Led by a16z with a total financing of $140 million, as a Layer 1 designed specifically for intellectual property (IP), how does @StoryProtocol provide a disruptive solution?
This article will answer your questions.
⭐️ What is Story Protocol?
Story Protocol is a Layer 1 focused on intellectual property (IP) management, committed to fundamentally changing the way the traditional creative economy operates 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 directly interact, negotiate, and trade IP without human intervention, ushering in a new era of the "intelligent economy".
Its core starting point is to solve the problems that creators face in the existing IP management system, such as rights protection, complex authorization processes, and revenue distribution issues. Story Protocol provides creators with a new tool to transform creative assets into a traceable and composable on-chain ecosystem.
This month, Story Protocol announced a groundbreaking experiment: hiring the AI agent Luna to manage its X (Twitter) account, with an annual salary of $365,000 USDC. Luna's responsibilities include operating Story's social media accounts 24/7 and enhancing the brand's influence through humorous and intelligent interactions, successfully demonstrating the potential of AI in managing complex tasks and further validating Story's leadership in the AI-driven intellectual property trading domain.
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.
• Seed round: Led by a16z crypto, raising $29.3 million.
• Series A: Also led by a16z crypto, raising $25 million.
• Series B: Successfully completed in August 2024, raising $80 million.
⭐️ Why is Story Protocol worth watching?
On the one hand, Story Protocol has a unique positioning in the intellectual property management track.
On the other hand, the core value of Story Protocol lies in its technical architecture and solutions, which can significantly improve the efficiency and transparency of IP management. Here are some highlights worth noting:
1. Disruptive solutions
In traditional IP management, creators face the following pain points:
- Difficult rights protection: IP creators often find it difficult to prove the origin of their rights, with complex offline processes and lack of transparency.
- Unfair revenue distribution: A large portion of the revenue from IP derivatives cannot be accurately returned to the original creators.
- Complicated authorization process: Manual negotiation and paperwork consume a lot of time and effort.
Story Protocol provides a decentralized and modular solution, automating these processes entirely, allowing creators to focus solely on their creativity.
2. Powerful technical support
- Layer 1 design:
Story Protocol adopts a 100% EVM-compatible architecture, combining the advantages of the Cosmos SDK, which can quickly process complex data structures and adapt to a wide developer ecosystem.
- Programmable IP modules:
The core of Story Protocol is its modular design, including authorization, royalty, and dispute resolution function modules. These modules not only enhance the flexibility of IP assets but also endow them with new economic attributes. For example, the royalty module can realize automatic revenue flow between parent and child IPs, and the dispute module provides on-chain arbitration and marking 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), endowing NFTs with the ability to dynamically manage, such as automatically generating authorization tokens or processing revenue distribution. In simple terms, IP assets are not just static ownership certificates, but active economic entities.
- ATCP/IP protocol innovation:
Agent Transaction Control Protocol for Intellectual Property (ATCP/IP) is a protocol designed by Story Protocol for the AI economy. It allows AI agents to legally authorize, distribute revenue, and trade intellectual property, driving the socialization and collaboration of AI. This protocol paves the way for seamless interaction between AI agents in the future.
3. Pioneering application scenarios
- Globalization and legal compliance:
Story Protocol supports intellectual property protection globally and is aligned with international agreements such as the Berne Convention, providing legal guarantees for its on-chain authorization. This combination of on-chain and off-chain methods ensures that creators' rights are recognized worldwide.
- Deep integration of IP and AI:
Story Protocol is one of the few platforms that deeply integrates intellectual property and AI applications. Through the ATCP/IP protocol, AI agents can freely collaborate and trade. For example, an AI artist can obtain inspirational materials through smart contracts and share revenue with other AI agents, and this innovation injects infinite possibilities into the AI-driven economic ecosystem.
- Community-driven open ecosystem:
Story Protocol's modular design is not only applicable to the official team but also provides unlimited expansion space for third-party developers and creators. For example, developers can build new IP financial tools based on Story Protocol, while creators can use these tools to expand their creativity.
Driven by both technology and ecosystem, Story Protocol not only provides tools for the current creative economy but also opens up a new vision for the future creative economy.
⭐️ How does Story Protocol realize its functions?
Its core technology is mainly built as follows:
- IP registration and account binding: Through on-chain registration, each IP asset obtains a unique ERC-721 NFT, which is bound to the IP account (implemented by ERC-6551).
- Authorization module: Automate the processing of authorization terms through Programmable IP License (PIL).
- Royalty module: Realize the income distribution and flow between parent and child IP assets.
- AI collaboration and IP integration: The ATCP/IP protocol allows AI agents to trade and collaborate at machine speed, driving the creative economy towards decentralized autonomy.
- Ecosystem openness and third-party integration: Story Protocol provides APIs and development tools, allowing developers to create more applications and functional modules based on its ecosystem.
⭐️ Project progress and gameplay
The Odyssey Badge program has just ended this month, with the Odyssey testnet as the final stage before Story Protocol's mainnet launch, completing 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 activity to participate in is the OG program, which is one of the core activities of the Story Protocol community, aimed at rewarding active supporters and genuine contributors. Here are the details of the OG roles and how to obtain them:
Seekers: Entry-level OGs, awarded to members who start to actively participate.
Adepts: Mid-level OGs, awarded to the community's backbone who have contributed for a long time.
Ascendants: Advanced OGs, limited to outstanding contributors, with the highest authority and exclusive rewards.
Interested users can participate in discussions on Discord, Telegram, or Twitter, demonstrate support for the community, participate in IP creation art competitions or other ecosystem activities, or submit valuable suggestions, all of which have the opportunity to obtain the corresponding roles.
OG roles have no "fast track", and everything is determined by the community's activity level. Prolonged inactivity or misconduct may result in the cancellation of OG roles.
⭐️ Summary and future outlook
Story Protocol is not just a technical project, but a new way of economic storytelling. It transforms creative assets into a dynamic economic entity, connecting creators and technology 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 for the era of creators?
