Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Jason Zhao: How do we take this ancient craft of storytelling and translate it for the blockchain era in the same way that he did for the mobile era? So what we're doing is like building this global IP graph where you have a source IP and then it's almost like a constellation of derivatives. And each of the nodes are IPs and each of the edges in that graph are economic and legal relationships. They love the idea of sovereignty. They love the idea of control. They love the idea of a global IP like a land where anyone can monetize and use their work because creators want reputation, they want reach, and they want revenue. And that's what Story provides, right? But we give them the control and the keys. And we build out the module architecture in such a way that we expect and we encourage developers to bring their own modules.

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. Each week, I sit down with some of the brightest people building Web3 to talk about what they're working on right now. My guest today is Jason Zhao, co-founder of Story Protocol. Story Protocol has raised over 50 million venture dollars to build an on-chain protocol for intellectual property licensing. In this episode, Jason explains what's wrong with IP licensing today and how putting licenses on-chain will enable more people to create derivative works without tedious and often infeasible paperwork and flow revenue royalties up to licensors on-chain. We also dive into the technical details and Jason explains how Story uses NFTs to represent individual IP assets and that these NFTs will control ERC-6551 token-bound accounts where IP owners can plug in licensing, royalties, and dispute resolution modules. It was great getting a chance to talk to Jason about everything Story Protocol. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks, and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. Jason, welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain.

Jason Zhao: Hi, Nicholas. Great to be here.

Nicholas: Awesome. So today, we're going to talk all about Story Protocol, which I'm very excited to learn more about. First off, how did the idea for Story Protocol come about?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. So Story Protocol, what we're doing is basically building the world's programmable IP layer, and we're really focused on basically building infrastructure layer that allows creators and applications to bring creative assets on chain. And when we think about creative assets, it's anything from characters to voice to name image likeness to TikTok videos or even full-length movies, right? So we think about this whole world of intellectual property and of ideas. And the way that the idea came about is really taking a look at the potential of blockchain and seeing that, for me, I'm a technical person. I think about what technology can do, right? So I was very interested in this technology blockchain because I studied philosophy, and in particular, political philosophy, and I started reading these white papers. And I just found that the breadth of ideas and political ideologies reflected in technology is very interesting. So there's the early libertarians in the form of Vitalik and Cypherpunks and Satoshi. But then around 2020, there was a lot of conversation around DAOs and experiencing governance. And of course, there's just a global market. There's a lot of trading going on. So it's a lot of pure capitalism. And I found that very exciting from an intellectual perspective. And that's how I kind of got into blockchain. And then I started looking around at the space. And what I saw was a lot of financial infrastructure, right? I think Bitcoin is infrastructure for immutable money. Ethereum is a sort of parallel financial ecosystem. And stablecoins are really like a global settlement layer. And all of that was extremely exciting to me. But at the same time, most people don't spend their time on Robinhood. They don't spend their time on Charles Schwab. People really spend their time on Netflix, on TikTok. They consume culture and they create culture. And that's what makes us human. And I just didn't see too much innovation compared to the financial side of things with blockchain. But I felt like there's so much that blockchain could offer to the world of creativity and to the world of culture. And NFTs are a great start. But in many cases, they're sort of still pointers to static media files. And there's no way to get the composability that is so key to blockchain and its promise in the world of culture as it is in DeFi. Because in DeFi, I can take a dollar bill, bring it on chain, it's USDC, it's USDT, make a swap on Uniswap, get ETH, stake that ETH on Lido, get staked ETH, put that into a lending protocol, get compound staked ETH or what have you. And that all happens in this parallel financial ecosystem without any permission. But if I wanted to, let's say, create a comic with a pudgy and someone else's board ape, and how would I do that? I would probably have to read my license. I'd have to read their license. I'd have to contact them in person. We'd have to get lawyers on both sides. We'd negotiate a deal, and I'd trust them to share the revenue with me. And the resulting byproduct wouldn't be on chain. So it's almost like if I wanted to make a DEX swap, I had to call my banker and find a counterparty. They had to call their banker to execute a trade, and we had to KYC. It almost defeats the whole point. So that was kind of the problem that we saw. And at the same time, we're looking at the outside world of creators without blockchain. And Hollywood is struggling. Digital creators are finding it very difficult to monetize. And I think monetization and coordinating incentives is a superpower of blockchain. So the combination of the problems that creators are facing in the traditional world and the lack of solutions invested in the blockchain space kind of made it sort of almost inevitable. We felt like that. there needs to be an IP infrastructure that creates programmable IP and IP Legos in the same way that DeFi created money Legos.

