No.195
Story IP
the registry chain that turns ideas into property you can license
๐ญ a tidy archivist who would rather give a song a home and a price tag than let it drift around unsigned
๐ฌ โHand me a song, an image, an idea, even a whole AI model. I stamp it, I write down who made it and the rules for using it, and from then on the credit and the payments find their way home on their own.โ
- The one job: a layer-1 blockchain for intellectual property, ideas, art, music, AI models, registered on-chain as real assets.
- Once registered, the work is programmable: licensing terms and royalties are baked in, so creators get paid directly.
- The big bet is AI: when a model uses your registered work, the chain can route a payment back to you.
- Built by PIP Labs; mainnet ('Homer') went live February 13, 2025. The token is IP, and supply is not capped.
๐ The Story
2022. Three founders, Seung Yoon Lee (who had earlier built the fiction app Radish), Jason Zhao (out of Google DeepMind), and Jason Levy, started PIP Labs around one frustration: the internet is made of remixes, but the people whose work gets copied, sampled and trained on almost never get credited or paid. Copyright lives in lawyers' offices, not in the places where work actually travels.
Their answer was to make ownership a thing the network itself enforces. Register a song, an image, or an idea on Story, attach the rules for using it, and the chain remembers all of it: who made it, what it was built from, and what a license costs. No contract to chase, no agency taking a cut.
The timing was deliberate. As AI models began swallowing huge piles of human work, the question of who owes whom got loud. Story's pitch is to be the settlement layer for that argument: if an AI uses a registered work, payment can flow back to the owner automatically. That story drew serious money. In September 2024, a16z crypto led an $80 million round, pushing total funding into the $140 million range.
The testnet, named Iliad, opened in August 2024. The mainnet, Homer, went live on February 13, 2025, with the IP token and an airdrop. The literary code-names are on purpose: this is a project that thinks of itself as keeping the great library, one stamped page at a time.
๐ Stats
๐งฉ How it works
Story is a proof-of-stake layer-1: validators lock up IP to help secure the network, and that locked IP also pays the gas fees for using it. Under the hood it bolts together two proven parts, an EVM execution layer (the same engine that runs Ethereum's smart contracts) on top of a CometBFT consensus layer from the Cosmos toolkit, which gives it fast, final confirmations. On top of that it adds special built-in shortcuts so the chain can cheaply trace how one piece of work relates to another, parent, remix, license, which is the whole point of an IP registry.
๐ Light & Shadow
- A sharp, real problem to solve: creators rarely get paid when their work is copied or used to train AI, and Story is built end-to-end for exactly that
- Serious backing and a credible team (a16z-led funding around $140M; founders from DeepMind and a venture-built reading app)
- Sensible engineering: it reuses the battle-tested EVM and Cosmos pieces instead of inventing everything from scratch
- The hard part is off-chain. The chain can record a license, but it can't stop someone from copying your work outside it, so real-world enforcement still leans on courts
- Very young (mainnet only since February 2025), so the AI-pays-creators flywheel is still mostly promise, not proven volume
- No supply cap. IP is inflationary, with new tokens minted to reward stakers, and a lot of early-backer and team supply unlocks over time, which can weigh on price
๐งฌ Evolution lineage
Story is not a fork of an older coin. It's a purpose-built layer-1 that sits in the EVM-on-Cosmos family: it borrows the Cosmos toolkit's consensus and Ethereum's contract engine, then points the whole thing at one job, intellectual property.
๐งญ Meet other friends
โ FAQ
- What is Story (IP)?
- A layer-1 blockchain built for one job: registering intellectual property, things like ideas, images, songs and AI models, as on-chain assets. Once registered, that work becomes programmable, so its creator can license it and get paid directly, with no middleman in between. The native token is IP.
- Who built Story, and when did it launch?
- It was built by PIP Labs (Programmable IP Labs), founded in 2022 by Seung Yoon Lee, Jason Zhao and Jason Levy. The Iliad testnet opened in August 2024, and the Homer mainnet went live on February 13, 2025 alongside the IP token launch and an airdrop.
- Does Story have a fixed supply like Bitcoin?
- No. It started with 1 billion IP at launch and is inflationary, meaning new IP is issued over time to reward stakers who secure the network. So the total supply grows rather than freezing at a hard cap. Live circulating and total figures shift with unlocks and staking, so treat any single number as a snapshot.
- How is Story connected to AI?
- Story wants to be the layer where AI's use of human work gets settled. If a model trains on or uses a registered song, image or idea, the rules attached on-chain can route a payment back to the owner automatically. That is the pitch; whether real AI usage flows through it at scale is still being proven.
โ ๏ธ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only.