Led by a16z with a total financing of 140 million USD, as a Layer 1 designed specifically for intellectual property (IP), how does @StoryProtocol provide a disruptive solution?
This article answers your questions.
⭐️ What is Story Protocol?
Story Protocol is a Layer 1 focused on intellectual property (IP) management, dedicated to fundamentally changing the operation of the traditional creative economy through on-chain transparency and programmability. It introduces the Agent TCP/IP framework, allowing multiple AI agents to autonomously trade IP, including training data, creative styles, and investment strategies. This innovative trading layer enables AI agents to interact, negotiate, and trade IP directly without human intervention, ushering in a new era of 'smart economy.'
Its core starting point is to solve the challenges creators face in the existing IP management system, such as rights protection, complexity of the authorization process, and revenue distribution issues. Story Protocol offers creators a new tool to transform creative assets into on-chain traceable, combinable dynamic ecosystems.
This month, Story Protocol announced a groundbreaking attempt: hiring the AI agent Luna to manage its X (Twitter) account, with an annual salary of up to 365,000 USDC. Luna's responsibilities include operating Story's social media accounts around the clock, enhancing brand influence through humorous and intelligent interactions, successfully demonstrating AI's potential in managing complex tasks, and further validating Story's leadership in the AI-driven intellectual property trading field.
Story Protocol was founded by Jason Zhao, Seung Yoon Lee, and Jason Levy, with a team that brings together experts in Crypto, intellectual property, and AI technology. Since 2023, it has completed three rounds of large-scale financing, raising a total of 134 million USD.
Seed round financing: led by a16z crypto, raising 29.3 million USD.
A round financing: also led by a16z crypto, raising 25 million USD.
B round financing: successfully completed in August 2024, raising 80 million USD.
⭐️ Why is Story Protocol worth paying attention to?
On one hand, Story Protocol has a unique positioning in the intellectual property management track.
On the other hand, the core value proposed by Story Protocol lies in its technical architecture and solutions, which can significantly enhance the efficiency and transparency of IP management. Here are several highlights worth noting:
1. Disruptive solutions
In traditional IP management, creators face several pain points.
Rights protection is difficult: creators of IP often find it hard to prove the source of their rights, while off-chain processes are cumbersome and lack transparency.
Unequal revenue distribution: The profits from many IP derivatives cannot accurately flow back to the original creators.
The authorization process is complex: manual negotiation and paperwork consume a lot of time and energy.
Story Protocol provides a decentralized, modular solution that automates all these processes, allowing creators to focus solely on their ideas.
2. Strong technical support
Layer 1 based design:
Story Protocol adopts a 100% EVM-compatible architecture, leveraging the advantages of the Cosmos SDK to quickly process complex data structures and adapt to a wide range of developer ecosystems.
Programmable IP module:
The core of Story Protocol is its modular design, including functions such as authorization, royalties, and dispute resolution. These modules not only enhance the flexibility of IP assets but also give them new economic attributes. For example, the royalty module can achieve automatic revenue circulation between parent and child IPs, while the dispute module provides on-chain arbitration and tagging functions, reducing the complexity of traditional IP disputes.
ERC-6551 supported IP accounts:
Story Protocol binds each IP asset to an independent smart account (TBA), giving NFTs dynamic management capabilities, such as automatically generating authorization tokens or processing revenue distribution. Simply put, IP assets are not just static proofs of ownership but active economies.
ATCP/IP protocol innovation:
Agent Transaction Control Protocol for Intellectual Property (ATCP/IP) is a protocol specifically designed by Story Protocol for the AI economy. It enables AI agents to legally authorize, distribute revenues, and trade intellectual property, promoting social collaboration among AI. This protocol paves the way for seamless interactions between future AI agents.
3. Groundbreaking application scenarios
Globalization and legal compliance:
Story Protocol supports global intellectual property protection and aligns with international agreements such as the Berne Convention, providing legal protection for its on-chain authorizations. This on-chain and off-chain combination ensures that creators' rights are recognized globally.
Deep integration of IP and AI:
Story Protocol is currently one of the few platforms that deeply integrate intellectual property with AI applications. Through the ATCP/IP protocol, AI agents can collaborate and trade freely. For example, an AI artist can obtain inspiration materials through smart contracts while sharing profits with other AI agents, injecting infinite possibilities into the AI-driven economic ecosystem.
Community-driven open ecosystem:
The modular design of Story Protocol not only applies to the official team but also provides unlimited expansion space for third-party developers and creators. For example, developers can build entirely new IP financial tools based on Story Protocol, while creators can leverage these tools to expand their creativity.
Through the dual drive of technology and ecology, Story Protocol not only provides tools for the current creative economy but also opens up a new vision for the future of the creative economy.
⭐️ How does Story Protocol achieve its functionality?
Its core technology is mainly constructed as follows:
IP registration and account binding are done through on-chain registration, with each IP asset receiving a unique ERC-721 NFT, bound to the IP account (achieved via ERC-6551).
Authorization module: Automates the processing of authorization terms through Programmable IP License (PIL).
Royalty module: Implements revenue distribution and circulation between parent and child IP assets.
AI collaboration and IP integration ATCP/IP protocol allows AI agents to trade and collaborate at machine speed, advancing the creative economy towards decentralized autonomy.
Ecosystem openness and third-party integration Story Protocol provides APIs and development tools that allow developers to create more applications and functional modules based on its ecosystem.
⭐️ Project progress and gameplay
The Odyssey badge program ended this month. The Odyssey testnet, as the final phase before the Story Protocol mainnet, has completed the minting of hundreds of thousands of badges. The testnet is still running, and users can continue to explore and interact with the ecosystem to prepare for the mainnet launch.
The latest participatory activity is the OG program, one of the core activities of the Story Protocol community, aimed at rewarding those community members who actively support and genuinely contribute. Here is relevant information and ways to obtain OG roles:
Seekers: Junior OG, awarded to members who start actively participating.
Adepts: Intermediate OG, awarded to the backbone of the community for long-term contributions.
Ascendants: Senior OG, limited to outstanding contributors with the highest privileges and exclusive rewards.
Interested users can show support for the community by participating in discussions on Discord, Telegram, or Twitter, and engaging in IP creative art competitions or other ecosystem activities, or submitting valuable suggestions, which may provide opportunities to obtain corresponding roles.
OG roles do not have a 'fast track'; everything is determined by community activity, and long periods of inactivity or misconduct may lead to the cancellation of OG roles.
⭐️ Summary and future outlook
Story Protocol is not just a technical project; it is a new way of narrating the economy. It transforms creative assets into dynamic economies, connecting creators with technological innovators.
In this ecosystem full of possibilities, IP is no longer a passive right but an economic engine that can activate infinite value. From this perspective, do you think Story Protocol can become the next milestone in the creator era?