Nicholas: Yeah. This is kind of one of my key questions for you, which is what makes Story Protocol better than just the kind of crop of NFTs that we're putting their licensing restrictions into? It's like comments in their solidity contracts. and what have you. What is the problem? that Story Protocol is trying to solve? that just like writing a comment with a legal agreement in it into an NFT contract doesn't solve?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. That's a great question. So essentially, I think NFTs provide a great foundation and the foundation that they provide is a sort of digital scarcity. Right. And that's important because just abstracting away blockchain for a little bit, like what is IP fundamentally and why is blockchain suited to serve it? IP is very different from fizz physical property. Physical property, naturally scarce, right? I want a beachside property. The beach is only a mile long. There's five mansions that can be built around it. The mansions are going to be valuable. But ideas are not that way, right? Like if I create a character or I have an idea for like building this awesome plane or something, and I share it with you, Nicholas, like you could go build that plane. You could tell someone else about it. They could go build that plane. I mean, it's not like a beach, right? So that's why blockchain is interesting because blockchains provide provable scarcity in this era of abundance, right? And especially with AI, like making content production, you know, Hollywood level content production almost go to zero. Like content's going to be extremely abundant. And in order for anyone to be incentivized to create content, there needs to be scarcity, which is why blockchains are really important. NFTs provide a foundation for provable scarcity. So that's why they're important. But like where they're limited and where story protocol and programmable IP really takes the next step is that right now it's extremely static and single player, right? Like I mentioned that in the Zuki example or the Pudgy example, if I want to do anything with an NFC, like I go back to the world of pen and paper legal world, right? And it's almost like what we're trying to do is very similar to USDC, right? USDC, you know, you on-ramp a dollar bill and on-chain, no one thinks about the dollar bill. They just think of. it's an ERC-20 token and I can do whatever I want with it. But then if I want to, I can off-ramp it and get a dollar bill. That's very important, right? What we're trying to do is bring the world of creative IP on-chain, on-ramp it, and then let you do anything you want with it in a multiplayer way, right? So what Story lets you do is you can bring any asset on-chain. It's represented as sort of a unique form of NFC. That's how our protocol works. And then you can set as a creator or as an application registering the IP, you can set the terms for how other people can engage with that. And that's really important because right now I don't know how to, like, I can look at this image and I can see that it's a token, but that's all I can do, right? But with Story, you can almost see like an API for rights, wrapped on every piece of content on the internet represented as an NFT. And so anyone, any developer, any app, any AI model that wants to use or remix or monetize a piece of content, they can see the terms of the creator or the application asset. So that application might say, look, you can use this character I've created. If you pay me 0.5 ETH and you share 50% of the revenues. And if I agree to that, I can call an API or as a creator, I can just get a license and use that IP without having to ask, without needing any intermediaries. And if I create a derivative work, let's say I add a hat onto the character, then that is also registered as a derivative. So what we're doing is like building this global IP graph where you have a source IP and then it can, it's almost like a constellation of derivatives. And each of the nodes are IPs. And each of the edges in that graph are economic and legal relationships. So if one of the, you know, children of my children of my children makes revenue, then all of that can be tracked and waterfalled up to me. And that happens automatically. And any single app can leverage this graph, right? So it's almost like the way Farcast or Lens or decentralized social is focusing on. any app can solve the cold start problem. When it comes to bootstrapping profiles in a social graph story is basically allowing any content or consumer app, whether it's crypto or not, to bootstrap a content graph and almost like a library of Alexandria on chain. But it's not just, Hey, this is the media file. It's actually, here's the media file. And here's how I can use it by calling a simple API and monetize on.

Nicholas: So as compared to some of the 2020, 2021 era NFT on chain IP rights, which may be conferred rights to the holder of the token, but then had all of the legal agreements. That's forth happened off chain. This is really bringing all of that activity on chain so that it can be both queried licensed and even revenues streamed back to the original holders through a series of derivation steps and remixes entirely on chain, not, not requiring recourse to a right to, to the, to the existing legal system. Got it. So let's talk a little bit about how this actually works. How does story protocol solve this problem?

