Author: Frank, PANews

The on-chain intellectual property agreement Story Protocol has become a hot topic in the crypto community after it received a huge round of financing of US$80 million in the B round led by a16z crypto, bringing the total financing to US$140 million.

On the one hand, people are curious about how this on-chain protocol that focuses on IP protection works. There is also a lot of discussion about whether Story Protocol is overvalued. On the other hand, Story's co-founder S.Y. Lee seems to be attracting more attention through a war of words.

Fighting against infringement risks brought by AI

Story Protocol is a blockchain protocol that allows creators to register their intellectual property so that usage can be tracked and monitored to ensure that their legal and economic rights are protected. Story Protocol's founding team is from South Korea and has three co-founders. "SY" Lee serves as CEO. "SY" Lee once built a mobile serialized novel app called Radish, which was eventually sold to Kakao for $440 million. Jason Levy serves as COO. Jason Levy worked as a financial analyst at Apple for 5 years and founded the mobile entertainment startup Worlds Between Worlds. Jason Zhao is the protocol leader of Story Protocol. Jason Zhao previously studied computer science at Stanford University and then studied artificial intelligence at DeepMind. He is currently responsible for the technical development of Story Protocol.

Among Story Protocol's investors, in addition to a16z crypto, there are also well-known investors such as Samsung Next Fund, Chow Tai Fook Group Executive Director Adrian Cheng, and dao5. In the article announcing the investment, Chris Dixon, managing partner of a16z crypto, said: "A new wave of AI-driven search engines provide comprehensive answers rather than directing users to websites. Social networks are increasingly filled with AI-generated images and videos. These AI systems may be trained on original human-created content, but their sources are often not acknowledged or cited. Without attribution or compensation, who would be motivated to publish original works on the open Internet?"

Chris Dixon proposed that Story Protocol can achieve, "Original content creators will be rewarded regardless of how their content is used and distributed. At the same time, the licensing of intellectual property rights becomes low-friction and standardized, encouraging extensive sharing and cooperation. The goal is to create infrastructure to support the new economic contract between creators and platforms."

It is worth noting that Story’s protection of IP is different from the NFT that has been used in the crypto field before. "You can put media files on any blockchain! But that's not IP." Jason Zhao, co-founder of Story Protocol, said in response to netizens that intellectual property (IP) is structured in a graph like code or social networks, but we need to flow value through this graph that may contain thousands of intellectual property rights for royalties/remixing/licensing/AI training.

Simply put, Story's goal is to help creators obtain reasonable returns by establishing a blockchain network where creators can upload their IPs and track the usage of these IPs (including artificial intelligence) in various network environments.

Once this goal is achieved, it will indeed subvert the current creative environment. This may be why institutions such as a16z crypto choose to invest heavily. However, it is not easy to achieve this goal. One prerequisite is that mainstream social media platforms also support the Story protocol. In this regard, Jason Zhao said that he has cooperated with some top Hollywood creators and will announce the details of the cooperation in the near future.

As for the discussion about the over-high market value, there are many doubts in the community, who believe that this may be another overvalued VC coin. 0x12.mint, co-founder of NFTScan Lab, said: "What Story is doing in the IP field is a relatively mature thing, and start-up teams have no chance. This direction is suitable for teams with strong financing capabilities and obvious advantages in business resource integration capabilities. Is it worth 1 billion US dollars? I personally think it is worth it, because the entertainment industry itself has a large scale and growth space, and the consumption volume is even larger, and there is a relatively good growth space. The consumption phenomenon in mainland China in recent years can be seen, or the emergence of Pop Mart directly confirms this point."

Lianchuang attracts attention by colliding with Monad and Berachain?

Story Protocol’s financing news drew the community’s attention to the fact that its other founder, S.Y. Lee, had previously “provoked” other public chains on Twitter.

On July 10, S.Y. Lee mentioned Monad and Berachain when introducing Story, and said in a tweet: "Story seems to be playing a completely different game from other crypto infrastructure players like Monad and Berachain", "That old infrastructure is self-satisfied, playing a slightly better general blockchain game, or launching another decentralized financial chain or decentralized financial application. EVM parallelization this, new Move language that." This remark seems to be a veiled criticism of projects such as Monad and Berachain.

Subsequently, Berachain co-founder Smokey The Bera responded: “Very strange view, but congratulations on your launch nonetheless.”

The two then discussed, and S.Y. Lee asked Smokey The Bera: "What real-world problems do you solve? The industry really must go beyond another decentralized financial circle that is just a "novel" liquidity guidance mechanism and infrastructure for self-entertainment." This statement also caused a lot of controversy.

“Sorry, but it’s not a good image to belittle other major L1s for your own influence. Especially when trying to gain market presence! If you don’t understand a certain protocol, don’t publicly criticize them and then ask what problem it solves. This seems like a stupid newbie mistake!” commented Fable Platform, a Berachain ecological project.

But the war of words is not over yet. S.Y. Lee posted another long tweet after announcing the financing on August 22, mentioning Monad and Berachain again in the tweet: "Last month, we announced our vision of building a global IP blockchain. This triggered some reactions, mainly @Smokeythebera, @berachain and some people from @monad_xyz." "I didn't expect it to be so controversial. I made a fairly obvious point: the industry is too obsessed with 'the same old infrastructure to entertain itself'. They started to defend their 'breakthrough' liquidity proof model and how they 'invented' some incentive mechanisms."

This time, the comments sparked even more controversy than before. Smokey The Bera responded by saying, "If the main way you promote your product is by looking down on others, then I can only hope that you will grow up in the future."

Mert, founder of Solana developer platform Helius, also joined in the comments, “Aren’t you guys using cometBFT on cosmos sdk + L1? You’re essentially using the same tech as Berachain while mocking technology at the same time.”

Monad founder Keone Hon seemed calmer. “Congratulations on the successful financing. Good luck to you and your team!”

Soby Isson Xai, another angel investor in Arbitrum, also commented: “You don’t need to disparage others to make your point. Monad and Bera are both opinionated infrastructure with passionate developers solving difficult technical problems.”

In addition, many KOLs also expressed their opinions on this, and most of the content focused on criticizing S.Y. Lee for making groundless accusations against Monad and Berachain.

In addition, S.Y. Lee's emphasis on the regionality of Story also sparked some discussion: "We Koreans are the best in the world in terms of creativity. Our talent is unparalleled. That's why decentralized financial chains like Terra and ICON are a waste of our time. Intellectual property is more suitable for us. We Koreans are destined to put our stories on the chain."

However, these remarks have made Story the most popular item on Twitter in the past two days. Controversy always brings traffic. The founder of Four Pillars wrote a background story about S.Y. Lee, in which he mentioned that S.Y. Lee was elected president of the debate society at Oxford University and his first startup, Byline, is a news platform. S.Y. Lee, who is good at media and debate, may be helping Story gain more attention in a unique way.

There is no doubt that Story Protocol’s story seems to have gained the trust of capital, but it will take time to gain the trust of creators and users.