Author: Francesco Source: substack Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance
Story Protocol recently officially announced the details of its native token IP. This article will analyze Story's architecture and token economic model and explore its impact on the intellectual property market.
I published a brief introduction to Story Protocola year and a half ago. Since then, the protocol has made significant progress, including a clear technical development plan and a product landing plan.
For readers who are not familiar with Story, its core goal is to solve the inefficiency of the traditional, centralized IP management system and create a programmable peer-to-peer (P2P) knowledge and creative market through decentralized technology.
1. The existence of centralized intermediaries and IP transaction costs
Currently, the economic value of IP assets is mainly in the hands of centralized intermediaries (such as publishing platforms and social media companies). These institutions not only charge high transaction fees, but also strictly control the circulation and monetization methods of IP assets, which greatly limits the autonomy of content creators.
2. Impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on IP rights
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought unprecedented challenges to the traditional IP system. The scale of AI-generated content is unprecedented, but current AI often relies on existing IP for training and lacks an effective attribution and revenue distribution mechanism. This not only threatens the rights of original creators, but also further exposes the sustainability issues of the current IP system. This phenomenon highlights the necessity of building a decentralized and open IP system to ensure fair copyright attribution and revenue distribution.
Story Protocol proposes an open, programmable IP trading market, whose core components include:
Universal IP Asset Library - a standardized ledger for storing and managing IP assets.
Programmable P2P Trading Market - an open market that enables IP transactions to be completed directly peer-to-peer without intermediaries.
Anyone can freely buy, sell, trade or monetize creativity on the Story platform without relying on traditional intermediaries.
So, how is all this achieved?
Story Protocol adopts a "multi-core" execution architecture, in which each layer of the protocol focuses on different tasks, including:
Main Core: responsible for coordinating various dedicated cores.
Dedicated Execution Cores: optimized for speed, privacy or scalability.
Story adopts a division of labor and collaboration model, allowing each layer to operate independently and focus on specific functions.
The entire network relies on a group of validators for maintenance, responsible for:
Consensus mechanism
Transaction processing
Security assurance
The execution layer is responsible for processing transactions and executing smart contracts.
Story is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and adopts a main core + dedicated core architecture. When a transaction involves a specific function, the corresponding dedicated core will be called to optimize execution based on speed, privacy, and scalability.
Each dedicated core must meet the following standards:
Determinism - Ensure that all transactions can generate consistent and verifiable results.
Measurability - Gas fees can be predicted before transactions, improving cost transparency.
The initial version of Story will include three dedicated cores:
IP Core
Off-chain synchronization
Cross-chain communication
IP Core is the base layer for Story Protocol to track intellectual property (IP), providing native support for managing and circulating IP assets on the chain.
In the Story ecosystem, all IP assets are represented by a "graph structure", where:
Nodes: represent atomic IP assets.
Edges: represent legal and economic relationships between IP assets (such as licensing agreements, revenue distribution, etc.).
This graph-based structure enables Story to transparently record the history, licensing agreements, and derivative applications of IP assets, ensuring the traceability of intellectual property rights.
Story Protocol introduces the PoC (Proof of Creativity) framework, providing the following core functions:
Open IP Asset Library - a standardized ledger for storing, registering and verifying IP assets and their authorization information.
Seamless Interaction Module- Allows the creation of a digital IP trading market and provides a transparent rights tracking mechanism.
PoC Mechanism- The traceability and transaction layer of IP assets, supporting IP holders to cast assets into NFT (ERC-721) for licensing agreements and royalty management.
PoC can also be used to establish or verify the relationship between users and IP assets. Before each transaction, the protocol checks the historical parameters of the IP asset to ensure the consistency of the rules, making it a universal compatibility engine for IP assets.
In addition, Story Protocol introduces a Proof of Creativity (PoC) framework that provides:
Open IP Repository – a standardized ledger with native storage for registering, storing and verifying IP-related assets and licenses.
Seamless Interaction Module - Supports the creation of a digital IP marketplace with transparent rights tracking.
PoC Mechanism - "The provenance and exchange layer for IP", allowing IP owners to register assets as IPAsset NFTs (ERC-721), facilitating licensing agreements and royalty management.
POC also establishes or verifies the relationship between a user and an asset. Each time, the protocol checks historical IP parameters to ensure that the rules are applied consistently, effectively becoming a "universal compatibility engine" for IP.
To ensure comprehensive verification and dispute resolution, Story integrates off-chain mechanisms to verify registration, validate IP ownership, and initiate decentralized dispute resolution procedures.