Jason Zhao: Yeah, it's a great question. So the way that story works at a high level, and we can go deeper into any part of the stack, right? But basically. It's a set of solidity smart contracts that we built out over the course of two years. We've made a lot of improvements, but right now, the way that it works is that there's essentially two components, what we call at a high level nouns and verbs for a more developer oriented audience, right? This is basically states and functions. And so essentially what we've defined is a global smart contract based IP repository. Think about it almost as a gift for IPs. So that's announced. It's how do you actually represent these diverse forms of intellectual properties? Anything from a video to a visual character. To a pros work to even someone's voice on chain and give it the appropriate metadata standard such that it can compose with any other IP. So you can, let's say I can create a sort of like multimedia experience where I have a character and then I bring in my own voice to animate the character. That would be almost like a composition using two IP Legos. One is the character and one is the voice, right? And they need to be able to compose with each other. And so on the knowledge of the state side, we've defined this sort of smart contract repository as well as a metadata. Data standard that allows us to represent IP and all the associated metadata on chain. So that's where the state is stored. And the way we implement that is we essentially use a very special story protocol version of a 6551 account. So every single NFT new or existing, right? Like if it's artwork from a museum, we just mint an NFC, attach a story token bound account to that NFT that has all that metadata. And if it's an existing NFT, we can work with that as well. So all the IP that's already on chain, like if it's a four day, or if it's something that's been minted on Zora, or Foundation, like we can already register that and it's backwards compatible, right? Just by attaching this story token bound account. So that's the state side of things. And then this is a. so what about? why do I care if it's on a story protocol? Like why do I want to program my IP? Well, the reason why is because of the verbs, right? Which are the modules. And so we've built these stateless modules, which are essentially like interfaces. And you can think about them as somewhat similar to like a module on Lens. Like Lens has collect module. They have follow module. They have all these different modules. Same thing with IP. So every IP gets superpowers when you register on story. You have a licensing module that allows you to attach a real legal license to your IP. And that's a license that we've spent a lot of time and effort creating with some of the top lawyers in the world. So that every IP registered on story, just like I said with the USDC example, gets the protection of legal backing without having to worry about that because it's all on chain. So you have a licensing module that allows you to set licensing terms and anyone can see those terms and permissionlessly generate a license for your IP and pay you for that work. There's also a royalties module that allows you to essentially if any of your derivatives or any children that have used your IP, if they receive revenue, the royalty module helps flow that revenue back to you and tracks the sort of obligations across this IP graph. And there's a lot of other modules that we built that. basically once you register on story, any IP has access to. So that's kind of how the overall structure works as we have sort of global database shared data standard implemented using the token bound account, a story token bound account that almost gives everyone like a story profile or every piece of IP a story profile and then that gives you access. To the set of modules. that are my capabilities for that IP.

Nicholas: So I think it might be helpful to go through an example like you kind of give a hint of just there. Let's say we were to turn this podcast into an NFT and maybe we're both somehow owners of it. If we were to go through the life cycle of the process and then someone were to make a derivative, maybe we could walk through each of them and that way it'll help the listener get a kind of idea. So first thing we would do is mint an NFT assuming that there isn't one already. My first question when we get to that step is it's interesting that you've chosen to make NFTs such an important part of the protocol, especially considering that it applies also to things that are not strictly NFTs. Like my impression is that you're as you mentioned with the idea of painting, your target audience is not exclusively crypto native artists, but also any kind of IP that may be originated off chain and maybe isn't particularly monetized via NFT sales. So why is it that the NFT has been chosen as this like core IP asset component? If some of the target audience, maybe even most of the target audience are not principally interested in crypto?

Jason Zhao: Yeah, so let me answer the second part of that question and then I'll give a concrete example. There's two parts of the first half or the two parts of the first part of your question that I'm going to answer. So let me just read this out. The first part is why blockchain, right? Like we actually work with for example, apps that are fully web to they have two and a half million users. They've reached product market fit. They're registering 10 million IPs, right? And eventually we'll support all of them. And so why blockchain? And then secondly, if blockchain, why NFTs, right? So let me answer that in sort of order. Why blockchain? It's really important. We're asking people to essentially register one of the most valuable assets in the world on chain, right? And in many companies, studios, individual creators, their entire like net worth and value is based on IP and we're asking them to register that on story and to allow us to help them sort of monetize and license their IP, right? And so if we were a centralized entity, like a company, let's just call it like StoryCo or something like that, like a holding company, where people register their IP, then number one, we would be almost like custodians and we'd almost replicate the intermediary problem that we had before, which is that someone needs to sort of manage, whether it's a lawyer or holding company needs to manage your IP for you. I need to trust them to essentially do the right thing. And now we have to create integrations with every single app as an individual company. And blockchain is really important because essentially allows us to create an autonomous, almost autonomous legal system on chain, right? An autonomous like IP Legoland on chain where we can say, hey, you as Disney as Netflix as this web to company, you can trust us with your IP or as a creator because we're not in charge of it. Like we can't tamper with your IP. We can't tamper with the terms that you've set and also the license that we've created. It's not a license with story the company. It's a license with anyone that uses your IP. So you are the holder of legal rights and you will always remain the holder and we can't change the rules of the game just because maybe we're not earning enough or because we're dissatisfied with some of the IP that's been registered.

Nicholas: So it really goes to this idea of sovereignty in your experience talking to, to prospective customers or users of the protocol. Do you find that they're excited about that aspect or they're more put off by the general reputation of crypto currently surely not in the long term, but do they like the idea of having this kind of decentralized protocol underlying a public registry of their IP? Yeah, they prefer the idea of having it private and maybe more traditionally managed.

