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Origin Summit: Where K-Pop, Crypto, and IP Converged in Unstoppable Momentum
Story
07 October 2025
It’s 7:00 p.m. in Seongsu, Seoul. It’s been a full day of insightful conversation and networking amongst IP, Web3, and AI elite, but the whole crowd is still on their feet.
On stage, HYBE’s newest K-Pop breakout group ILLIT is delivering a private live performance to close out the summit. The energy is electric. It’s a fitting finale that mirrors the high-voltage mix of cultures and ideas ignited throughout the day.
Origin Summit was a one-of-a-kind event that nobody in the room will soon forget.
Rewind to the Beginning: A Night of VVIP Insights
Origin Summit kicked off with an intimate VVIP dinner and fireside chat that set the tone for what was to come. In one corner of the room, Maggie Kang, director of KPop Demon Hunters, the #1 film in Netflix history. She offered a unique perspective on storytelling, fan culture and Korea’s outsized cultural influence.
Over dinner, Kang explained the secret behind KPop Demon Hunters’ success, and it wasn’t big budgets or Hollywood formulas. “The biggest mistake most IP makes is trying to appeal to everyone. Once you do that, you risk losing everyone. Instead, focus on a smaller, diehard audience and trust their love to carry the word outward.”
Kang's anecdote struck a chord with Story co-founder, SY Lee. After all, startups live by the same rule. It’s better to have 100 true fans than 10,000 lukewarm users, and real success often comes on the 2,000th night, not overnight. This ethos of devotion-driven growth would echo throughout Origin Summit.
That message landed with particular resonance in Seoul, a city where fandom isn’t just a side effect of culture, but a practice in constant innovation. From having one of the world’s most digitally savvy populations to being a trendsetter in entertainment, Korea proves that a passionate core audience can drive global phenomena. South Korea’s cultural content exports hit a record $13.6 billion in 2024, and the country boasts the largest number of ChatGPT subscribers outside the U.S. It’s no wonder that winning in Korea, whether for K-Pop or blockchain, often predicts winning the world. Roughly 30% of Koreans (15+ million people) invest in digital assets, and Korean exchanges account for nearly 50% of global altcoin trading. Trading volume Korea is now the second-largest crypto market globally.
This is the backdrop against which Origin Summit unfolded: a perfect stage set in a country where tech, finance, and fandom intersect like nowhere else.
K-Pop Moguls, Crypto Legends, and More Under One Roof
It’s not every day you see K-pop entertainment CEOs sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with crypto founders, legendary game developers, VCs, and even government regulators. For the main summit the next morning, Origin Summit managed to convene the elite and leaders of their respective industries:
- Kyung In Jung, CEO, The Black Label (Executive Producer for BLACKPINK, KPop Demon Hunters)
- Maggie Kang, Director, Kpop Demon Hunters
- Justin Sun, Founder of TRON, Advisor to HTX
- Arthur Hayes, Chief Investment Officer, Maelstrom
- Amy Oldenburg, Head of Emerging Markets Equity, Morgan Stanley Investment Management
- Lee Sung-soo, CAO & Former CEO, SM Entertainment (company behind Aespa, EXO, and more)
- Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Managing Director, Grayscale Investments
- Brandon Yu, CEO, HYBE (company behind BTS, Ariana Grande, and more)
- Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins and Igloo, Inc.
- Yat Siu, Co-founder & Executive Chairman, Animoca Brands
- Jangwon Lee, Founder & CEO, Contents Technologies
...and many more.
This diverse lineup wasn’t split into separate tracks or side events, they were part of one continuous conversation. This underscored one of Story’s core beliefs: the future of IP is multidisciplinary. It lives at the crossroads of culture, technology, and policy. And only a forum like this, created by Story, with its mission to build the “IP layer” of the future could bring these worlds together at such scale.
“The diversity of people in the room showed just how much interest there is in the breadth of issues Story is tackling.” — SY Lee, Founder & CEO, Story
Throughout the summit, conversations jumped fluidly from discussing K-pop fan communities to the mechanics of stablecoins, from AI-generated art to intellectual property law. Yet it all felt surprisingly cohesive. Everyone was there to explore how IP can be better created, owned, and monetized in the digital age.
Korea: Ground Zero for the Onchain IP Revolution
A theme that emerged often: Korea is the epicenter for onchain IP adoption. Korea’s entertainment industry has become a global factory for IP: K-pop idols, K-dramas, webtoons, and games that garner massive worldwide fandoms. Combine that with Korea’s tech-forward population and supportive regulatory climate, and you have fertile ground for a new kind of marketplace where intellectual property is brought onchain and traded as an asset.
This came into focus on a panel about “Won-Stable: Building Korea’s National Digital Dollar,” which featured cross-party government representatives actively working on crypto legislation, debating what a blockchain-based won (₩) would mean for adoption. The consensus: a KRW stablecoin could turbocharge onchain transactions domestically, letting K-IP (Korean IP assets) be bought and sold by anyone with a smartphone and a few won in their wallet.
In his fireside chat, Arthur Hayes discussed how expanding money supply, rising debt, and Fed policy are reshaping global markets and eroding fiat stability. He argued that Bitcoin and DeFi offer the clearest alternatives in an era of political populism and AI-induced disruption. The conversation closed on how Asia’s crypto adoption and stablecoin innovation signal the future of decentralized finance.
