Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Story Protocol: Tokenizing Intelligence Into Programmable IP Assets - Jason Zhao

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

As online content becomes predominantly AI-driven, intellectual property (IP) rights should not be neglected as (human) creators will heavily rely on them. While the main use cases for blockchains revolve around financial applications, one could argue that our everyday lives constantly intersect IPs in different forms. Although the legal framework is abundant, proper recording, monetization and disputes are often a burden for independent creators. Story Protocol aims to create a decentralised framework for IP management, tokenizing it both through NFTs and fungible tokens, allowing creators to register fully programmable IP, that is also recognized and enforced through the traditional judiciary system. Using smart contracts and programmable metadata, Story Protocol ensures proper monetization for creators whenever their IP is used.Topics covered in this episode:Jason’s backgroundCurrent IP pain pointsTokenizing IPStory Protocol blockchainPreventing IP infringementStory Protocol validatorsInteroperabilityOnboarding traditional IP to Story ProtocolStory Protocol’s legal frameworkEnforcing IP rights on Story ProtocolHiding or demonetizing on-chain IPGovernance & disputesRoadmapEpisode links:Jason Zhao on XStory Protocol on XSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

IP is an asset class where the market for that asset is so inefficient. The transaction costs to do business, to transact, trade, use IP are so high. And honestly, it's so inaccessible and opaque. You have no information about this market. So it's illegible, but it's also illiquid and it's high transaction costs. So only the biggest, biggest players with hundreds of lawyers, they're able to do these massive bespoke deals and negotiations for IP. But for the 99.9% long tail of this market, nothing happened because the cost of making

things happen are too high. you know, whether or not people think about it in this way is something that we interact with far more than with stocks, right? Every single day we spend three or four hours on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram. We post photos. We create photos. And with AI, there's going to be 8 billion Hollywood-level creators that can create Hollywood-level movies by just having a single idea and putting in a single paragraph. So even though the word IP is not how people maybe would call it, like the reality is this is sort of the most tangible part of our lives, like consuming and creating culture, and AI is only going to supercharge that. The amount of

infrastructure that's been built for IP is very low comparatively to how deep of an impact it makes in our everyday lives. We don't just build software. We actually spend a lot of time and effort on the legal side of things. So I would say for every single dollar we put into building the stack I just told you about on the engineering side, we've probably spent as much with some of the best legal teams in the world to create a new licensing framework that's first of its kind. And we call it the programmable IP license. Essentially, it's a standard legal framework that maps one-to-one with the parameters on story. So if you set some terms on story, let's say in order to use this IP, you need to pay me $5, that smart contract parameter is also

mirrored on the legal contract itself. In other words, there's a one-to-one link between code and law and story, and everything on story has a legal wrap around it that's enforceable. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Anz, and today I'm speaking with Jason Zhao, the co-founder of Story Protocol, which is a protocol in the IP space that we'll dive into in just a bit before I talk to you about our sponsors. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Corace 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Pantera Capital and Ledger trust Corus 1 with their acids. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos and,

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Deploy on the EVM-compatible NOSIS chain or secure the network with just one GNO and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at NOSIS.io. Jason, it's super nice to have you on. Thanks for having me. Really excited for this conversation. Before we dive into Story Protocol, tell us a bit about yourself. Absolutely. So my background is a little bit more diverse. I didn't come. I haven't been in the blockchain space for 10 years like some people here, but I've been pretty interested in a couple of things before entering the blockchain space. So I studied philosophy in university, really interested in political theory. And I also got a master's in computer science, both at Stanford.

So I've always liked to focus on the intersection of the humanities and technology. But originally, you know, my first passion in technology and software was really AI. So I did some AI research at Computer Vision Lab at Stanford. And then I worked at DeepMind, which is Google's AI Lab for a couple of years. And what I was doing there was taking reinforcement learning coming out of AlphaGo and Alpha Zero, these large like chess playing, game playing agents and finding ways to take that research, that reinforcement learning algorithms and apply them to build new products on the back of that. So one thing that I've been really interested in throughout my career is essentially finding

ways to take cutting-edge technical research and find ways to translate that into tangible consumer products. That's what I was doing at DeepMind. But then I got really interested in blockchain. I would say around 2020, around DFI summer at 2020-21. And what really excited me was I started to reread the Bitcoin and Ethereum and White Papers in addition to Uniswap and Maker and these other core protocols. And what was really striking is that reading these white papers, it was almost like reading a political treatise in some ways, especially like Bitcoin and Ethereum are so ideological and so philosophical with a little bit of computer science mixed in. So I found that element very intellectually interesting that, you know,

blockchain had this ambition to become core substrate of a new type of internet and somewhat argue even like a new type of society. So that was really exciting and I think very fresh. And then the other component was sort of the open source ethos and the organic, almost Darwinian ethos of blockchain where, you know, if you build a smart contract, it's this unstoppable software program that can last for thousands of years as long as the blockchain is maintained. and the idea that other people can permissionlessly build on top of your work.

They can fork it. They can build an application on top of it. If they want, they can even maliciously attack it. So if the software is structured perfectly, then there will be cracks and those cracks will be manipulated. And that leaves this really open research environment where you're going from white paper to products, from research to production in like a matter of weeks or months. Rather than what I was doing in the AI world was, you know, you wait like five years to see some research going to production. Because there's only like five or six players that can actually do that, right? So that's kind of how I got into blockchain.

And the sort of, you know, quick story of how story happened is just me and my co-founder were really focused on finding ways to build blockchains that could do something beyond money and beyond finance. And I think IP is, you know, a $61 trillion asset class that blockchains haven't really tackled. And there's so many problems that IP is having because it's just so opaque, so inefficient of a market. Especially with respect to AI, you're starting to see all these issues. So that's kind of how a story started and how I got into the space. And what are the pain points that you currently see with how IP is treated under the current system? Yeah. So, I mean, I could go on for a long time about this. But just to kind of give you the high level overview, you know, I think the history of crypto is kind of building software-based networks, blockchain networks that replace struggling existing institutions, right? And the best example of this is Bitcoin. You have Satoshi responding to the 2008 financial crisis and essentially saying, hey, like, banks, maybe we shouldn't, maybe we shouldn't completely rely on banks. Maybe we should at least have an alternative.

where software is intermediary instead of like this massive Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers institution, right? And so that's kind of an example where most blockchings have been focused is kind of continuing that mission of decentralizing finance.