Jason Zhao: Well, this is a very interesting question because they love the idea of sovereignty. They love the idea of control. They love the idea of a global IP Legoland where anyone can monetize and use their work. Creators want reputation. They want reach and they want revenue and that's what story provides, right? But we give them the control and the keys. So it's almost like a Shopify, right? Like Shopify is not like if you're selling on Amazon, you're beholden to Amazon. But if you create a Shopify store, I mean they can still do some certain things because they're web to. but like the idea the principle is that hey, I have my own storefront. I do whatever I want with it and Shopify just gives me the tools right? There's the stories more like Shopify and they love that idea. And when we work with web to companies and big Hollywood creators that they don't really care about blockchain. They love the principles. And we don't pitch them the technology, right? Actually, we've built UI that abstracts away all the wallet architecture that abstracts away all of the gas all of the you know, things that would really because these these web to apps they already have users. They don't want to see a wallet pop up one day into their normal workflow and that would confuse them. So we abstract all that away and the technology just works, but they love the principles behind the technology. And so I think that's kind of a gap that maybe many industry have faced and we're starting to cross now. It's like can we just communicate the value to people that don't care about crypto and then just abstract away all the technical intricacies. So that's what we've tried to do with more traditional partners.

Nicholas: That maybe starts to answer the question about why NFTs are so fundamental. Each piece of intellectual property is unique and to the users of the protocol the creators who are using it. They maybe don't even have to really care about whether it's 6551 NFT, etc. It's it's technical details.

Jason Zhao: Exactly exactly exactly and you nailed it on the head. NFTs represent unique assets and creativity is is almost definitionally unique. Otherwise, it would just be like a replication rather than creation. So that's exactly why we use.

Nicholas: I'm curious about the. so you register an NFT you have an NFT you register it as an IP asset in this registry that story protocol provides and that creates an IP account. If I understand correctly, which is this 6551 token bound account. So basically the NFT, let's say your Izuki or maybe this podcast episode now owns whoever holds that NFT can now control the smart account associated with that NFT. So if the NFT moves hands, then whoever holds that NFT will have control of the smart account. This what do you call it? Story protocol? Exactly account.

Jason Zhao: Story protocol token. Yeah, story about an account.

Nicholas: Yeah, sorry about account. So and then what? what is the purpose of having this smart account? Why choose to have a smart account? Why not just have like all this metadata and details just inside of the smart contract in the first place? Why does it need to live inside of a smart account that belongs to the NFT rather than just living inside of the story protocol registry?

Jason Zhao: Yeah, so when our in our first design, we actually had everything in the end it like sort of ERC 721 and that's the cleanest, right? I think that's the most simple. But one thing that and one of the whole points of why we started story in the first place is composability, right? And so if you have your own standard, you're not backwards compatible. And so all of this existing creativity that's on chain, you need to remit it or it just doesn't work with story. And that's us was unacceptable. We wanted to be no matter what happens. We wanted to be compatible with all the creativity in the world because our ambition is to be, you know, serving as you know, like web to users, traditional Hollywood creators, in addition to crypto users. And so all of the work that's already been done on the energy standard is really important. And all of the all the existing IP that's already been imported on chain is also really important. And so for us, we wanted to think about what is the most flexible, adaptable and future proof way to ensure that any digital asset that represents IP can live on story. And the most intuitive idea for us was why don't we create a wrapper, right? Instead of forcing people to use an underlying standard, why don't we create a wrapper around that standard? So that. Anyone who creates an entity in a game or who has already created an FC can use story and leverage its benefits. And then for incoming, you know, future users who don't care about entities, you know, we just meant an entity on their behalf, right? So they don't have to think about, you know, how do I like, what is an entity? How do I represent this artwork as an entity? I've never heard of this. We just do it for them. And we have an SDK that does the entire process in one step. If you're bringing something off chain, we mint the entity for you. We attach the account. It all happens in one seamless registration. But the idea here is really to maximize composability of curiosity.

Nicholas: What chain are you doing? Sponsored transactions on?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. So right now we are really focused on the Ethereum community. And so we had some experiments with partners like lens. And so right now, basically, the way that we think about story is we want to support our partners wherever they are. And we believe that he lives everywhere. So right now we're relatively chain agnostic. in the future. We may explore ways to kind of allow more atomic composability across chains. But we're basically focused. We're very partner focused. And so we have deployments on testing that across variety of chains.

Nicholas: Because I guess ultimately you might you might want to have a single or at least the affordance so that people can query IP, regardless of what chain the NFTs live on and the smart accounts.

