What exactly does Story Protocol want to do, and what kind of magic does it have to attract top investment institutions from China, the United States, South Korea, and others to bet on it?

By: Dehydrated web3

On September 6th, the on-chain intellectual property protocol Story Protocol announced the completion of a $25 million Series A financing led by a16z Crypto. Together with the $29.3 million financing completed in May of this year, the total financing amount has exceeded $54 million.

In addition to a16z Crypto, other participating investors include well-known venture capital institutions such as Hashed and Foresight Ventures. Against the current market background, what exactly does Story Protocol want to do, and what kind of magic does it have to attract top investment institutions from China, the United States, South Korea, and others to bet on it?

Story Protocol: Opening the "Printing Press Moment" of the Internet Age

If you want to understand what Story Protocol is trying to do, perhaps comparing it to the "printing press" in the internet age would make it easier to understand, because they both aim to break the original knowledge creation and dissemination models.

It is well known that over 400 years ago, the birth of the printing press completely changed the methods of collecting, storing, and disseminating information, turning competitive resources into non-competitive resources that could be replicated on a large scale, accelerating the Renaissance and driving the modern European cultural transformation.

The blockchain, on the other hand, can be seen as the "printing press moment" of the internet age, but its utility is quite the opposite—on the internet with zero marginal cost of replication, non-competitive information resources can be turned into distributed, decentralized competitive information resources through smart contracts.

In summary, the printing press, based on paper, made the knowledge behind the text move from closed to open, and Story Protocol aims to further expand knowledge (IP) on the internet based on the blockchain.

The core issue involved is that the digital publishing IP on the internet currently faces a series of urgent problems throughout its entire lifecycle:

Creators: Difficult to Authenticate, Difficult to Protect Rights

First, the traditional IP authentication process requires going to a specialized third-party authority and providing corresponding identity verification materials and supporting evidence, which is particularly unfriendly to digital publishing IP based on the internet. Digital IPs, in particular, need a new, more convenient, and lower-cost authentication process.

Second, the near-zero replication cost of the internet and the centralized operating environment also mean that value capture has always been a major pain point for creators—aside from the difficulty of pursuing rights and protecting them after infringement, IP holding parties also have the dominant right to obtain and distribute income.

The blockchain's timestamp and smart contracts can efficiently and concisely prove the traceability, tamper resistance, and uniqueness of digital cultural products (such as text, images, videos, and audio), and once these works that have been authenticated and registered have subsequent transactions, the blockchain they are on will automatically record them.

At the same time, the blockchain can effectively solve the problem of value creators often being at a disadvantage in income distribution, because the traditional IP transaction circulation mechanism relies on third-party intermediaries to handle and distribute income. With blockchain technology, value creators can gain more control and autonomy, thereby occupying a more advantageous position in income distribution.

IP Holding Parties: Poor Openness, Dominant Share of Income

In traditional digital rights management (DRM), publishers generally use a centralized database to control users' access, changes, sharing, and replication of files through licensing operations.

However, it is a typical "centralized" cluster-based operating model, where the intermediary holding the copyright connects IP creators and demanders, separating the two, and has obvious drawbacks:

• The difficulty and high cost of the originality review of IP holding parties make it difficult to confirm the true ownership of works.
• Centralized IP holding parties divide IPs into closed traffic pools, constraining the further derivation and creation of IPs.

The problems from the perspectives of IP creators and holding parties are exactly what Story Protocol aims to provide new solutions for—creating, managing, and licensing new intellectual property on the chain, achieving the democratization of intellectual property creation through a global, scalable intellectual property repository, and providing a streamlined framework to achieve source tracking, frictionless licensing, and income sharing.

This also means that Story Protocol aims to create a knowledge property framework that integrates the principles of openness and collaboration native to the internet, becoming the native "open IP infrastructure" of the internet.

IP Repository + Composability Module = "Open IP Infrastructure"

So how does Story Protocol specifically realize its vision of "open IP infrastructure"?

As a neutral third party, the solution provided by Story Protocol is also built around the life cycle of IP, mainly including the mechanism design of two major modules:

IP Repository

First is the IP Repository, which is similar to "GitHub" in the developer world, responsible for storing all related IP metadata and providing traceability based on clear ownership.

Strictly speaking, it is a set of underlying protocols deployed on the blockchain, a set of composable data structures that can store IPs as Lego blocks on the chain. In other words, the IP Repository focuses on the initial birth and creation stage of all IPs, ensuring that IP metadata can be accurately recorded and accessed at any time.

Through standardized structure, it enables any application to easily create, manage, and utilize IPs, becoming a globally open and collaborative source of IPs like "GitHub."

This not only makes it extremely convenient to call for ownership proof, simplifying the process and preparation work for copyright protection, but also gives more powerful operational space for authorization circulation and subsequent rights protection.

In addition, the biggest highlight of this "GitHub" for IPs is that it allows tracking the development path of IPs, recording their evolution from birth to digital co-creation:

This means that it can consistently record the birth, enrichment, and improvement process of any IP, and save various versions of IP content, leaving traces of subsequent creation, transactions, and other behaviors of IPs, ensuring the traceability of the entire life cycle evolution of IPs from a technical perspective, and building a set of IP evolution networks.

"Composability Module"

The "Composability Module" can provide various functions for IP assets registered on the protocol. All types of IPs can be combined and extended through the module, unlocking a series of functions, such as licensing, co-creation, and income streams of derivative works.

