Technical Roadmap Update

The launch of Story Mainnet marks the beginning of something bigger. Story is the world’s first blockchain designed for intellectual property (IP), and we’re just getting started. Our mission is to make creativity limitless, ownership seamless, and collaboration frictionless.

IP is the bedrock of artificial intelligence (AI). As AI transforms industries at an unprecedented pace, IP is emerging as the most critical asset class of the 21st century — a $61 trillion market encompassing training data, scientific discoveries, brands, and creative works.

Story proposes an entirely new framework for intellectual property, one that creates an open and programmable market for IP. Story is a peer-to-peer intellectual property network purpose-built to transform IP into a programmable asset class, enabling permissionless exchange, ownership, and monetization across AI and the broader internet.

This roadmap is a living document that evolves with our community.

Every update we build enhances performance, unlocks new possibilities, and makes the network more powerful.

How We Build

At Story, we believe a roadmap should be more than a list of updates——it should be a vision shaped by the people who use the network. We work side by side with our community, research partners, ecosystem partners, universities, and developers to implement the decisions that will shape the future of IP.

We focus on two types of initiatives:

1. Planned Releases: Concrete features with clear timelines, measurable goals, and real impact.

2. Active Research: Cutting-edge explorations that push the boundaries of what’s possible.

This balance allows us to execute with precision while staying flexible to new opportunities.

Planned Releases

Our development flows in cycles, each lasting several months. Every cycle introduces key improvements across three areas:

🏁 Performance: Faster. More efficient. More reliable.

We’re optimizing throughput and reducing block times to ensure seamless, high-speed operations at scale.

🛠️ Product: Expanding what’s possible.

From AI-powered execution environments to large-file storage, we’re unlocking new ways to create, share, and monetize IP.

⚖️ Governance: Transparent. Decentralized. Evolving.

We’re refining governance to empower our community with better decision-making tools and a more streamlined upgrade process.

Every feature goes through rigorous testing, security audits, and real-world validation before launch.

Read the full technical details of this roadmap update on the Story Forum.

Q2 2025: Beta Product Release

This release focuses solely on the product aspect, thus doesn't require node software updates, helping maintain network stability during the onboarding of a larger ecosystem. This release includes streamlining the IP onboarding process through two key components: the IP Portal and the Story Attestation Service.

• IP Portal (public beta): The “Homepage” for Story that allows for simple and no-code registration of IP onto Story (and all applications leveraging Story). Further, a browsing experience that enables anyone to view all of the IPs registered on Story in an elegant and visual way. A consumer-focused “GitHub for IP”.

• Story Attestation Service (public beta): An attestation service that attests to the validity of every single IP Asset on Story by verifying social identities, IP infringement/similarity, and other real world signals offchain and delivering them onchain for users/developers. Results can be surfaced on any application and will be featured in the IP Portal.

Q3 2025: Comprehensive Tech Release

The first major network upgrade after Mainnet launch focuses on performance and reliability. We’re introducing foundational improvements with minimal breaking changes, ensuring a smooth experience for everyone. Further, we will launch IPKit, our premiere Frontend Application SDK with UI Components to make registering, searching, and monetizing IP seamless on any application.

🏁 Performance

• Consensus Optimization: Optimizing consensus parameters and implementation to reduce block production time and increase validator seats by 10-20%. Adding state snapshotting to enable faster node recovery and synchronization.

• IP-Core Enhancements: Optimizing the IP-core to improve the performance of IP-related operations across IP graphs.

• Dependency Upgrades: Updating underlying dependencies for the execution and consensus layers (CometBFT, EVM, …) to gain better performance and improve stability.

🛠️ Product

• IPKit (public beta): Releasing a seamless and elegant Frontend SDK with UI Components for registering, searching, and monetizing IP on any application in a few lines of code.

• Passkey Support: Adding support for passwordless authentication for a smoother and more secure user experience.

⚖️ Governance

• Seamless Network Upgrades: Implementing a streamlined upgrade process enables nodes to seamlessly transition between versions via a consolidated binary, reducing complexity and security risks during updates.

Active Research

Some challenges require deeper exploration. Some of these will be in research collaboration with Stanford FDCI. Here’s what we’re exploring at the frontiers.

Performance at Scale

How do we maximize throughput for complex workloads? We’re optimizing storage, execution concurrency, and pushing computation closer to the hardware.

Next-Gen Consensus

We’re rethinking the consensus layer to reduce latency and support a larger validator set. We’re experimenting with CometBFT upgrades, HotStuff consensus, and BLS signatures.

On-Chain Storage

We’re exploring native, cost-efficient ways to store large files directly on the blockchain, providing an alternative to external services like IPFS.

Confidentiality

We’re researching efficient and pragmatic ways for confidential on-chain IP transactions and royalty payments.

Governance for the Future

We’re streamlining community participation, improving voting mechanisms, and refining system upgrades.

The Road Ahead

Mainnet launch marked Day 1 of our journey. Innovation never stops. With every update, Story becomes faster, smarter, and more powerful. Built with the community. Designed to bring IP — all of human knowledge and creativity — onchain.

This is just the beginning.