Jason Zhao: Yeah, that is definitely the end goal. And that's something that we're thinking about. And so we've kind of proven out that, hey, individual, you know, apps really, really benefit from story. And the next step is, can we actually, you know, again, continue to make steps towards this promise of composability? Because right now you can have intra chain composability, but it's hard to have cross chain composability. And we want. This to be a seamless experience where if I want to create a comic with a pudgy penguins on a theory mainnet and a cleanest source on that, that we could do that.

Nicholas: Got it. So I guess also having these smart accounts lets you define some modules, but also over time introduce new modules or let people permissionlessly create their own modules that could be associated with an IP asset. I presume.

Jason Zhao: Yes, the latter is is really what we're focused on in the long run, which is, hey, we started. We started out with royalty and licensing, which we think are pretty core. But the mission. Is to really decentralize this open sources and we build out the module architecture in such a way that we expect and we encourage developers to bring their own modules. And so we think that, you know, IP is remitting. licensing are really just a start, but there's a world of ideas that we'd have no idea, like what people are going to create and we want to allow third party developers to build their own modules. And we can imagine almost a module marketplace where people can create really cool functionality around IP and actually get compensated for having created that.

Nicholas: Okay, so let's dive into these modules a little bit more. So the first one is the library. The second one is the licensing module. And I suppose that's almost by default, at least at this stage, given that there's no alternative modules to do licensing. So if you're registering an IP asset, you're probably going to use the licensing module and it uses this programmable IP license that you've developed. Can you like add a little color on what this PIL or I suppose the bigger done and call it a PIL license, but what this programmable IP license? What does it involve? What does it solve for someone that they might otherwise have to deal with in the kind of TradFi IP space? How does it relate to existing? How does it relate to existing kinds of IP protections?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. So the PIL, we kind of call it internally, is basically think about it as there's two ways to think about it. The first is that it is essentially an on-ramp on-chain for IP. And the reason why we need a legal on-ramp is because IP is a legal concept. And so the PIL is basically the way that we ensure that every IP on-story protocol, it's not just purely on-chain, but it also has off-chain protection. And that's really important for creators. Because let's say I'm in something. Let's say Zora. And it's connected with story. And I set my licensing terms on-chain. And so people can monetize my IP on-chain and it's protected on-chain. But then it gets really popular and I want to take it to a studio. And they ask, okay, so it's Disney. They don't really care about NFTs. And you say, oh, I have these on-chain terms that I've set. You have to follow them. They won't care. Right? So the idea is that every IP registered on story is protected by the PIL. And there's a one-to-one correspondence between the on-chain terms that you set using our API. And the selections that we automatically make for you on the PIL. So the PIL is like a very, very flexible license. Almost think about it, each term has like a drop-down menu. So there's a term for what's the upfront fee. There's a drop-down menu that you can set. What is the royalty share? There's a drop-down menu on the license that you can select. And so there's like 10 or 15 of those terms that allow you to have a legal license. that's one-to-one with the on-chain reality that we're making. And so this vision of code is law and law is code is something that we're really trying to realize. Where you as a developer. Or as a crypto user. Just think about the code. But the law just works for you. Or if you only care about the law, you can trust that the code is enforcing that law. And so the PIL is this almost like off-ramp or on-ramp into the legal world. Whereas we are really operating in the on-chain world. We think that world is more efficient. So that's one way to think about it. The other way, another analogy that we use is basically it's a little bit like a YC safe for story. And so it's kind of one-size-fits-all license for all types of media. And we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make it flexible. But in the future. We actually plan on allowing people to bring their own license. So big brands or individual apps. They might have their own license they want to use. We think the PIL probably covers 99% of use cases. But if people want to bring their own license. Or you can even imagine like lawyers creating licenses and selling them. And allowing people to use them on story for a small fee. Like that's possible as well. So we have this open system where people can register their license on story. And then map those to terms in our smart contracts in our licensing module. And the beauty of doing that. The power of doing that is that whenever you want to. Compose IPs together. And see if they're compatible. And you can use two different IPs or four different IPs. Or if you're creating like a Smash Bros style game. It's maybe like 30 different characters that you want to license. Instead of having to talk to 30 different teams. And then make sure that each of them are compatible with each other. By like putting 30 legal docs side by side. You can just let our smart contracts check the compatibility for you. Basically what we've built is this universal compatibility engine. So we can check on chain. Whether you can actually bring these IPs together. And if so. Like what do you owe everyone? Right? And royalty wise. And you don't have to worry about that. So anyone can bake the next Avengers or the next Smash Bros by making a series of clicks. Rather than by having to be one of the biggest corporations in the world. And have massive legal team. talk to other massive legal teams.