But if you look at the legal system, that system is way more antiquated and way less sophisticated than Wall Street. Wall Street's actually quite sophisticated. If you think about just to give an example, I've talked to sort of execs of companies where their entire business is owning IP, right? And IP can be scientific research,

so it can be pharmaceuticals, It can be the biggest brands in the world. Think Louis Vuitton or Nike or Puma or Ditas. And then also think, you know, media, right? So Hollywood, music, Black Pink, things like that. So it's a very broad asset class. But if you go to execs in any branch of this asset class, I've literally heard this many times where they'll tell me,

hey, sometimes I just don't do deals where I could actually have someone else use my IP and pay me for it because I need to go to my legal team and find out what IP I own. And that, like, querying what IP I own and what slice of the the rights I own is actually more expensive. It costs more millions of dollars than the deal itself. So I just don't do the deal, right? And this is indicative of a broader problem, which is IP is an asset class where the market for that asset is so inefficient.

The transaction costs to do business, to transact, trade, use IP are so high. And honestly, it's so inaccessible and opaque to people like, you know, you and I, like, how do I know what IP I can use? There's not a place I can go. If you go to the US Copyright Office, for example, it's like, it looks worse than Craigslist, right? So you have no information about this market. So it's illegible.

But it's also illiquid and it's high transaction cost. So it's a very inefficient market where you have only the biggest, biggest players with hundreds of lawyers, they're able to do these like massive bespoke deals and negotiations for IP. But for the 99.9% long tail of this market, nothing happened because the cost of making things happen are too high. And that's what stories trying to solve is make it easier for individual IP holders, even also AI companies, right?

You're starting to see open AI is getting sued by the New York Times. At the same time, they're also paying a bunch of IP companies like tens of million dollars a year. So, like, how do you have this massive discrepancy? There's this, like, free-for-all in the IP world. And our thesis is, like, whether you're an individual IP holder, whether you're an Open AI, it's very hard for you to license IP. Like, you also can't expect Open AI to make 10 million licensing deals per day. They don't have the resources to do that.

So I think the thesis is the market for IP is very inefficient, and you need a blockchain-based global market, a transparent market, a programmable market for IP. How did you stumble upon this kind of, like, interweaving set of problems? because in a way, it's very obscure and that most of us don't really deal with IP directly the way that we kind of deal with, say, stocks or kind of like financial products or even kind of like things like reputation or so that kind of other people are trying to put on chain. Yeah, it's a good question.

So the way I got interested in this issue is a couple things. So one is just my time at T-Mines and my time doing AI research. there's a saying in AI research. It's quite simple, but it is very truthful, which is if you have garbage in, you're going to have garbage out. And what that means is if you have really bad IP, really bad data, you can have the world's most advanced AI model algorithm. You can have the most compute, all the GPs you want,

and you can train it for a million years, but it's still going to produce bad outputs if you train it on bad data. And so very quickly I realized, you know, even at deep mind and at Stanford, that essentially high-quality data is a scarce resource, and is a resource that, again, doesn't have a very efficient market, right? So not only are there a ton of legal battles around, you know, like whether AI companies need to pay for IP, which I certainly think they do, there's also just not an efficient way to actually pay for that IP, to actually even not even just pay for it, but to discover it, right? So the more, the closer you

look at, you know, how the market for this sort of like high valuable training data works, the more you realize that even the most basic insights as who owns what IP and how much do I need to pay and how can I pay them, like these questions are very difficult and very expensive to answer. So that's kind of my first foray into it. And then like I said before, I got really interested in blockchain through DeFi summer. And I was thinking like, you know, if blockchains truly are like this substrate for a new society and or at least a new internet, you know, can they do things beyond just currencies? Because, you know, if you think about the institutions that hold our society together today, they go so much broader than just currency. A currency is a big part of it. Money is a big part

of it. But what I'd argue is IP as a term is quite, you know, technical in some sense. It's quite legal, but IP as a concept, you know, whether or not people think about it in this way is something that we interact with far more than with stocks, right? Every single day we spend three or four hours on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram. We post photos, we create photos. And with AI, there's going to be 8 billion Hollywood-level creators that can create Hollywood-level movies by just having a single idea and putting in a single paragraph. So even though the word IP is not how people maybe would call it, like the reality is this is sort of the most tangible part of our lives like consuming and creating culture and AI is only going to supercharge that. So I think most people spend far more time

on TikTok, let's say, then on Charles Schwab or on Robin Hood and certainly on Coinbase. So I think IP has a total like a massive addressable market. It's very easy for people to understand why it's valuable because, you know, even your mom can understand like why Snoopy or Mickey Mouse is valuable. They might not understand like why, you know, collateralized loan, over collateralized loan on Ave's is so valuable, right? that might be more niche. But I think the amount of infrastructure that's been built for IP is very low comparatively to how deep of an impact it makes in our everyday lives.

Why do we think kind of there needs to be a blockchain at the core of the solution for this, right? Kind of like it sounds like kind of some standardization and kind of like digitization would already kind of make a big dent. I agree. I think some standardization would make a big dent. And I think the analogy I like to, always go back to is because it's familiar in the blockchain space is money. And so I think Swift has

has somewhat standardized international payments, right? There are sort of global payment standards because you know, countries with different banking systems and different currencies need to be able to exchange money with each other. And so we as a society have tried to come up with an like a kind of overlapping set of agreements and standards like Swift that allow us to pay money to each other across borders. But then again, stable coins are probably 100x cheaper than Swift. So I think that, you know, like, I think where IP is today is they don't even have a Swift. Okay, there's no, there's no Swiss for IP. So yes, I do agree, like even having off-chain solutions would be really helpful. And I think that it's great that people are thinking about that. But I like with

stable coins being 10x better than Swift. I think a Blaschain-based solution will be 10x better than even like a Swift for IP. And the reason why is because I think the killer app, if I had to summarize in one sentence for Blachshane is to create unstoppable, programmable digital market. And you have this instant settlement, instant payment. for IP across the world, regardless of where you're from. And I think that's really, really powerful. So I think that's why blockchains are necessary. And then as a very pragmatic matter, we're a developer product.

