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Introducing IP Vault: Secure, Confidential, Programmable Access to Onchain IP Data
Story
12 September 2025
Intellectual property is evolving.
In the age of AI, IP is no longer just copyrights and patents. The full spectrum of IP spans genomes, music stems, unreleased footage, datasets, and much more.
Earlier this year, we launched the Story Layer 1 Network: a purpose-built blockchain for programmable IP. Story enables IP to be tokenized, licensed, and monetized directly on-chain with programmable royalty logic and license enforcement embedded, without the need for intermediaries.
But as IP expands into high-value digital assets and data, ecosystem applications quickly ran into an interesting challenge: how do you handle access to sensitive, specialized IP content?
All of this must be stored, licensed, and accessed securely. But today’s infrastructure falls short: data is either exposed, or siloed.
IP Vault solves this.
Why We're Building IP Vault
Large organizations, IP holders, ecosystem developers and creators have long asked: how can we make licensed content usable without compromising its integrity?
Whether you’re managing music stems, medical data, or training datasets, you need:
- A way to encrypt and store high-value content
- An onchain system for permissions and licensing
- A secure, automatic channel for access without requiring ongoing intervention from IP owners
That’s what IP Vault enables.
What is IP Vault?
IP Vault is a secure on-chain storage space attached to an IP asset that stores confidential IP data on Story. These vaults are protected by the network and can only be accessed by IP owners and their license holders.
Vaults don’t store raw files themselves, but rather, they store the encryption keys that unlock those files, wherever they’re hosted (e.g., IPFS, Shelby). This creates a trustless, programmable access layer for IP that sits natively onchain on Story’s Layer 1.
How IP Vault Works
Vaults and Storage
This confidential storage space scales effectively when paired with any decentralized data storage solution (e.g. IPFS, Shelby, etc.) that ensures availability. Encrypted data is uploaded to the storage solution, while the encryption key remains securely stored in the IP Vault.
Automatic Access Control
IP owners can attach secrets to IP Vaults anytime after registering an IP. When users acquire a license, they seamlessly gain access to these secrets without requiring further involvement from the IP owner.
Vaults inherit the same protections as IP assets. They are secured through Story’s multi-core architecture, with validators participating in distributed key generation and secure multi-party computation inside their Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This enables them to encrypt and decrypt IP assets based on onchain logic.
Introducing Conditional Decryption
The real power of IP Vault lies in what we call conditional decryption.
This allows access logic to go beyond license ownership. IP owners can define complex rules for when, where, and how content is decrypted.
Example: an unreleased track can only be decrypted by a license holder inside a TEE running specific software, giving them access to the output, not the raw audio file.
Conditional decryption opens up new primitives for AI, RWA, and secure collaboration:
- Decryption only inside approved software environments
- Partial access to large datasets (e.g., specific genes, not entire genomes)
- Time-based, usage-based, or multi-party logic
- Monetization tied directly to access events
Real-world Use Cases for IP Vault
IP Vault will power the next generation of programmable IP applications. Here’s how projects will build with it, with many more applications to come:
Poseidon: Vaults for AI Training Data
“Poseidon enables decentralized, traceable, and monetizable access to AI training data, addressing the primary bottleneck in the next generation of AI applications. Poseidon allows communities to collaboratively form high-quality, long-tail datasets and register them as IP assets on Story. As a full-stack data layer, Poseidon bridges the gap between supply and demand for specialized, IP-cleared training data. IP Vault enables secure access to these datasets alongside their corresponding IP assets on-chain.” — Sandeep Chinchali, Co-founder of Poseidon
Aria: Secure Access to Music Masters
“With conditional decryption and trusted execution environments, IP owners can set programmable guardrails around their assets. For example, a song master can be given to a remixer while ensuring it is only decrypted inside a secure enclave and never re-uploaded in its raw form. This allows creators to retain control, license holders to get the access they need, and Aria to unlock remix culture without compromising the integrity of the original work.” — RWAkefeller, Co-founder of Aria Protocol
Genobank: BioIP Vaults for Genomic Data
“Genobank utilizes IP Vault as a foundation to create BioIP Vault - securing complete genome files (100GB+) onchain with conditional decryption. Combined with Story’s PIL (Programmable IP Licensing), this enables precise medical access: AI Agents or Human Bioinformaticians analyzing BRCA mutations receive licenses for only those genes, never the full genome. Through TEE-based operations, researchers can run computations without touching raw DNA data. Every access is tracked through PIL, every permission controlled by the patient, and compensation flows automatically when their data contributes to discoveries. If Story can secure humanity’s most sensitive data while meeting HIPAA/GDPR compliance, it can handle any IP asset.” — Daniel Uribe, Founder of GenoBank
What’s Next
IP Vault will launch on Dev Network later this year, with Testnet and Mainnet releases planned for 2026. We're building IP Vault as a result of demand from developers across the Story ecosystem. Have ideas for what should come next? Reach out to us on Discord or DM Story Engineers on Twitter/X.