Nicholas: Would you call that liquid licensing?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. Yeah. Actually this is a great term. And I think we might actually use that. Liquid licensing. One of the things we think about is beyond licensing. Like we're not just a licensing protocol. Right? Because at the end of the day. One of the big unlocks of crypto is creating liquidity. Right? We think about that beyond just licensing. In terms of IPs are real world assets. Actually they're the real world assets that are most uniquely suited for blockchains. Because of the fact that they have no natural scarcity. They need blockchains to provide scarcity. And so it's a $2 trillion asset class. Which is I think right now around the market cap of all of crypto combines. And it's the most illiquid asset class. So you have $2 trillion that people don't even like as a creator. I don't even know I have IP. Like that term is foreign to me. If I'm creating something on Dolly, that's IP. But I don't know I have it. The only people that can do anything with it are these massive studios and conglomerates. And so it's like extremely illiquid. It's extremely opaque. And so for a lot of creators just having the ability to bring that IP on chain into this global marketplace. Where anyone can use it and license it and trade it. Is going to be a huge unlock. And so that's probably the first phase of story is just tokenizing the world's creativity. Bringing it on chain. Making it liquid and legible. And then let's say for every 1,000 IPs. That get tokenized on story. Maybe 100 of them get licensed. Or 100 of them get remixed. And then maybe 10 of them get royalties. So not every IP is going to be licensed. And you can use story for things beyond just licensing. I think the most powerful unlock for people in the early days is just going to be tokenization. And that's very powerful in and of itself. Because it provides liquidity. But to your point on liquid licensing. Every license generated story is also an NFC. So you can imagine a marketplace for licenses. You can imagine IPFI or DeFi protocols. That allow you to take in either IP. As collateral. Or licenses of that IP as collateral. And you can now create this parallel pseudo creative, pseudo financial ecosystem. Right? Like both creative and financial. That really unlocks this asset class in a way that just wasn't possible before.

Nicholas: So we might say. Okay. We're going to turn this podcast episode into an IP asset. And then we're going to maybe create some shares of ownership that could be sold. Or we could take a loan against some portion of the revenues generated by derivative works. And then have whoever purchases those. Either taking it as collateral. Or maybe if we tokenize it. Fractionalize it as a fungible or something. We could distribute the revenues that we receive from derivative works of our product. Up to people who maybe allow us to fund the next production in advance. By giving us some kind of investment. To own a part of the IP. Or even the whole thing.

Jason Zhao: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean I can give like a radical end-to-end example of just like how flexible a story can be. Just to finally go back to your question like 30 minutes ago. I think one way to think about this like is let's say. Let's just start even before the podcast. Like we all own IP. And I genuinely mean that because you have a voice and I have a voice. Right? Like our voices mean. I mean your voice is more valuable than mine because you're a podcaster. And so people like hearing your voice. My voice is probably worthless. But anyways. Let's just say I tokenize my voice and your voice. And you tokenize your voice as IP. So we register on story. We set our terms for like. how much is my voice worth. How much do people have to pay to use it. And so let's say we get together. Or let's say I don't even know you Nicholas. I just like your voice. So I'm going to pay you 0.1 ETH because that's what you've said on your terms. I don't need to talk to you. I just click a button on some front end. Back in the API call. And now I have a license to use your voice. And obviously I can use my own voice because I registered. I'm the owner. And I use AI to create a podcast where we are talking to each other. Maybe this whole thing is AI generated.

Nicholas: I'm going to be the spokesperson of the next story. Right.

Jason Zhao: Exactly. And maybe this. You know you never know. If you're listening to this. Maybe this is actually the real example. Maybe this is all generated by an AI. So we use a video AI. Yeah. And it licenses our voices to create this podcast. Right. And so now let's say I have this podcast, which is itself a derivative of both of our voices. You can imagine a graph growing. I have my voice. I have a license. Your voice. Those are two nodes. And then I have this podcast that I've created with our two voices. That's like a third IP. Right. So now this is the sort of source or the child IP of these two parents. And let's say that this podcast blows up. People are collecting it or they're minting it or somehow it receives revenue. You would receive, whatever you said as your terms. or you would receive 50% of the revenue, I would receive 50% of the revenue, all of that would happen automatically. And to get it even more radical, you can imagine a third version of the scenario where actually, because I couldn't finance my access to the AI that would create this video, I could actually take out my voice and use it as collateral in a DeFi protocol to get a loan, right? To get a loan to finance the creation of this AI podcast. And then once this AI podcast generates revenue, I can pay off that loan that's collateralized on my own IP, right? So now you can sort of imagine these really, really interesting mechanics, both financial and creative. And especially with AI lowering the bar for creativity, it's such a massive opportunity. And right now it's just a huge issue because you've seen like Scarlett Johansson have her voice being used by OpenAI. You've seen Drake and The Weeknd have their voice be used in creation of remixes that have gone to number one SoundCloud. You see Harry Potter remixes, like Harry Potter and the South, Blenzy, Yaga on YouTube that are getting tens of millions of views. And it's a total lose-lose situation. For JK Rowling, for the person who spent hours remixing Harry Potter, none of them are earning anything. It's an antagonistic lose-lose relationship. But with story and AI, that becomes a positive some relationship where you're happy that I licensed your voice because I created this podcast using your voice, but you also earned, and you also got reach, and you also got reputation. And so that's a much more sustainable future for creativity in the era of AI than this current antagonistic system. Because currently, the legal system is fine on paper. It can't scale to the speed and scale the internet. So right now it's just like a cease and desist whack-a-mole, like don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. But the internet can't be stopped and it's fundamentally inevitable. And so given that inevitability, can we create an IP sort of infrastructure underlying system that allows you to monetize in the age of AI?

