Bootstrapping Story via Initial Incentives

Summary

Initial Incentives are a dedicated $IP allocation for rewarding Story's end users and community members. We are implementing strong anti-farmer and anti-sybil measures on Day 1 to distribute significantly greater rewards to the community via future Initial Incentive campaigns. Initial Incentives begin on Day 1, but Day 1 is just the start of these programs. Beyond Initial Incentives, we cover how other allocations will provide long-term support for the ecosystem.

Story’s Incentive Philosophy

Story’s Incentive Philosophy rests on three core pillars:

1. Rewarding real users
2. Incentivizing useful apps and novel use cases
3. Ensuring long-term alignment

Let’s dive briefly into the reasoning for these three principles.

Strong incentives are one of the most exciting and promising advantages of blockchain based products. However, in recent years, the crypto space has seen a proliferation of broken incentive mechanisms. What started as a strong bootstrapping mechanism has become an unhealthy expectation, forcing projects and their communities to engage in a zero-sum conflict.

The natural state of a healthy project is a strong long-term alignment between the community and the core contributors. Despite this natural harmony, we believe that the current status quo of unhealthy antagonism has arisen because of a third class of actors that are not truly aligned long-term with the interests of either the community or the project as a whole: farmers.

Farmers create a false tension between a project and its real users by taking rewards from long-term aligned users and leaving a project immediately after the rewards are distributed, damaging both the users and the project. These extractive behaviors produce an unnatural and unproductive zero-sum environment at the outset of a project’s launch.

In close keeping with these lessons, Story will filter farmers to establish true alignment between Story and our community, creating a positive-sum spiral in which users drive meaningful behavior to the network and are rewarded fairly for doing so.

Redistributing from Sybils to Users

All of the allocation saved from Story’s anti-sybil efforts will be 100% redistributed to the real users in future Initial Incentives programs, ensuring that farmers do not take away rewards from long-term aligned participants in the Story network.

In fact, we will grow the amount of rewards in the Initial Incentives pool by staking all unclaimed tokens — tokens that were preserved by filtering Sybils who could not claim — from the Story Rewards Portal to our validators. By earning staking rewards on the Initial Claims, we ensure that the user incentive pool continues to grow as we scale up our Initial Incentives programs, and these rewards will be fully redistributed back to the community.

Story’s Initial Incentives

Initial Incentives consist of 10% of the $IP token supply. The entire allocation is committed to end users and community members. This allocation will be used to reward users for valuable activities and contributions to the Story ecosystem in its bootstrapping phase, from Day 1 and in the period following as the network develops into a mature ecosystem.

However, our Initial Incentives allocation is just a small portion of the overall $IP allocation that is dedicated to Story’s ecosystem, community, users, and developers.

Initial Incentives Breakdown

All of the Initial Incentives will end up in the hands of our users and our community.

There are two routes by which these rewards end up in the hands of users:

1. Direct Claims
2. Distributed via Ecosystem Projects (Ecosystem-based Incentives)

Half (5%) of the Initial Incentives will be allocated via Direct Claims to users. Direct Claims includes rewards distributed on Day 1 of Public Mainnet and in the months following via continuing Initial Incentive campaigns.

The other half (5%) of the Initial Incentives will be allocated to Ecosystem Projects with the explicit mandate that all rewards must be given to end users. The advantage of the Ecosystem-based Incentives model is that the Story community can be rewarded for a wider variety of activities across an array of behaviors on different ecosystem applications. The Ecosystem-based incentives allocation may grow beyond 5% in the future, powered by unclaimed incentives from Sybils that were filtered out during Day 1 claims.

Ecosystem-based incentives will apply to many different categories of applications on Story, ranging from AI, to IPFi, to consumer. Initially, these will focus on IPFi activities on apps ranging from DEXs to IP RWA protocols to lending protocols. These will be announced by each project individually, and all rewards coming from the Initial Incentives pool will be put into the hands of users with none kept by the project itself.

Needless to say, Core Contributors to Story will not be able to claim any Initial Incentives – now or in the future.

Day 1 Story Rewards Claim

Within Initial Incentives, there will be multiple rounds of rewards. The first round starts on Day 1 of Public Mainnet and remains open for 30 days.