So we don't necessarily build a bunch of user-facing applications. We're more like Stripe or a payment platform in the sense of, you know, you're not going on Stripe.com to pay for your hoodie or your shoes that you just bought. You're going on some website, and Stripe is powering, it's kind of behind the scenes, powering the payment experience. That's how we imagine the story is we're kind of like a developer tool. and if you're building an app that touches IP, whether it's an AI application or a consumer app or a creator tool,

you're kind of using Story to sort of register IP that's being created on your app to Story or pull IP that's already on Story and bring it into your app. And if that's the case, we need to sell to developers. And in order to sell developers, we need to assure them that if they're about to put their entire company's IP, which could be 90% of the company's value, on a system, that system cannot just shut down.

Because what we're promising to developers or we're pitching them, I should say, is you register your IP from your application once on story and can now access monetization and distribution from the hundreds of other applications in our ecosystem, right? So it might originate from, like, you might create a character on one creator tool, but then that character can be used as a comic

in, you know, five other apps, right? And so if we just, if we have the ability to shut that off, shut that IP system off, then we're cutting off like a very important source of revenue for that business. And I think developers from, you know, seeing, for example, Twitter, shut down their API, I think in the 2010s, that was very devastating, right? And people

stop trusting centralized APIs so much that if we're asking these businesses where 90% of their values accrued in IP, like, it's good to have this immutability in an unstoppable condition where they know that, you know, the software we put out there that they're registering their IP on is actually not in our control either. So I think that's an added layer of benefit, but I do think sort of just having a global settlement layer in instant payments is really important part of why we chose to have blockchain system backend. Okay, yeah. I think this sets the stage super beautifully. So kind of let's dive into kind of like how the protocol itself works and then we can kind of loop our way back around to kind of like how this kind of applies to the real world. So story is actually its own blockchain, right? So kind of why did you choose to kind of build a new blockchain rather than kind of use an existing one? Yeah. So there's two reasons for that. One is more I would say historical based on like our own. sort of trials and tribulations as a company.

The other is more philosophical and future-facing. So in terms of the sort of history of why we ended up building it all one, that was never really our intention. So we started off trying to build just a pure smart contract protocol. And we immediately ran into a lot of limitation. So essentially what we wanted to do, the way that IP works, is it's very graph-like in nature if you try to represent it in a database structure. And what I mean by that one example I can give is this game called Super Smash Brothers.

So it's a pretty popular game where you have, like, characters from many different franchises that are able to fight with each other, and it's like kind of a combat game. Right? So you have Mario from Nintendo. You have Sonic from Sega. You have, you know, characters that are licensed in, essentially, from, let's say, five to 10 different franchises.

So you can imagine there's, like, let's say, 30 to 50 characters in that game from many different franchises. And the way that we would represent that on Story is you'd have, like, 30 different parents IPs. So you have Mario, you have Sonic, you have some other character. And they're all kind of like, licensing their IP into this game, which is its own sort of dots or node on this graph. So you can imagine like 30 parent nodes all connecting to a single child mode.

And if the game generates revenue, let's say it generates $100 in revenue, that revenue would be flow, it would flow up to each of the parents based on the agreements that they had, right? So maybe Mario gets 1% of the revenue. So it gets $1. So now you have this revenue coming in to this graph and flowing up to each of the 30 parents. But the thing about building something that's permissionless and on chain is that those

parents can have parents as well, right? So you have money moving into one node. That's the game. It flows up proportionally to all the parents. And then the parents have their own parents. And so you have this very computationally expensive graph traversal problem. And the EVM, as it stands today, is just, it's not optimized to do this sort of computation. And because it was so expensive, we had to limit our protocol such that each IP could only have two parents connected to it. And that really limit the sort of things that you can do on story. For example, if you have a song that has three components, like let's say, a harmony, a melody and then like some instrumentals,

you can't represent that on story because you can only have two parents. And so we had to limit a lot of the applications and we decided that that's not the route we wanted to go. Like we didn't want to just wait for the EVM to get better. And so what we did was we just built our own execution environment and this kind of goes to this sort of feature-facing reason. We decided that like IP is just a very different type of asset than money

and it requires a lot of additional things beyond just the graph traversal problem I mentioned to you in terms of the execution environment, you also need to validate each IP. You need to validate whether it's unique or not, right? So if someone registers Mario, like, we can't have like 5,000 Mario's on story, right? That's not how IP works.

There's only one Mario, and it's the unique one, and then we need to track other usages of Mario, right? So even like this sort of decentralized validation service, we had to build out ourselves. And so the benefit of building a layer one, although it's much, much more costly and takes a lot more time on the engineering side, is that you can customize every layer of the staff.

So we can choose exactly what's software our validators are running. We could choose exactly how to customize our virtual machine. And I think that the product that we put out there on public main net is going to be version zero. And I think there's going to be many, many improvements, fundamental improvements that we want to make over the coming years as we get more feedback. And it's very difficult to change and customize these things if you're either building a smart contract protocol on another layer one or if you're even building a layer two where if Ethereum is struggling, for example, you're just by default struggling. And if Ethereum is making certain changes, so it's op codes,

you kind of have to accept those changes. And so I think for us, the freedom and independence was worth the extra cost as we started to encounter more and more bespoke problems that we ran into. I want to double click on the,

how do you know which one's the right, Mary? Oh, but kind of, I want to do that a little bit later. So maybe first up, let's talk about kind of the tech stack, kind of you're building on. So kind of like, what tech sector did you pick and kind of like which novel features did you introduce and kind of like, how did you make those tradeoffs when you were designing

the system? Yeah. So our current layer one is a little multi-layered. So we have a very, I would say, composable stack in the sense that we can upgrade each layer of the stack very easily if we wanted to. and that kind of alludes to the flexibility that we want to have in the future. But basically on the consensus level, we're using a version of CometBFT, which is also supported by the Cosmos SDK.

So we have compatibility with the Cosmos SDK, which we think has the biggest developer ecosystem out of any sort of blockchain-based SDK. So that allows us to have a very developer-friendly consensus level. So that's what we're doing on the consensus side for the validators. And then on the execution layer, we started with the EVM, but we made a lot of changes to solve these IP-specific problems. So I talked about the graph traversal issue and flowing royalties through this very large graph. So we have precompiles that are optimized towards lowering the cost of that execution.

