Story Protocol co-founder SY Lee defended the challenge’s resolution to push its first main IP token unlock to August 2026, in a latest interview with CoinDesk, saying the blockchain wants “extra time” to construct utilization and that near-zero on-chain income is “the improper metric” for an intellectual-property and AI information community.
The six-month delay retains workforce and investor tokens locked as Story pivots from a normal IP registry towards licensing human-generated datasets for artificial-intelligence coaching.
He pointed to Worldcoin’s 2024 resolution to increase investor and workforce lockups from three to 5 years, a transfer that diminished near-term circulating provide and was framed as extending the event runway, with the token posting double-digit positive aspects within the hours after the announcement. Story, Lee stated, is following the identical logic.
“If we have been all mercenary, we’d have needed a shorter lockup,” he stated, describing the extension as a sign of long-term dedication moderately than misery.
Story’s every day income, which peaked at $43,000 in September 2025 and is at present $0 per DeFiLlama, has additionally been a priority for a lot of traders.
Lee contends that these numbers understate Story’s exercise as a result of a lot of the supposed monetization happens off-chain by way of licensing agreements moderately than in transaction tolls.
In his view, fuel income is a lagging indicator for a community designed to report rights, provenance, and utilization phrases earlier than it begins extracting significant worth from them.
“We deliberately put our chain fuel price fairly low. We’re extra of an IP chain,” he stated. “It’s possible you’ll not see the kind of income stream that you simply’re searching for like a DeFi chain.”
As an alternative, he stated Story’s near-term focus is on recording possession phrases and utilization rights for datasets and fashions used to coach artificial-intelligence programs — one thing the challenge introduced final yr — with funds and royalty splits embedded in sensible contracts.
That shift strikes the challenge away from tokenizing media content material or collectibles and towards what Lee described as “unscrapable” human-contributed information, equivalent to multilingual voice samples and first-person video, property he argues are tougher for AI builders to acquire legally at scale by way of conventional internet scraping.
The transition, nonetheless, delays the visibility of on-chain revenue as a result of a lot of the anticipated worth is tied to enterprise licensing offers moderately than retail transaction charges. Lee in contrast the timeline to his earlier Web2-based startup expertise — which landed him a $440 million exit in 2021 — noting that it took years for significant income to materialize.
For token holders, the sensible implication is that provide growth is being slowed whereas the workforce makes an attempt to reveal traction in AI information partnerships and rights-cleared dataset assortment.
Whether or not that technique in the end converts right into a sustainable enterprise mannequin is an open query, however Lee maintained that extending vesting schedules is more healthy than speeding liquidity right into a weak market.
“The very best founders, the perfect groups, the perfect firms normally do it for a decade plus, we’re in it for the long run and longer innings,” Lee stated.
