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Story's Chapter 2: AI-Native Infrastructure for the $80T IP Economy
Story
10 July 2025
Since launching mainnet, we’ve been building toward something bigger. Today, we begin sharing what comes next: a new infrastructure layer to unlock the full spectrum of intellectual property (IP), including the most valuable and underserved category of all: real-world data for AI.
How It Started
Launching mainnet was the first chapter. In the months since, we’ve been focused on laying the groundwork for Story’s next chapter. This new chapter kicks off with a series of big updates we have planned, and over the coming weeks, you’ll see exactly how this vision concretely starts to take shape.
From the start, we built Story for a world moving faster than traditional contracts, legal systems, or IP frameworks could ever keep up with. We envisioned Story as the intelligence layer of the Internet, designed to transform how IP is managed, valued, and exchanged.
In our first chapter, Story has already taken significant steps toward this vision.
- Built a purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain running a full-featured IP-native protocol that now serves hundreds of thousands of IPs secured onchain.
- The tokenization of globally recognized IP, from songs performed by music icons such as Justin Bieber, Blackpink, and BTS via Aria, to major brands like Crocs and Adidas through Ablo.
- Partnered with Stability AI to build AI applications that embed tracking of contributions to enable fair compensation to all IP owners involved.
- Over $100M in funds bridged through to the protocol.
- A thriving ecosystem engaging millions of creators on platforms like Magma.
Story has now become real infrastructure serving IP at scale.
What Only Story Can Do For AI
In recent months, leading AI partners have begun asking us for IP-cleared assets: datasets with embedded provenance, permissions, and royalty logic that automatically persist and update as the data is remixed, reused, or integrated into AI workflows, particularly in the field of robotics.
At its core, Story is the only blockchain purpose-built to make IP programmable, traceable, and monetizable in real-time, at global scale. Conventional blockchains can represent static ownership but cannot embed dynamic, programmable license terms.
Story lets you:
- License data programmatically with enforceable on-chain terms
- Track provenance and revenue splits across complex AI workflows
- Distribute royalties automatically to multiple contributors in a data supply chain, from data collectors to labelers and even creators of privacy-preserving synthetic data
- Bridge legal enforceability and blockchain primitives for global IP rights
- Register and tokenize both traditional and non-traditional IP, including real-world data
This unlocks something never possible before: the ability to register data as IP, track all downstream derivatives, and route royalties to everyone involved, from raw data creators to synthetic data producers.
The mandate for the next chapter became clear: solving AI’s biggest bottleneck.
AI’s Next Bottleneck Isn’t Compute. It’s IP-Cleared Real-World Data.
There’s a huge race underway for specialized, IP-safe data to train the next generation of physical AI: robots, healthcare, and other embodied applications. As Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth pointed out, no amount of media content can replicate “the intuitive judgment of friction and material deformation when people grab a coffee cup.” NVIDIA similarly identifies real-world data collection as the key bottleneck for AI developers. In short, data for the world of atoms is the next AI frontier, and it’s a precious resource.
While compute, power, and AI models become increasingly commoditized, one asset remains uniquely valuable: highly specialized real-world data that simply cannot be crawled from the web. This uncrawlable data, such as egocentric videos of humans performing complex manipulation tasks to train robotic foundation models, is the critical fuel driving the next wave of AI breakthroughs. Yet, it remains locked away in fragmented silos, inaccessible due to outdated licensing models or lack of proper incentives.
Traditional IP frameworks were never built for a world generating billions of new content iterations every day. As a result, we’re left with a $80 trillion IP market that's largely illiquid, undervalued, and urgently in need of new infrastructure.
Story’s AI-Native IP Infrastructure Is Uniquely Positioned to Serve Real-World Data On Top Of Media
This is the world Story was built for. AI’s next leap depends on unlocking and scaling this $80 trillion IP market, especially with its subcategory of real-world data.
By real-world data, we mean sensor-generated content captured by cameras, microphones, LIDAR, radar, and more that gives us a uniquely valuable snapshot of the physical world at a specific moment in space and time.
Consider a real-world example:
A driver captures an unusual edge-case moment on a dashcam, say, a cyclist emerging from fog. That image becomes a valuable training sample for computer vision.
A second person adds high-quality labels to the image (e.g., bounding boxes, metadata).
A third entity (which could even be an AI agent with a crypto wallet) generates a synthetic version of the scene with altered weather conditions. All three contributions are valuable IP, and they power the training of a new AI model.
Who owns what? Who gets paid?
With Story, each contributor, whether a human or AI agent, can register their work, embed licensing terms, and receive automated royalties as their data flows through labeling, synthesis, and model training. Only Story can track this entire lifecycle: on-chain, in real-time, and legally enforceable. As AI continues to defy the pace of innovation and limitless content generation becomes the norm, Story isn’t pivoting. We’re stepping fully into the role we always envisioned: the connective tissue for licensing, exchanging, and monetizing high-value data and IP across a decentralized, AI-powered society.
What’s Next: Story Chapter 2
We call this next phase Chapter 2, dedicated to unlocking IP and data for the AI era.
For this next phase, we are focused on three interconnected pillars:
- The data layer for physical AI models: Story will serve as the definitive licensing layer for uncrawlable, high-value real-world AI training data via DePIN and infrastructure to coordinate the supply and demand for training data.
From robots that tidy up cluttered living rooms, to vehicles that drive confidently in rain and fog, to smart assistants that respond to diverse languages and accents, we’re already delivering mission-critical datasets to global enterprises in an IP-safe way through initiatives soon to be publicly announced. - Bringing the world's IP on chain: We’ll dramatically expand IP tokenization beyond music and fashion, moving into massive, under-tapped sectors like sports, DeSci, and entertainment.
By unlocking liquidity in the global IP market, we enable entirely new ways to invest in, trade, and build on IP through our IPRWA model. - Flipping the licensing model: Together with partners that have worked with the “who’s who” of global brands, we’ll help major global names embrace, not resist, viral user-generated moments.
Helping major brands legally capture viral memes or fan remixes instead of chasing them down, or letting fashion houses monetize unexpected UGC trends that take off overnight. Companies will be able to convert unpredictable cultural explosions into valuable, licensed IP assets.
All three pillars share a simple, powerful throughline; Story systematically unlocks value from what was once unreachable, from rare, specialized data to global IP portfolios to viral content that defies control.
At every step, we use our strengths in scalable licensing, on-chain enforcement and monetization, and IP programmability to turn these assets into real, tradable economic opportunities.
The New IP Economy
We see a world where all IP, from critical AI training data to viral cultural moments, moves fluidly, transparently licensed, securely owned, and easily monetized.
Story will be the infrastructure that makes this new IP economy possible. It’s a vision that will redefine industries, empower creators, and unlock entirely new categories of innovation and investment.
Redefine IP With Us
Story’s greatest strength is our community, builders, enterprises, developers, and investors who actively shape the future of IP. We’re deeply committed to growing this ecosystem, sharing value transparently, and integrating collective feedback every step of the way.
Realizing this vision is bigger than Story alone, we invite creators, enterprises, and visionaries everywhere to join us in building the licensing infrastructure for the AI era.
Together, let’s redefine IP for the age of unstoppable creativity and intelligence.
This article has been updated to reflect the latest IP market size from the World Intellectual Property Organization.
