Reported by Cointelegraph: Web3 intellectual property protocol Story announced that its mainnet will launch on February 13, alongside its native token IP, aimed at enabling creators to monetize their content and protect their digital assets.
Story announced the upcoming mainnet in a post on X on February 11. Its native token will be used for trading, governance voting, and paying creators, with an initial staking period called "Singularity" to be held first.
The total supply of IP tokens is 1 billion, and rewards will begin distribution on March 2 after the staking phase ends.
According to a post on the protocol forum, the launch of the mainnet "marks an important milestone in introducing decentralized intellectual property ownership to the world."
Multiple exchanges, including Bitget, Bithumb, Bybit, KuCoin, Coinbase, and OKX, have announced support for the listing of IP tokens.
Story aims to make intellectual property programmable by providing an open market where rights holders can register their content and write the terms and payments required when others use it. These fees are paid in cryptocurrency, but creators and intellectual property rights holders can receive compensation in local currency.
Creators will be able to register their works directly on the blockchain, set up automatic licensing and revenue sharing, receive compensation directly without intermediaries, and protect their works from unauthorized use.
Story was founded in 2022 by former Google DeepMind product manager Jason Zhao, who identified the issue of AI failing to compensate creators when remixing content.
In a December interview with Cointelegraph, he stated: "You have these amazing creative tools," referring to AI, "but if you are an intellectual property holder, platform, or individual creator, you don't have a sustainable business model."
"In the age of AI, intellectual property will play a key role in the tokenization of $61 trillion worth of intellectual property assets," Story stated on February 7.
Currently, over 50 applications are running on the protocol, including Magma, which has 2.5 million users and allows teams to create and collaborate on digital art simultaneously.
In December of last year, Story launched an experimental framework utilizing the latest popular AI narrative and agent AI, enabling AI agents to interact on-chain.
At the time, Story stated that its ACTP/IP created a secure system for managing intellectual property, allowing for autonomous exchanges between AI agents, with bots being rewarded for data exchanges.
The Story protocol is supported by renowned venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital, Hashed, and Samsung Next. It raised $29 million in a seed funding round in May 2023, $25 million in Series A funding in September 2023, and again raised $80 million in Series B funding in August 2024.