Day 1 Initial Incentives will allocate rewards to the following groups:

1. Odyssey Badge Holders
2. Holders of Chronicles NFTs
   • Only if they are also Odyssey Badge Holders*
     • Snapshot taken on Feb. 9, 2025 at 11:53pm PT
3. Active Story Community
   • OG Roles
   • Other Community Roles
   • Genesis IP Creators
4. Social Rewards
   • Kaito Genesis NFT Holders
     • Snapshot taken on Feb. 10, 2025 at 9:00pm PT
   • High Quality Story Yappers
     • Via data starting from 2023 that is weighted towards long term contributions, not short term yap farmers
   • Others who started high quality conversations around IP (based on Kaito data)
   • Regional contributors and community leaders
5. Exchange Based Programs*
   • Binance Wallet Rewards
   • OKX Wallet Rewards
   • Bybit Wallet Rewards
6. Validator Rewards*
   • Validators who participated in our Validator Competition during Odyssey testnet, including those who were not selected in the final 64.
7. Ecosystem-Based Incentives*
   • IPFi Rewards (eg, PiperX, Story Hunt, Verio)
   • IP Ecosystem Rewards (eg, Aria)

*These rewards will be distributed separately from the Story Rewards Claim portal

Beyond this Day 1 claim, we already have plans and will continue to make plans to regularly reward users. Bolstered by our strong anti-sybil efforts (more below), a large portion of the Initial Incentives will be reclaimed from harmful Sybils and farmers that we can now use to reward the real users and community in future campaigns.

We plan to continue to offer Initial Incentives in the early stages of Story network, and there will be future rewards programs that will abide by our principles of rewarding real users and real contributions for the long-term.

Details on Our Anti-Sybil Approach

We devoted a significant portion of our team’s resources and effort to filtering out Sybils in order to preserve rewards for real, long-term aligned users and community. We also engaged three separate firms to advise and analyze onchain and offchain behaviors in order to maximize our ability to detect Sybils while minimizing the chances that real users would be mistakenly filtered out. Assuming similar rates of farmer participation, we were able to filter out about 3x more Sybils as a percentage of overall eligible wallets than comparable projects, according to estimated Passport data. This does not include the farmers that will be filtered out on the day of our Day 1 Story Rewards Claim, which we expect to be significant.

Our overall process was to first filter out Sybils based on clustering algorithms. We leveraged multiple clustering techniques including both onchain and offchain data in order to filter out rings of Sybils. We also investigated badge behavior to validate, especially in cases where large rings collected the same badges in the same sequence at the same times. We also investigated activity on other EVM chains as a factor, and wallets that did not have activity on Ethereum, Base, Polygon, BNB, Optimism, Arbitrum, and other popular EVM chains were investigated more thoroughly. Funding patterns were also taken into account, with wallets in large groups that received funding at the same time from the same source repeatedly being removed.

These methods, when combined and validated against each other, paint a strong distinction between real users and farmers. The difference in activity and therefore intent in most cases was very stark. However, these clustering algorithms are not perfect, and in cases where there was any doubt, we still qualified these wallets to participate in the Day 1 Story Rewards Claim.

In order to further validate these wallets and filter Sybils, the Story Rewards Claim portal will ask most wallets to provide a relatively low Passport score to prove uniqueness and humanity. Any user should either already have such a score or should easily be able to obtain such a score without issue. We expect that this will further filter a significant number of Sybils during the claim period, which will last 1 month from Day 1 of Public Mainnet.

Additional Ecosystem and Community Programs

Beyond the Initial Incentives allocation which bootstraps a strong and aligned ecosystem in the near term, there are many other allocations that are designed to support the ecosystem for the long term. Some of these programs are already underway, including hackathon prizes and ecosystem grants.

Ecosystem Grants are already live, with grants given out to the following projects.

Hackathon prizes are already live, with hackathon rewards at:

• Story’s Alpha Hackathon (2023)
• Story’s Beta Hackathon (2024)
• ETHDenver (2024)
• ETHGlobal SF (2024)
• Cursor Hackathon (2024)
• Livepeer/Encode Hackathon (2024)
• Autonomous Hackathon (2024)
• Agent to Agent Payment$ Hackathon (2025)
• TartanHacks (2025)
• AI Agents Bounty (2025)
• AI Framework bounties (2025)
• Sozu House (2025)
• EthDenver Hackathon (2025)
• Super Agent Hackathon (2025)
• Safe’s Agentathon (2025)

Towards a Vibrant Ecosystem

We believe that incentives are core to bootstrapping vibrant ecosystems, and a killer differentiator of blockchain products if executed with principle. Though many will disagree with our approach, we believe it maximizes the chances that Story will achieve its user-centric, long-term aligned vision of making IP accessible, open, and programmable — unlocking and extending a multi-trillion dollar asset class.