This includes combining IPs with mature Web3 business models such as DeFi and NFT, releasing the liquidity of IPs and their greater potential value. In addition, leveraging the programmability of smart contracts can also meet new use cases that the traditional IP system cannot achieve.

For example, generating programmable licenses, creators can transparently set license conditions for others to seamlessly extend their works, rather than through one-on-one legal negotiations.

Story Protocol also plans to provide developers with crowdfunding tools, IP discovery, licensing modules, asset certification, and community development support.

In short, these two mechanism designs of the IP Repository and Composability Module cover a series of IP life cycle processes such as registration and certification, on-chain authentication, derivative creation, and circulation transactions.

Underlying Infrastructure + Self-composing IP Ecosystem

Blockchain has always been called the "Internet of Value" and is itself an excellent technical carrier for value distribution. Story Protocol, as a neutral third party, aims to directly link creators and users, reshaping the value discovery and distribution system of IPs, and providing IPs with an infrastructure that can be traced throughout the entire process, providing diverse functions, and possessing openness.

Since its positioning is infrastructure, Story Protocol is simply providing a unified underlying layer for developers to build specific IP ecosystem products on top of it.

From this perspective, Story Protocol is just a starting point, or rather the center of this grand native open IP ecosystem of the internet—subsequently, it will aggregate the self-innovation capabilities of the ecosystem and, together with many developers and entrepreneurs, collectively empower the entire publishing chain, especially individual authors, to establish a fairer and more positive publishing environment.

This also means that a product matrix centered around Story Protocol will be established for the entire lifecycle of IPs in the future, allowing for the "one-to-many" construction of N specific applications on top of it, enabling creators to be independent of centralized platforms, developers to freely develop, and users to make choices in their experiences:

• At the authentication storage level: Original IPs are stored and registered on the chain for evidence, and for subsequent copyright protection and authorization circulation, a low-cost, low-friction, easy-to-prove copyright self-certification, rights protection, and circulation method different from traditional copyright protection processes will be provided.
• At the level of re-creation: Traces of subsequent creation and transactions of IPs, and through a series of modular designs, any IP will have "Lego block" properties and allow the community to actively participate in co-creation, exploring greater content value boundaries.
• At the circulation transaction level: Allowing IPs to be combined with DeFi, NFT, and other models, and combined with smart contracts to enable assets to be controlled and traded on the blockchain, empowering various specific use cases.
• At the anti-infringement level: Once original IPs are registered on the chain, they are tamper-proof, and if combined with real-world laws, they can ensure legal effects from a technical perspective.

In this way, different dimensions of IP products on this chain will share an open IP infrastructure, and their differences will be limited to the application layer. A complete ecosystem and system can be built around IP authentication, circulation transactions, Lego construction, and rights protection, providing a fully composable IP trading and usage experience.

Backed by top-tier investors, the vision is grand, and if successful, Story Protocol will naturally become the most core component of IP management and creative content, with immense potential for the future, but undoubtedly full of challenges.

Team Members

According to the official website, Story Protocol has three co-founders, and interestingly, they are from South Korea, the United States, and a Chinese-American, presenting a distribution background of "China, the United States, and South Korea."

Among the co-founders, S.Y. Lee should be the key figure of Story Protocol. According to LinkedIn data, he graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and served as the President of The Oxford Union, one of the oldest university debating societies in the UK, where Einstein, Reagan, Nixon, Carter, and others have given speeches.

Of particular note is S.Y. Lee's political and business background. He interned at the U.S. House of Representatives and the South Korean National Assembly, and from 2013, he worked as a special contributor for one of South Korea's largest media groups, the Korea Central Daily, for four years.

Starting in 2021, S.Y. Lee began serving as a partner at Kakao Entertainment, a well-known South Korean entertainment, mass media, and publishing company, and also as a venture partner at Hashed, a well-known South Korean venture capital firm, which is the top investor from South Korea in Story Protocol's latest round of financing.

The other two co-founders, Jason Levy and Jason Zhao, are more focused on the product and technical dimensions. Both are alumni of Stanford University, with the former having worked for several years at top companies such as Apple and Episode, and the latter having served as a product manager at Google's DeepMind project.

The core contributing team of Story Protocol is also almost entirely from prestigious schools and covers various roles such as story developers, product managers, and senior developers:

• Allen Chuang: Contributor to Bu Zhi DAO.
• Ben Sternberg: Entrepreneurial partner of S.Y. Lee at Radish Fiction.
• Gatsby Kim: Personnel and finance director at Radish Fiction during S.Y. Lee's time there.
• Jonny Chang: Senior information security analyst at VMware.
• Leo Chen: VP, leading Story Protocol's engineering team, formerly a software development manager at AWS and development VP at Harmony.
• Liz Tingue: Story lead at Story Protocol, Columbia University undergraduate, Harvard BA professional graduate.
• Raúl Martínez: IP protocol and smart contract architect.
• Spyros Tsiounis: Story developer at multiple companies.
• Susan Park: Design lead at Story Protocol, former Web3 product Googler design lead at Google.
• Weilei Yu: Growth lead at Story Protocol, former market and developer relations lead at Flow Blockchain and CMO at Subspace Labs.
• Ze Huang: Engineer at Story Protocol.

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