The general public mainnet for Story Protocol, a layer-1 community for licensing and sustaining mental property, is now up and operating following an almost six-month testnet section.
Developed by PIP Labs, the undertaking seeks to scale back authorized friction for creatives and lecturers by internet hosting a platform for registering IP and leveraging it in business settings.
Permitting IP homeowners to set programmable phrases for a way their content material is used, Story’s whitepaper says that “any two keen people can commerce, lengthen, and monetize their concepts instantly on Story with out interference from rent-seeking intermediaries.”
Story’s testnet section started on August 27 final yr, with the launch of the “Iliad” testnet.
Its mainnet kickoff comes after PIP Labs raised $140 million in whole funding, backed by enterprise capitalists together with a16z and Samsung Subsequent. With Story out within the wild, the general public could get a greater sense of what drove PIP Labs’ reportedly $2.25 billion valuation in its Sequence B spherical.
Alongside the debut of Story’s public mainnet, a PIP Labs spokesperson informed Decrypt a local token referred to as IP is launching with an preliminary provide of 1 billion.
Tokens allotted to core contributors and early backers are locked for one yr, in accordance with a weblog submit revealed by the Story Basis earlier this week.
The token will function Story’s “underlying medium of alternate” for facilitating transactions between customers whereas additionally being leveraged as a approach to safe the community by way of a course of generally known as staking, in accordance with its whitepaper.
Final yr, Story co-founder Jason Zhao informed Decrypt the community may assist set up a brand new type of decentralized finance, or DeFi, referred to as IPFi. Since IP property are represented as NFTs, he mentioned they may turn into fractionalized or serve and even function collateral for loans.
Zhao informed Decrypt extra lately that a few of the community’s most vital customers could come from the sector of synthetic intelligence. He recalled one instance of an AI agent augmenting itself with coaching information bought autonomously by way of Story’s platform.
As a layer-1 community, Story helps protocols being developed round IP. One undertaking referred to as Aria raised $7 million to buy the rights to Justin Bieber’s tune “Peaches,” sharing income with individuals who personal a fraction of the linked IP asset, Zhao mentioned.
“Anybody who has Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat, they produce and personal IP, however that is actually opaque and inaccessible,” Zhao informed Decrypt in an interview final week. “So you have got the $61 trillion market that’s primarily solely accessible to centralized intermediaries.”
Story’s whitepaper particularly mentions pharmaceutical firms and media establishments as entities that may flip IP catalogs into comparatively productive property utilizing the community.
On Thursday, the Story Basis unveiled a so-called rewards portal, letting early customers and group members declare 10% of IP’s provide.
Nevertheless, would-be farmers must take care of a system stopping them from cashing in on the coin in a bid to “set up true alignment between Story and our group,” it wrote in a separate weblog submit on Monday.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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