Nicholas: You mentioned an example a moment ago about like Disney saying, for example, "Oh, we don't care about blockchain particularly.". But if, let's say Disney was interested in some character that emerged that had been minted, registered as an IP asset on story and had a PIL or pill, then I assume those are irrevocable, right? If Disney says, "We don't really like this pill, we want some different deal." Is there anything that a creator can do once they've registered it as an IP asset? Because presumably they can't go back and change the license given that other derivative works may have sort of already engaged with it on the basis of that existing license, right?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. So it's actually, very powerful what people can do and the terms they can set. It's very expressive. So let me give you an example where it would be irrevocable and then another where it would be. So if Disney registered, let's say Mickey Mouse on chain, they set some terms and you generate a license, Nicholas, with those terms. And then they just got cold feet and they said, "No, actually, I don't want to do that deal anymore.". They can't do that because you've already paid for the license. You already have the license. That license NFT, that liquid license is yours, right? So you can do whatever you want with it, obviously following the terms of license. But let's say they generate a few licenses in that way and they realize, "Okay, this is not a fair deal for us. We want to change all the terms for future licenses, or we want to give tiered licenses.". So if I know you, if you're Warner Brothers, I'm going to give you a much better deal. If you're a random person on the internet, I'm going to make it really expensive, right? So they can start tweaking the terms and you can even imagine on-chain primitives like allow lists coming into play. You can set that on chain where, "Look, if you are in this list of addresses, you get this deal. If you're not, you get that deal.". All future deals can be changed. So I can append exemptions.

Nicholas: Okay.

Jason Zhao: Yeah, exactly. Because in the same way, an IP owner, if I do one deal, I can't change that deal, but I can change all my future deals. Maybe that deal wasn't a good one and I want to change my mind for future deals. I can change the terms. I can also have granular terms for different classes of people. And so anything that can be expressed in software can basically be expressed in these terms and it can become pretty powerful in that way.

Nicholas: But it might be difficult. if I wanted to create an exclusive... If Disney was like, "Okay, we want to option your NFT character, but we only want to do it if we're going to be... We don't want Warner Brothers to go make a movie with the same character or some crappy YouTube channel to make videos with the same character. We want an exclusive license.". It might be difficult to walk back the irrevocable liquid licensing aspects of prior versions of the pill. So you're committing to some amount of liquid licensing, right?

Jason Zhao: Yes. Any decisions that have been made and done on-chain previously, you're committed to because you signed a contract and that's going to be enforced. But in the future with different people, or after the existing license expires, you can update your beliefs and update that on-chain.

Nicholas: Okay. Is there some notion of temporal notion built into the pill? Or there can be?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. This is not currently something that we support, but we're adding this feature where licenses can basically... Essentially, there's a tag that flips on after a certain period of time so that they are temporary. But because we're really focused on creating liquidity, and this... I mean, I love this term liquid licensing. It's hard to imagine a licensed entity being used in a DeFi protocol when the DeFi protocol needs to now manage risk around, "Oh, this collateral just disappeared because the license expired and this person maliciously put in an expiring license as collateral.". So we wanted to let the ecosystem develop and see how people use things and then add more complexity and more expressivity based on a safe foundation.