And we will continue adding more and more execution customizations in the future. And then on top of, so we have the consensus layer with the execution layer enshrines natively into our execution layer, is a smart contract protocol called the Proof of Creativity Protocol. And this is kind of the original smart contract protocol we were building way back when a few years ago. And the basic functionality of the smart contract protocol is to, number one, create a standard set of metadata for each IP asset so that whether your IP is from country A or country B, whether it's from the U.S. or from Europe, it essentially has the same metadata, whether it's registered by OpenAI or by small indie app, right? So that's number one, is the same smart contract metadata. And the number two is allowing each IP to be programmable, right? So not just storing the static information around each IP on chain, which is relatively uninteresting,

but actually allowing the programmable terms that each IP owner sets for that IP to be enforced automatically. And so an example I can give is like, let's say I create, let's say I create like some sort of music. I can register on story and I say anyone can use this song in AI remixing if they pay me $5 of front. And if the remix that they make blows up and generates a lot of revenue, then I want 10. percent. These terms are actually registered on a smart contract through the proof of crazy every protocol. And whenever someone tries to use that IP, we would actually enforce the payment upfront. And then also if the derivative generated revenue, we would also flow, like as used in the super-synchristra's example, we would flow 10% of the revenue to the original user creator.

So in this example, it would be myself. And so essentially what we've done is allow every single IP asset to have its own terms, its own programmable parameters, and to allow them to be enforced on chain through story automatically, building this kind of like parallel IP system on chain. So that's enshrined on top of our execution layer. And then the last thing on our stack is essentially this validation service I was talking about, which every single IP asset that comes in that gets registered to story, we actually check whether it's unique based on the reference set of every other asset that's already been registered on story, as well as a common set of IP assets like Mickey Mouse or Thanos that we know are likely to be infringed upon. So every other.

single IP asset that's coming into story, we actually check for basic level of uniqueness before it can be registered. And that's also a separate system that we've built that works in parallel to the stack I just shared. What do you do if I kind of just bypass story and just use, you know, the IP without ever involving story, right? Kind of like I can take the song and kind of just remix it. What prevents that? Yeah, so I mean, one thing that is really important to note is there's many layers of defense that we have. So first and foremost, right, we don't just build software. We actually spend a lot of time and effort on the legal side of things. So I would say for every single dollar we put into building the stack I just told you about on the engineering side,

we've probably spent as much with some of the best legal teams in the world to create a new licensing framework that's first of its kind. And we call it the programmable IP license. And essentially what that license is is a standard legal contract. Think about it like similar to a YC Safe, right? YC Safe made it really easy for people to raise capital without having to have a price round. And so essentially it's a standard legal framework that maps one to one with the parameters on story. So if you set some terms on story, let's say in order to use this IP, you need to pay me $5. That smart contract parameter is also mirrored on the legal contract itself.

In other words, there's a one-to-one link between code and law and story. and everything on story has a legal wrap around it that's enforceable. Right. So story is not guaranteeing that no one will ever be able to use your IP in a malicious way. That's impossible without running like some sort of Big Brother security state where we track every click that everyone's doing at all times. It's impossible. But what we can say is at the very basic level,

if you do not support the terms that the creator is set, you are violating the law, right? And usually that is actually quite a level of deterrence that people aren't familiar with. right. So if there is like actual consequences, then people are less likely to infringe. So that's kind of like the baseline, right? Like the worst case scenario on story is the best case scenario today, right, which is that someone violates your IP and you have to go to court. That's not a very good outcome. It's very expensive. But we think that's importance as a backstop. So that's kind of why we invest in on the legal side. But hopefully we don't have to get to that backstop. Hopefully we can

actually build a set of solutions that are like levels of escalation below having to go to court because we want to avoid that. And so what we're, we've done is, like I mentioned before, we have this IP validation service. And so what it does is we partnered with a lot of Web2 enterprise providers whose entire companies focus on scanning the internet and finding instances of similar images. So every asset on story, by virtue of it being registered on story, now all these different providers are actually searching for instances where that IP is being used, right? And we can flag that and we have an on-chain attestation service where we essentially flag, hey, your IP may be used elsewhere. You might want to take a look. And it

if the violating IP is also on story, right? So let's say if there's two IPs on story, one is pretending to be the other, we would actually have the ability to demonetize the IP that's infringing. So those are sort of the ways that we like have these levels of escalation such that on chain there are already quality signals

to people that want to use IP as well as to the IP holders, that there may be something wrong or that they might want to avoid using certain IP, but the legal backstop is always there. So I think that's kind of important as well as to have that legal backstop. Cool. I have more legal questions in just a bit.

Maybe let's talk about the blockchain for a little bit. So I assume this is proof of sake, right? Yes. So who are your validators? So our validators are a mix of what I would say, like our relatively professional validators that you see working on a lot of other top blockchains. And then we also have a good amounts of validators from our community.

So we have validators being run by students at Stanford. We have validators from people, you know, in Asia all around the world. And so we, you know, right now we're starting off with the Genesis set of 64 validators, which is relatively common for something you see in the Cosmosis DK realm for Comet BFT, because Comet BFT has two to three seconds block finality time. So it's good to start off with a smaller set of validators. But we're planning on very quickly ramping that up and getting to like 80, even 100 in the first year. And so when we do expand, our focus will be primarily filling those with more community validators. So like I know some folks at Stanford, uh, that I talked to some students there, like, they didn't get in on the Genesis set, so they were very excited about getting it on the second, as well as, like, other sort of community players, either ecosystem projects or folks that we work closely with outside of that. I think those are the people that were really prioritizing.

But right now it's a set of professional validators as well as, like, I would say, 20 to 30 community validators. So it's a little bit under half that would be community. And like, as we expands, most of the marginal additional validators should be from the community. And how do you ensure interoperability with other blockchains? Because kind of like in principle, you can kind of use IP in different ways too, right? In principle, kind of say, I could use this as collateral, I could kind of borrow against this and so on. So how do you, can you kind of create that level of interoperability?

Yes, this is something that's a core focus of ours. at the end of the day because our thesis, our success case that story is that we actually become a core protocol for the internet. And by that, I mean, there's not many people out there that like our big domain name system fans or like HTTPS fans. Like there's not many people saying, I love the internet like, you know, IP protocol, TCP IP, right? Like, because they're just the fabric of our lives. Like we just take HTTP for granted. We should take DNS for granted. And I think that's the level of invisibility that we aspire to. And in order to get to the point where we are just this sort of peer-to-peer IP system,

that power is not just government IP systems, but also individual companies in this massive ecosystem, we need to have a lot of adoption from different parties, right? And I think that starts with off-chain IP. So we worked with, you know, Justin Bieber. We worked with Dual EPA. We worked with some top Hollywood creators as well as, you know, stability AI, right? Which is one of the world's largest AI companies. They're the creators behind stable diffusion, which is the biggest, most remixed, I should say,

most for image creation model, image generation model in the world. So we have like these large off-chain partners that we work with in the AI world and in the world of IP holders. And the way that we treat other chains is very similar. So we just treat them as off-chain. Essentially, you're not on story. So if you are building an IP on base or Solana or Polygon or what have you, essentially we treat it the same way as we would treat, you know, a creator who, not Justin Bieber, who isn't

on chain, right? Because ultimately, we want to be able to support IP no matter where it is. And that IP should live wherever it's living before, but it's specific transactions, its specific exchange information, its settlement should be settled on story. So I would say that we do have an integration with layer zero so we can have crushing communication. But our overall philosophy is, I told you about the entire stack that we built. There's this consensus layer, execution layer, there's a protocol layer on the smart contract side. But wraps around that entire stack is a simple API. And it looks just like the Stripe API, right?

Like, it's just a service that you can use. And so whether your app is on Solana, whether your app is completely off-chain, you just call our API, and it doesn't work for you. So Story is sort of this invisible IP settlement layer, but we are wrapping and abstracting away this entire stack in the form of an API that anyone can call regardless of whether they're on-chain or off-shame. Okay. How do you envision kind of the shift from...

you know, the traditional IP system to your on-chain model. So kind of what, how do you get people to move? It's a good question. So there's two ways to do this. And we focused on both ways, but to different extends. So the first way is onboard off-chain IP and I would say existing IP.

The second way is to just get net new IP on story. And I actually think the second way is more interesting. So we spend probably 80% of our time trying to just get all future IP being created on story natively. So I say story native on chain native IP. And the reason why we spend more time there than on traditional IP or existing IP is because I think about it similarly to YouTube. Whenever you have like a new paradigm shift in content, it's never the incumbents that are the best most avid adopters of that technology. So YouTube is a good example because YouTube when they started, they didn't go after Hollywood people and say, hey, Stephen Spielberg or James Cameron,

why don't you create a five-minute movie on YouTube? They went after, or at least I should say, the people that adopted YouTube were the Mr. Beast of the world, right? Or people in their living rooms, like creating home videos for fun. And over time, they got more sophisticated. And now I would say, like, Mr. Beast, Marquis Brownlee, these big YouTube creators probably make two or three or even 10x more than the average, like very successful Hollywood producer, director. Right. So it's taken a couple decades, but my point is YouTube would not have succeeded if they had gone after traditional big players in Hollywood. They succeeded by finding a neglected class of creators and serving them. And those people became YouTube native, internet native creators.

And I think the same thing will be true of IP when it comes to story, which is that brand new economics are going to be unlocked when you have this new marketplace for IP. And the people that get it may be crypto native at first. And they're probably just creating net new IP on story. than onboarding just these massive catalogs of already existing IP, what is like a purely on-chain native version of IP look like? That's kind of the ecosystem that we're building. That's what a lot of the apps that have been built on top of story are doing, is just letting people create IP natively on story.

So that, I think, is a big focus where we're not even trying to onboard the existing class, and I think that's going to be very exciting. On the other hand, like, there's so much valuable IP out there, and we want to get as much of it onto stories. So we do have to work with these traditional institutions. And I actually think 2025 is just going to be a great year to work with institutions, especially, you know, being an American company. Like in the U.S., I think a lot of more people in the government are much more open to

blockchain now, right? And that's a real opportunity because I think with Story, one of my goals for this year is to work with institutions and in particular with copyright offices and patent offices around the world, essentially because they all have very outdated, very fragmented, very expensive and inefficient IP systems. Imagine if every single copyright that was registered in the U.S. was also registered on story and in a standardized way. that anyone around the world could use that copyright and generate revenue for that American

copyright holder. And same thing for someone in Germany or someone in France, like they would able, if they registered copyright or patents with the German or French governments, that would also be on story. Now you have this fully composable network of IP. And so just starting to work with governments, this is conversations we're already starting to have with folks in the US government and other governments about being a sort of backends for their IP systems. I think that's also really exciting. And actually is going to be like way more efficient than onboarding one by one. But just to kind of outline the progress we've already made with traditional IPs, we've already started to work with, you know, we've taken Justin Bieber's Peaches

and tokenized it as an IPRWA. So now all the right are on chain. We've done that with a song with Miley Cyrus and Duleipa, and we're planning on doing that some more with some big IPs in Korea. So we are working with some of the world's largest music catalogs and IP catalogs to on ramp their IPs on the story. And then last thing I'll say is with a stability AI partnership, the stable diffusion partnership,

one reason that's so exciting is because 90s and 99% of the content in the future will probably be AI-assisted or AI-generated. So I think in the next decade, we'll see, you know, in 2035, 90% of AI content is AI-generated or AI-assisted. And the best way to register new IP on a story is to just embed ourselves at the AI model level. So now with Stable Defusion, any outputs of Stable Defusion, if you call Stories API, it gets registered on Story as an IP asset. So if we can embed ourselves into these AI models and these AI models, and these AI-Moddifference, models are what's going to be producing most of the IP in the future, that's going to be a huge onboarding tactic for us. And that's something that we're jumping down on. So I think there's a lot of ways to get IP, but ultimately, I think getting new IP is actually even more exciting than just

getting an existing IP. Can you tell us about some of the applications that sit on top of our story and kind of like create IP directly on story? Yeah, absolutely. So the one I just mentioned around like tokenizing some of the biggest music catalogs, that is a very interesting, protocol that's built on top of story called ARIA. And essentially what ARIA does is they have really close relationships with some of the biggest music catalogs in the world. And eventually they'll expand beyond music to fine arts and other sort of IP assets. But the idea is they want to do what, you know, I'd say Aondo did for T bills, but for a much

more interesting asset class, which is these like really iconic IPs, right? The thing about treasury bills is that, you know, anyone can bring, most people can purchase treasury bills. Treasury bills is probably one of the most common financial instruments in the world. So bringing it on chain is less beneficial, I think, because it's already so common. And also, treasure bills are not programmable. So, I mean, if you have it on chain, like the programmability of that treasury bill is not enhanced by bringing on chain.

There's not much you can do. It's just, it's a treasury bill. Whereas with IP, what ARIA is doing is they're bringing some of the biggest hits out there, right? Like, I just use Justin Bieber's features as an example. And they're bringing it on to story, which does two things. One, it means that people who have no access to IPS and asset class, right? I was talking about the 99.9% long tail, all of these people, you and I can now access the yield from all the streams of Justin Bieber's speeches, right?

So as I'm listening to Justin Bieber's features on Spotify, I am benefiting the people who have access to that asset on ARIA. And that's really exciting because you're now taking this asset that used to be held by the top 0.1% of institutions in letting everyone have access to it, but it's not just the yield, because that part is kind of similar to what Ondo's doing with Treasury bills, bring treasury bills yield on chain. What's even more exciting is that the rights are also on chain. So not just the economics, but also the rights are on chain.

And so whoever owns the Justin Bieber asset or even a fractionalized part of that asset on story, now has the rights to create AI remixes of that song. And that's really exciting because that licensing is done through story. And that's something that just isn't possible in the traditional legal world. If I wanted to remix Justin Bieber speeches, I mean, I would have to go talk to his lawyers, right? that they'll be very, very difficult for me to do that. Now I can do it with a single click on story. So I think that's one exciting use case.

The stable diffusion is another one. And then we actually announced recently that David Goyer, who is the creator behind the Dark Night trilogy, the big Batman movie series, he's the lead screenwriter there. He's actually creating a brand new IP franchise on story, where every single character, every single spaceship,

every single story in that universe is on story. And his fans and his community can actually extend and add new stories, add new characters, add new lore. And if accepted by David, they're actually share revenue in the entire franchise. So if that franchise becomes a movie and generates a lot of revenue, all their revenue would be shared with people who contribute along the way. So it's almost like a Wikipedia for fiction where you have these atomic building blocks, these IP assets, that the community can now have full reign to build on top of it.

And now there's actually already AI agents being trained on top of the IP that David has put out so that these AI agents are actually creating short films, images, based off of the canon and they can monetize as well. So this is an example of a sort of a creator who's actually leaning in to opening up that IP, creating a market around it, leaning into AI even, extending his work and helping him make revenue. Because if that AI does a really good job, builds a lot of popularity, generates a lot of revenue, David is also going to get to share.

So I think all of these things are like very exciting early experiments of how it can be used in AI, how story can be used in sort of DFI or IPFI. And then also just by like everyday users that may not be crypto-native. I think IP is going to bring a lot of people on chain that just had no reason to be on chain before. You talked about the legal framework that kind of you're setting up to go alongside the software part of this. In which jurisdictions is that recognized? Yeah, so luckily for us, we started with copyright. And the great thing about copyright is that there's this thing called the Burn Convention, which is a little bit obscure.

But basically, the Burn Convention, I believe it was 1884, 1886, essentially around 200 countries around the world met to harmonize the basic standards of copyright law, right? And the reason why that's important is because if I created Pikachu as Nintendo in Japan, that doesn't mean that like someone in the U.S. who is not in Japan should be able to use Pikachu freely, right? Like you want these ideas and this creativity and this knowledge to be global, and you want it to be protected globally. And so most copyright law is, it functions relatively similarly across countries. What is difference is enforcement. So some countries enforce copyright much more heavily than others. But when it comes to at least declaring this order of principles,

they are very similar. And our legal contract is designed primarily with the U.S. and minds, but in a way that it is compatible with most other countries' copyright systems. And so that allows us to start giving global or near global protection to basically all the people are using story. Right. So that's why one of the reasons I always started with copyright is because you do have this global harmonization on the basic principles of copyright law. Okay, I understand. What are the flavors of IPR there? I mean, there must be more, right? Yes, so there's copyright which covers media, right?

So you think about songs, movies, anything creative work, like a poem, a new character. And then there's patents which cover sort of unique ideas or processes. So you can patent a drug. You can patent a specific process for making a car, things like that. And then those trademarks, which are sort of protecting the brands that businesses and people kind of do commerce around. right so like think about Nike logo that's trademark and so yeah patents and trademarks are a little bit more complex that's something that we haven't we're not supporting on day one of main net is patents trademarks but it's something that we're very interested in supporting and I actually think the inefficiencies

in patents and trademarks are much higher than in copyright because they're just higher value assets in general on average and so right now we're kind of starting to do the legal work to also have that legal wrapper for patents and trademarks on story but one of the things that we'll have to deal with as you said is that they're less global right so. So you have a patent office in the U.S. You have a patent office. In Germany, those are completely different patent offices with different processes. So being able to harmonize that, we might have to go country to country as opposed to copyright, which is much more global.

Okay. Maybe let's talk about the enforcement of IP rights on story. So kind of like you talked about Mario and only being able to kind of like upload Mario once. How do you discern who the true Mario IP holder is to kind of give them the rights of reaping the, the yield on that asset. Yeah, so the way that we do this is twofold. So there's sort of like a, I would say like an information signal layer, and then there is a dispute layer.

And so the information signal layer, every single asset that someone tries to register on story, we have four or five different IP partners that essentially are specialized. They're basically API services, right? SaaS services that go and scan the internet and say, hey, have I ever seen something that looks like this? And if so, what percentage confidence do I have that this is infringing or not unique? So every single asset that comes into the story, we actually query a series of these APIs and kind of average out the results and try to give a signal.

Now, it's not binding. So the signal might say, hey, this is like 99% likely to be infringing. And the idea is that, like, we're a permissionless protocol, right? So ultimately, if you see a Mario asset and we're like, this is 99% infringing and you want to use it, then you're running that risk as a user, right? But we want to provide developers and their end users as much information as possible. So we have all these signals that every IP asset has based on its analysis, right? The sort of second layer of this is a dispute system.

So anyone around the world can dispute an IP asset on story and say, hey, this asset is actually infringing. So if Nintendo goes and sees this Mario with 99% certainty that it's infringing and it's like, this is not registered by a Nintendo employee, then they can go and dispute it. And the dispute process, right now we're using Uma, which is the same thing that settles polymarket. but in the future we want to have, you know, professional lawyers and, and, you know, more sophisticated methods of settling these disputes. But basically, there's an on-chain arbitration process, and the result of that process is enforced on chain, right? So in the case of Mario being 99% chance to be infringing, Nintendo raises a dispute. Well, the dispute is probably going to end that this asset is indeed infringing, and it would be demonetized and essentially not surfaced by story's own API

and story zone indexing, right? Because it's on chain, we can't actually remove it and we don't want to, like, censor fully. So you can still look at it on chain. And, but it will say, hey, this is, you know, an asset that's been successfully disputed. So we have basically our own on-chain sort of information system, almost like a sort of like, you know, nutrition facts of each IP, and then also an on-chain dispute system, which is like an on-chain court that can actually take decisions. So that is all the sort of on-chain apparatus that we've had to build to make story like a high quality IP repository, a global IP marketplace.

And then, like I said before, like, I mean, maybe they're not perfect because we're just starting out. So maybe there's some gaps on the edges. that's why we also had the legal backing where, you know, if none of that works, then you can still take it to court and you'll still have that protection from the law. But I mean, to the extent that we can avoid that we want to because it's very expensive to do that. So we try to keep things on chain. Say I'm the original Mario owner and kind of like someone else has uploaded it. Do you force me to kind of dispute it on chain first or can I take you to court right away? Because kind of like you should. You can do that right away. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Because you can't really force someone to. kind of like, no, of course not. The dispute is more of like, we think, I mean, if you're Nintendo,

I think it's maybe like a hard to use in a Nintendo's example. They probably already have a bunch of lawyers that are serving people out of, so they probably don't need this. But we're really thinking about the long tail, right? So if you're a creator, I mean, no fortunate truth of the current legal system

as it's set up is that it's biases towards people who infringe on IP because the cost of prosecuting IP infringement is so high that most creators choose not to. Right? So if you're a creator and you're not making that much every year and someone violates your IP, it's going to cost you tens of thousands

dollars over potentially multiple years to go and say, hey, this person, you know, to go to court, right? So it's actually incentivizes creators to not file a suit. And that systematically biases the system towards people who infringe because they know a lot of these people, they don't have the resources to defend themselves. What we're trying to do is, at least if it's on story, if it's on chain, we're giving you a very cheap way to sort of defend yourself. That's much less cost prohibited in the traditional system. But of course, if someone wants to go straight to the, you know, very, very complex gunfights of the traditional legal system, then of course they can do that. But you can't remove my IP from the blockchain, right? Kind of like it's permissionless.

And even if kind of like, even if it was something that I wouldn't want to be online, you can't remove it, right? We can't remove it in the sense of, We choose not to censor on story because we don't want to be the Arborder's truth. Well, it's, it's hard to remove content that's on chain. It depends on whether it's on IPFS or RWeef. Like on RWeef, it's very difficult to remove. If it's on IPFS, then there are ways to do that. But the, you know, even if we could, we wouldn't because we think it's important to be like a sort of censorship resistance and in line with the use of the blockchain.

But that's why we have this API, right? So functionally speaking, it kind of like, it's kind of like Twitter. Twitter decided, okay, we're not going to remove your post, but we're just going to make sure that the algorithm never serves your post to anyone. And the only way to see this is if you have to go on the specific profile, right? Except 20 times harder because navigating the blockchain is not, you know, it's not like as easy as navigating Twitter. So that's kind of the idea, right? It's kind of like we just don't show anyone this asset anymore. So if someone calls our API, we just don't show it to them. Now, if someone wants to go and, you know, actually traverse the blockchain,

then they can find it. But, you know, the amount of the amount. of people who want to do that are probably very low. And so it's functionally a soft, it's soft removal, but we don't want to actually remove all possibility for people to actually access this. You said earlier that you can also demonetize certain IP. How do you do that? So essentially just, we just prevent people from, so we have this sort of royalty system. So we prevent people from being able to send funds to that wallet that's part of the royalty system. So basically, like, every IP asset has its own wallet, a smart wallet, associated with it. So it almost has, like, is autonomous bank account attached to each IP.

But that bank account is kind of held through Story's proof of creativity protocol. And one of the features in that protocol is we can actually prevent that account from accruing more value if it's deemed as disputed. So essentially, we just remove the ability for that IP asset. And, you know, let's say, you know, it's owed $10 because some royalties were shared. It's unable to claim those $10 from his wallet. How does the governance behind that work? The governance for stories mostly done on the blockchain level. So we have some basic governance through decentralization.

We have a forum. But essentially, like, the governance is making suggestions to how we can improve the protocol. But for now, we kind of want to make sure that we can do the protocol for the first few months before we sort of allow things to be decentralized progressively. I think the first few things that will decentralize is actually protocol. fees rather than the specific logic of the royalty module. So for example, you know, UNICEWP has protocol fees and the in the Dow has the ability to serve to turn it on and off. I think that's something that we'll be looking at giving that decisions the community.

Okay, but in due course, kind of the community will be, it will be the one deciding which IP to demonetize? No, so that's based on the dispute, the dispute system. So in this case, it would be Uma and the people participating in that on UMA. But in the future, we want to add a lot more dispute options so that it's not just one option. But basically the dispute process and the outcome of that process is binding. There are ways to, let's say, try to reverse that dispute as well so that you can challenge the dispute. But essentially, or appeal, I should say. But essentially the dispute system is what is used to turn on and off the royalties.

And once kind of an item has been disputed, Can they just upload it again and I have to dispute it again? Or do you ban kind of like re-uploads? Yeah, it's hard to ban re-uploads in some sense because people can, I mean, even if we try to ban a wallet, right? Anyone can create a new wallet. And so it's kind of like a constant battle. Like I think there's no, there's no, unless we centralize the whole thing, there's no one size to all. But you said you scan the content, right, when I registered it?

You scan it against the content. Yeah. Yeah. So you could in principle do it, right? We could in principle do it. But, you know, you never know if Nintendo is the one that's actually registering it, right? So we don't want to ban, let's say, Mario. We don't want to just ban Mario forever because Nintendo could actually register Mario rather than some random person.

Right? So that's why we don't want to ban the image, because the image maybe is nothing wrong with it. It's just the person that's registering it. It's not the one that owns the image. Okay. And the person who's registering the image without my permission as the IP holder, are they penalized in any way other than kind of like, being demonetized because otherwise they can just grieve me, right? Kind of like they can just make five million accounts and kind of upload the Mario pick five million times

and kind of like I have to dispute it five million times and kind of it just cost me a bunch of time. Yeah, so I think that in that case, right, I mean, it's a good edge case. But ultimately, I mean, that is the sort of risk of our permission system is that you have the ability for people to do things openly. I think what in realistic will happen is that essentially, like, there will be social consensus and there will be reputation systems built around this. And so, like, we already have a lot of apps that are focused on this specific sort of problem. We don't have to solve every problem ourselves as like an ecosystem. So one example is essentially there's a, there's an application called Vario, which allows people to stake IP on assets and say, hey, if I'm staking this token on an IP asset, I'm basically saying, I believe that this is a real one. right and so i think there are going to be a lot of sort of immune system uh sort of type of

responses that develop in the ecosystem where people might only really look at or take seriously IPs with a certain level of stake and if everyone knows hey like for whatever reason there's 5,000 marios on story but this one has 10,000 usc stakes then that one's going to be the the accepted one and the other 5,000 will probably be looked at with you know just an understanding that that is not the real consensus one right so i think there are sort of like many crypto economic ways that we can actually generate legitimacy in a more scalable way. But ultimately, like, as a matter of practice, we are not trying to limit the amount of people who can register. And even if we try to limit just a big wallet, they can always create more wallet. So the way

that we approach this problem is less, how can we prevent any wrongdoing? Because if you want to have 100% success and prevents you wrongdoing, you need to have full control over the system. And that just kind of, now you're avert into this sort of centralized version of IP that governments try to do very unsuccessfully. And in trying to achieve perfection, they actually achieve meat-ocurity, whereas we could have more scalable systems that have, like, you know, different approaches to developing an immune response that kind of spamming or other forms of long-tail behavior to make them unprofitable, essentially, right? Because, you know, if you have a lot of IP-staked or a lot of token staked on one asset, and then there's 4,000 other versions of that asset

that don't have any, then it's pretty clear which one is the real one. Okay. What do you do in a case where kind of the IP rights are disputed, even off? chain because that happens very regularly, right? I mean, there's IP fights all the time. Say, I developed a drug and someone else says they kind of developed the same drug ahead of me and there's a lawsuit. Do you just freeze kind of the registering of that IP until it's decided in court? Yeah, so one thing that we are developing is essentially a way to kind of take off-chain

events and bring them on chain. So there's this thing called the Story Orchestration Service. And actually, the Story orchestration service is one thing that we already use now to coordinate these off-chain infringement detection providers. So these detection providers are not primarily serving blockchain companies. They're primarily serving about two companies. And so they have like some sort of auction algorithm and they send a result to us. And we need to bring that result onto story.

So one thing that we want to extend is if there are off-shane disputes, can we actually have an Oracle that brings them on-chain and updates with the result, right? Ultimately, our thesis that story is kind of similar to stable coins in a way where, you know, stable coins, they are totally U.S.20 tokens. If they're on Ethereum, they're totally, like, you know, blockchain native, but they derive their legitimacy from the U.S. dollar, and then they take the U.S. dollars legitimacy and add in the blockchain technology to make it much better, right? So now you have instant global payments with stable coins instead of having to go through all these terrible processes if you just had U.S. dollars.

I think story is the same thing, right? Like, we're not trying to create a parallel legal system where like we have a completely different set of laws. We're trying to do is take the legitimacy of the legal system and then make it 1,000 X better on chain. And so if there are things happening in the traditional legal system, then we should be responsive to it. And that's a really great point. So I think right now we don't have that support live,

but one thing that the story organization service is meant to do is to bring the relevant events and analysis from off-chain world into on-chain world. So as time goes on, and as we prove story out, I think that that'll be an essential feature. And actually one thing that I am eager to do is actually, you know, when people violate IP on story to take it to court in the traditional legal system, just to prove to everyone using Story that this actually does work

and that we're putting our money where our mouth is. So I think that we're sort of driving towards that institutional adoption by showing that we're going to put our money where our mouth is. Okay. Can you outline the roadmap for a story? So what are the key milestones in the next year and beyond that? Yeah. So, I mean, the biggest milestone for us coming up is our public mainnet launch.

So that's going to be very, very soon. And, you know, I'm really excited to sort of celebrate that with the community and with the team. Because we've been working on this for three years. And so we've had a few test nets by now. And this will be like our first main net and just making sure everything goes well. Beyond that, looking forward to deepen our relationship with Stability AI, as well as working with, you know, some big players in the AI worlds. Because I think, you know, Story is one of those few projects in the blockchain space that can work with these massive AI companies because we're providing them with this. massive, essentially training set of IP that they can use, but also pay for, right, in a legal way.

So continue to work with the AI providers, starting to work with governments, as I mentioned. And then essentially just building up the ecosystem and a lot of the technology. Like, the way that we see story, as I mentioned, is it's not a finished product. Like, even though it's on mainnet, I think a lot of, a lot of the blockchain space has this notion of like once you launch on main net, that's kind of like the core thing, it's done, it's set in stone, but we kind of see this as an iterative approach. And so we're dropping our white paper very soon, which will show a lot of the future directions we have. But I think there's a lot of innovations we can make in decentralized file storage.

I think there's a lot of innovations we can make in connecting deeper to the AI stack and knowing the moment AI model generates something, whether it can be registered on story. I think there's just going to be a lot of technical upgrades to our also just like basic scalability as a blockchain as we get more and more adoption. So I see our tech as very much V0. and I think we're just going to have to add a lot more bells and whistles as a year goes on, in addition to partnering with these AI companies and working with governments. Cool. So if a creator or developer kind of wants to get involved with Story, where would you send them? Yeah, so for developers, definitely are docs. So docs. DotS. Story.Foundation, we update it like more than once a week.

So super live, super up-to-date. We also have a version that you can easily download to train an AI agent on. So we know that a lot of people are coding with AI helpers now. So, you know, our documentation is, AI consumable. And then for creators, we're actually going to launch a very interesting first-party app that allows you to seamlessly register IP on Story very shortly after our public mainnet. So I'd encourage you to experiment with that. It's going to be called the IP portal. And it's going to be a really, really easy app for you to register, protect, and monetize your IP without having any technical ability or knowing what the blockchain is. So that'll be relaunched pretty shortly after our public mainnet.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on, Jason. Thank you. Thank you for having me.