IP is a complex topic that often involves off-chain components, such as identity verification, infringement assessment, and legal proof. To address this issue, Story introduces an off-chain sync core that facilitates off-chain data integration through oracles and other external providers.
For example, the Story Orchestration Service (SOS) framework allows third parties to use the off-chain network to provide proofs for on-chain services.
IP is not static and is widely used in the network. This raises the question of how to verify proofs when transaction costs are too high (for example, it is impossible to implement an EVM contract checker), and how to enforce IP ownership.
To facilitate interoperability, the CCC Core ensures:
Interoperable ownership verification -Ensures that IP transactions comply with predefined terms in different networks.
Cross-chain execution mechanism -Prevents unauthorized use and facilitates secure transactions using IP assets as collateral.
The Story module is customizable, and we can already see two features that may be added in the future:
AI Core:Optimize AI on-chain operations
Zero Knowledge (ZK):Used to efficiently verify zero-knowledge proofs.
The storage layer optimizes data organization by integrating on-chain and off-chain storage solutions (including Arweave and IPFS).
In fact, it is not feasible to store all data on-chain. At the same time, using off-chain storage like IPFS limits the user experience.
This hybrid approach enhances scalability, cost efficiency, and redundancy while preserving accessibility to IP assets, allowing for:
Optimized data placement and storage strategies:Using usage patterns, the storage layer can adjust and adapt to the data being processed, balancing "performance, scalability, cost, proof size, and redundancy between heterogeneous storage systems."
Direct model inference: Benefits from storing machine learning models and their metadata together
Story uses CometBTF, a Tendermint-based consensus mechanism originally developed in the Cosmos ecosystem. The consensus model provides:
Resistance to malicious activity - consensus can be reached even if up to 33% of validators behave dishonestly.
Activity - Ensure that more than 2/3 of validators are active
Instant finality - When a transaction is included in a block, fast finality is critical for institutional investors and any application that requires "immutability".
Modularity: In Story, consensus is separated from execution, keeping the consensus layer flexible and able to introduce future mechanisms.
Currently, Story is based on the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism, and validators need to stake a certain amount of stake as an incentive for honest behavior.
https://x.com/StoryProtocol/status/1886793841576976630
Now that we have defined the architecture of the Story Network, let’s dive into some of the possible use cases in the white paper:
1.IP Universal Marketplace:
How does blockchain fit into non-tangible asset classes?
Blockchain technology has traditionally focused on tangible assets, but Story extends these capabilities to intangible assets, solving previous inefficiencies by creating a P2P marketplace using programmable IP.
Key use cases include:
IP as Real World Assets (RWA IP) – Enables anyone to update an IP catalog on Story
IPFi (IP-based DeFi) – Use IP as collateral for DeFi applications.
AI Automation - Allow AI agents to autonomously license and monetize IP.
2. Enhanced AI Agents
Agents: Use IP for training and produce IP as output.
Story facilitates AI-driven transactions by building an IP settlement layer that supports:
Collaborative AI models – AI agents can leverage shared datasets consisting of IP assets to enhance each other’s learning capabilities. This is shown in the following diagram, where each model leverages other models and datasets.
Efficient model fine-tuning – Reducing computational overhead while maintaining performance.
Marketplace for high-quality training datasets – Incentivizing the contribution of valuable data to AI development.
In addition to human-agent relationships, Story can also accommodate agent-agent interactions, enabling autonomous agents to interact, collaborate, and create value.
As part of this, Story created the Intellectual Property Agent Transaction Control Protocol (Agent TCP/IP), which defines standardized interactions between autonomous AI agents:
Agents can autonomously negotiate, license, and execute intellectual property agreements, with on-chain execution and off-chain legal enforcement capabilities.
Opens space for agents to become autonomous actors, "improve themselves by licensing training data, and monetize their output by registering their IP".
The network is open and scalable: its functionality will grow as more agents join.
Professional agents can collaborate with each other (e.g. to create movies, songs, etc.)
The Story Protocol ecosystem is powered by its native token, IP. The token has multiple roles, including:
Network security - Validators stake IP to ensure honest participation.
Transaction convenience - All protocol interactions utilize IP as a medium of exchange.
Agent-to-agent transactions - Enable AI-driven IP negotiation.
Governance
According to the information released a few days ago, IP tokens will be distributed in a fair manner:
IP will be distributed as follows:
It is worth noting that they are trying to follow a "community-led" launch approach. However, it is not clear what percentage will actually be allocated to users, rather than the foundation, R&D, ecosystem, or foundation. In fact, the 58.4% above refers to "ecosystem and community, foundation, and initial incentives."
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