In a current interview with CoinDesk, Story Protocol co-founder SY Lee defended the mission’s determination to delay unlocking its first main IP token till August 2026, saying “extra time” is required to construct blockchain utilization and that near-zero on-chain income is a “mistaken indicator” for mental property and AI information networks.
The six-month delay leaves groups and traders’ tokens locked up because the story pivots towards licensing human-generated datasets for synthetic intelligence coaching from a preferred IP registry.
He pointed to WorldCoin’s determination in 2024 to increase the lockup for traders and groups from three to 5 years, a transfer that decreased short-term circulating provide and was disguised as an extension of the event runway, inflicting the token to put up double-digit features within the hours following the announcement. Lee stated the story follows the identical logic.
“If we had been all mercenaries, we’d need a shorter lockup,” he stated, explaining that the extension was an indication of long-term dedication moderately than ache.
Story’s day by day income reached $43,000 in September 2025 and is presently $0 per DeFiLlama, which is a priority for a lot of traders.
Lee argues that these numbers underestimate Story’s exercise, as a lot of the supposed monetization happens off-chain by licensing agreements moderately than transaction charges.
In his view, fuel income is a lagging indicator for networks designed to report rights, provenance, and phrases of use earlier than they will start to extract significant worth from them.
“We deliberately set our chain fuel charges fairly low. We’re extra of an IP chain,” he stated. “Chances are you’ll not discover the kind of income stream you might be searching for, like a DeFi chain.”
As an alternative, the short-term focus of the story is on documenting possession phrases and utilization rights for datasets and fashions used to coach synthetic intelligence methods (one thing the mission introduced final yr), in addition to funds and royalty splits embedded in sensible contracts, he stated.
This shift strikes the mission away from the tokenization of media content material and collectibles and in the direction of what Lee describes as “unscrapeable” information supplied by people, equivalent to multilingual audio samples and first-person movies. These belongings are tough for AI builders to legally get hold of at scale by conventional internet scraping, he argues.
Nonetheless, the transition will delay on-chain income visibility, as a lot of the anticipated worth is tied to enterprise license transactions moderately than retail transaction charges. Lee in contrast this timeline to the earlier expertise of a Web2-based startup that raised $440 million in 2021, noting that it took years for significant income to materialize.
The sensible implication for token holders is that offer enlargement has slowed whereas the crew seems to reveal traction in AI information partnerships and rights-cleared dataset assortment.
Whether or not that technique finally interprets right into a sustainable enterprise mannequin is an open query, however Lee argued that extending the vesting schedule is more healthy than speeding liquidity right into a weak market.
“The most effective founders, the very best groups, the very best firms usually keep on this work for 10 years or extra, however we’re working for the long run, over longer innings,” Lee stated.
