network. 

On Thursday, the Story Foundation unveiled a so-called rewards portal, letting early users and community members claim 10% of IP’s supply. 

However, would-be farmers will have to contend with a system preventing them from cashing in on the coin in a bid to “establish true alignment between Story and our community,” it wrote in a separate blog post on Monday.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair