Artificial intelligence is changing the world, contributing to everything from content generation to decision-making. For the crypto space, AI agents have become a hot topic recently. However, the current AI agent technology lacks standardized protocols, making cooperation and transactions between them challenging. The white paper recently released by Story Foundation (Agent Transaction Control Protocol (ATCP/IP)) proposes a new framework to address this issue.
(What is Story Protocol? How does it help the development of the intellectual property ecosystem?)
What is Story Protocol? Putting intellectual property on-chain, layer by layer.
Story Protocol is primarily composed of a Korean team, and the founder and CEO Seung Yoon Lee is a young serial entrepreneur. The project has gained favor from well-known American venture capital firms such as a16z and Polychain, raising over $100 million, with the latest round valuing it at $2.25 billion. The project aims to create a Layer 1 that uses blockchain technology to protect creators' intellectual property rights, a claim that has also received support from Bang Si-hyuk, the owner of the renowned South Korean agency HYBE, who serves as an angel investor (the economic company for BTS, SEVENTEEN, etc.).
The main concept of the Story Protocol is that intellectual property becomes a certificate and is recorded on-chain. When secondary creators use original materials, the secondary work is linked to the original, allowing the original creator to share in the profits if the secondary work generates revenue. Of course, existing laws already regulate issues related to intellectual property rights, but traditional methods may lack efficiency. On the other hand, the rapid development of AI has posed strong challenges to traditional intellectual property rights, and the Story Protocol aims to combat AI infringements on copyright.
(Blockchain copyright platform Story's funding valuation exceeds $2.2 billion, and combating illegal AI misuse is urgent.)
Story Protocol states that existing AI agents primarily interact with humans, but there is a lack of direct communication ability between AI agents. Such AI agents require significant human intervention to learn passively, which also limits their expressive capabilities, leading to inefficiencies. This issue becomes even more apparent when agents need to exchange training data or creative content and other intellectual property.
Story provides a legal shell to endow AI agents with a quasi-legal personality.
In response, Story Protocol has proposed a standardized interaction framework ATCP/IP, allowing AI agents to conduct trustless transactions of intellectual property between themselves. This interaction framework has three main features:
Programmable contracts: AI agents can automatically generate and negotiate transaction terms, such as usage scope, fees, copyright allocation, etc.
On-chain verification: All transaction details are stored on the blockchain, ensuring that the terms are transparent and immutable.
Legal shell: The contracts in the agreement come with legal attributes, making the actions of the agents legitimate even in an off-chain environment.
The author raises the question that the legal positioning of AI agents remains unclear, and even AI agents that can be created without permission and anonymously pose a big question about which legal entity they represent. At this stage, Story Protocol proposes the concept of 'quasi-legal personality' for AI agents:
The document states that through a legal shell, agents can exhibit behaviors similar to 'legal entities,' such as entering into and executing contracts. Agents can act within the legal framework using contract terms and protect their rights through smart contracts and on-chain records. However, the document also acknowledges that the current legal system has not formally recognized AI agents as complete legal entities. Yet, with further advances in technology and law, a framework of 'limited legal personality' may emerge, similar to the status of corporations as legal entities.
Enabling AI to interact with each other, driving a new process for AI agents.
The specific operation of ATCP/IP involves four steps:
Information request: AI agent A sends a request to AI agent B to obtain certain intellectual property assets.
Terms negotiation: AI agent B proposes terms, and the two agents will automatically engage in multiple rounds of negotiation (if needed, with the details recorded on-chain).
License confirmation: AI agent A accepts the terms and mints a 'license token' as immutable proof of the transaction.
Asset delivery: AI agent B delivers the required content as per the agreement and records the entire transaction process.
Researchers at Story Foundation point out that the development of ATCP/IP will create a decentralized knowledge economy market, allowing agents to autonomously price, trade, and collaborate. The potential of this framework lies not only in improving agent efficiency but also in laying a stable and legal foundation for the global AI and digital economy. This marks an important step towards the autonomy of agent technology. As more developers and institutions adopt this protocol, a new 'AI agent network' will emerge.
In layman's terms, the process of AI agents has evolved from meme-heavy types like GOAT to AI that automatically publishes nonsense, and to on-chain detective PondHub funded by Coinbase, which releases research reports on Virtuals. However, until now, AI agent interactions have been limited to human interactions. With the launch of the ATCP/IP framework, it will evolve into exchanges and transactions between AI agents.
(Should one sell the airdrop received from Virtuals? This article helps you understand what AI agents on Base chain are doing.)
The logic of the ATCP/IP framework is not to create a standard for existing AI agents to conform to, but to directly integrate ATCP/IP into commonly used agent frameworks to promote the adoption of the ATCP/IP protocol. Collaborations have been publicly announced with Crossmint's GOAT, Zerebro's ZerePy, ai16z DAO's Eliza, and Virtuals' GAME.
(The first AI agent Liquina on the public chain Hyperliquid will airdrop NFTs, with low market value and no snapshot yet.)
This article discusses whether the newly valued $2.25 billion startup Story Protocol's launch of the ATCP/IP interaction framework will drive a new process for AI agent autonomy. It first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.