Justin Sun and SY Lee discussed the convergence of finance and IP, outlining how tokenization unlocks capital access for the average content creator while ensuring IP authenticity and monetization. They explored the infrastructure needed for stablecoin adoption, the risks of leverage and centralization, and the role of programmable IP in an AI-driven future.
Big Announcements
Origin Summit was also a stage for major announcements. Story used the spotlight to unveil several partnerships and milestones, each reinforcing the momentum behind its vision. Among the biggest news:
- Story signed a 3-year exclusive agreement with Seoul Exchange to become the blockchain infrastructure for Korean real-world assets (RWAs), creating a powerful bridge between Story and one of the world’s cultural juggernauts.
- Barunson, the film studio behind Parasite, and Solo Leveling, the global webtoon and anime phenomenon, both announced integrations - a mark of major IP coming aboard. Their adoption shows Story’s ongoing journey into mainstream, beloved IP.
- Moonbirds and Azuki announced that their IP is coming to Story. Moonbirds holders and creators will soon extend the brand into AI games (via Verse8) and custom merch (via ABLO), with licensing and royalties secured onchain. What was once “community-driven IP” hype is becoming reality, showing how a crypto-native brands can expand fan engagement through Story.
- During his keynote "Building Data Economies Onchain", Sandeep Chinchali (Founder, Poseidon; Chief AI Officer, Story), revealed Poseidon's Litepaper, introducing a Subnet framework purpose-built on Story. A major step forward in the Story ecosystem’s effort to tackle AI’s real-world data bottleneck.
- Aria launched Aria PRIME in partnership with Contents Technologies, debuting with a $100M deal to tokenize one of Korea’s largest music catalogs on Story.
Beyond the individual deals, the pattern was clear: Story is rapidly expanding its foothold across major IP, both Web2 and crypto native.
AI x IP: Unlocking AI's Bottleneck
Another major thread throughout Origin Summit was the intersection of artificial intelligence and intellectual property which is arguably the defining technological challenge of our time. The consensus here was stark: AI’s next big bottleneck isn’t compute power, it’s data. Specifically, high-quality IP that algorithms have permission to use. As models get more powerful (and now multi-modal, meaning they can see, hear, and generate content in various forms), the need for rights-cleared datasets becomes critical. In other words, before AI can build amazing new games or music or art, someone needs to provide the raw ingredients in a way that respects creators and compensates them. That is fundamentally an IP problem before it’s an AI problem.
Origin Summit tackled this head-on in several talks. In a fireside titled “Why AI Needs Crypto-Based Verification Systems,” with Sreeram Kannan (Founder and CEO, EigenLayer), Andrea Muttoni (CPO, Story; President, Story Foundation), and Jan Liphardt (Founder and CEO, OpenMind) moderated by Liz Harkavey from a16z, they discussed how blockchains can act as real-time ledgers of who owns what content, who created which derivative, and what usage is allowed.
By registering creative works on Story, developers can prove a piece of data’s provenance and embed licensing terms that AI applications could check instantly before, say, using a song clip or an image. Another panel, “Building Data Economies Onchain,” went deep into the mechanics: how to price access to IP for training models, how to split revenues between original creators and AI remixers, and how tokens like Story’s native $IP might facilitate this exchange. This is specifically relevant for the field of robotics, where real-world data is the scarcest and most sought after resource. It was geeky stuff, but for the venture capitalists and AI researchers in the audience, it painted an exciting picture of an AI economy built on fair, transparent rails.
All this theory was backed by the concrete announcements we heard. The Moonbirds and Azuki integrations are perfect case studies of making IP “AI-ready”. They set up these brands to be feedstock for games, merch, and media that fans themselves can generate. We also saw demos from startups like Verse8 (turning textual lore and character IP into playable game content via AI) relying on clear rights and provenance for the media they use, exactly what Story is designed to ensure.
In a world where generative AI is blurring the lines of authorship, Story’s approach of tying identity, attribution, and licensing to content at the protocol level could be a game-changer. The summit made that future feel within reach.
The World’s IP Blockchain Has Arrived
Throughout Origin Summit, you could sense that something special was crystallizing. As Maggie Kang put it during her conversation with SY: “It’s fitting your company’s called Story. Because that’s the most important thing, in anything. Everybody wants to feel something, to be connected to something, and that’s the story.” Ultimately, that’s what this summit was about. It was a narrative in itself, a story of worlds colliding to form something new. K-pop, blue chip NFTs, crypto projects, AI companies, and everything in between gathered to discuss how the world is taken by storm by AI and how IP is a common denominator. It was about finding common ground in bringing real-world assets onchain. These weren’t typical pairings, and you’d be hard-pressed to find them all together anywhere else. Only Story, with its cross-cutting mission, could have convened this group with a shared purpose.
As the lights finally dimmed on ILLIT’s performance and the crowd filed out into the Seoul night, there was a buzz of optimism. And for two whirlwind days, the evidence of that optimism was everywhere you looked.
We envisioned Story as the intelligence layer of the internet, as new infrastructure to transform how IP is registered, valued, and exchanged. Not just for media and entertainment, but for the full spectrum of intellectual property, including the most valuable and underserved category of all: real-world data for AI.
If Origin proved anything, it’s that IP has declared itself an unstoppable force, and that force is now drawing strength from all directions. East and West. Mainstream and underground. Corporate and community.
Korea runs on IP. AI runs on IP. And now, IP runs on Story.