Nicholas: Okay. I know you don't have ages to talk and I have too many questions. So let's do lightning round. How do royalties work? Okay. If I install the royalties module, I know that there's some notion of ERC20s in the royalties module, but if I create a derivative NFT, for example, I suppose there's two classes of derivatives I can create. Ones that are on-chain, where the revenues are on-chain, where you can imagine it's still up to me in my derivative work to actually honor the terms of the agreement that I signed up for using the protocol. But all of the revenues can flow through queries to the protocol to find out who's owed what. I can execute the royalties and flow them up the tree of derivative works. But if they're happening off-chain, then not only do I have to voluntarily do it, but also the fact of it being executed, the fact of my derivative being created as a merchandise or something is not in the chain. So in each of these cases, how does the royalties module work? And I guess, how does enforcement work also?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. Great question. I'm going to try to talk as fast as I can because it's a lightning round, but these are very big thorny questions. Take your time. So let me do my best to be succinct. How does royalties work? The first part of the question, the view I can give is that you're right. We use ERC20 royalty tokens, which again, can participate in DeFi, right? Like I have this token. It gives me a claim over some of the royalties, right? So there's a fixed number of tokens that are created per IP and the royalty module essentially allows you to distribute those tokens in a way that represents the royalty share. So if you want to keep 100% of those tokens, then you don't give out any royalties. If I give you, Nicholas, 10% of my token supply for this IP, then you have a share for 10% of the royalties. It interacts closely with the licensing module because when you set your terms, for the licensing module, you might have some royalty terms. And so the royalty module automatically essentially airdrops the right amount of royalty tokens to those people that you've done the deal with. And so that you don't have to manage that yourself, or you don't have to trust that the person is going to give you the royalty tokens after the license has been generated. So there is an interaction between the licensing module, which can dictate the royalty module and the distribution of those tokens. So that's high level. how the royalty module works.

Nicholas: Let's just say for the on-chain example, just because it'll be simpler to imagine, or I guess in both cases, the idea is that any derivative works would reference the ownership of the ERC-20 in order to decide who to allocate revenues to, be it on-chain or off-chain? Yes, exactly.

Jason Zhao: Yes. And so you can imagine a situation where I have a deal with someone to get 20% of the royalty. So when that deal is struck, when that license is generated, I get airdropped 20% of that supply, the royalty tokens for that IP. But then I'm like, "I don't want this anymore. I want to sell it.". And so I can sell my existing initial conditions. I can change that. So I can go and swap those tokens on uSwap. There's probably not liquidity for one IP asset, but I can trade them to other people. I can bundle them up. I can do whatever I want with them. Once it's in my wallet, it's tokenized and I can keep them and not do anything with them, in which case I just get the royalties. Or I could do DeFi and other interesting maneuvers in order to get the most value out of that.

Nicholas: So for example, if someone's going to create a derivative NFT, instead of hard-coding the split of the revenues into the NFT, like say Zora or 0xSplits contract, they would make a reference to the ownership of the ERC20s, which it would then query in real time when revenues are generated so that the ERC20s can change hands and the royalties will be allocated to the right people. Got it. And then I guess in the off-chain merchandising context, it's just up to following the law and maybe being enforced by courts.

Jason Zhao: Yeah. Sort of. And so a couple of quick points on that. One is we've actually seen... Think about a Teespring or a platform that allows you to create merch. Most merch is going to be being created digitally these days anyways. There's a lot of digital platforms to create merch. And so these platforms, we talked to them, they're integrating with Story so that... It's not perfect. I guess I could go and print a T-shirt manually without using the internet at all. But if you're using any of these platforms and they're integrated with Story, those platforms know how much people pay for the merch. And so if I'm on a website selling Billie Eilish merch, that website knows how much they're earning because they can call... They're getting that through the web. And so essentially, if they're integrating with Stories Story, that revenue can be funneled on-chain. Now, they do have to be honest because that revenue is coming in fiat rather than on-chain assets. So that is sort of a stress point. But I do think knowing how much royalties are coming in and integrating with these platforms and following the happy path, that's a very powerful onboarding mechanism for off-chain revenue.

Nicholas: Do you imagine them doing some kind of content ID on the imagery that's being used? For example, in Teespring, if you use a Billie Eilish photo that we might be able to use content ID technology, you know, whatever, I'm just using that as a brand name, but just figure out who the photographer is, who owns the actual rights on Story, but based on the visual content rather than just having to know the, I don't know, ID number of the NFT corresponding to that IP asset?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. We've thought about building a sort of AI-powered content ID system. But right now, it's more explicit where you just have to specify in the API what IP ID is, what we call it, that you're using. And so there's no automated mechanism right now, but that's definitely something that could be added as a layer on top. And to answer your question on enforcement, the way that we think about this is you can right now use Story protocol to raise disputes about IPs that you think are infringing or are, you know, I just registered Mickey Mouse maliciously and I said, I'm the creator. Like you can dispute that. And there are ways to essentially prevent royalty streams from accruing to disputed IPs. But really the end all be all of it is the reason why the pill is so important, this programmable IP license, is that the worst case scenario? on Story? is the best case scenario today, right? If anyone buys your IP, like, how do you deal with that? Like, unfortunately you have to use legal recourse. And so we try to avoid that as much as possible by building in these modules and enforcing things on chain. But in this option scenario, if someone is just simply not doing what they said they would do, you still have that protection. You don't have to rely on just goodwill. You have a license, you can show people that license, you can get enforced. And to be honest, that deters a lot of people from doing bad things because they know that that exists. Like Getty Images, you can go on Getty Images and right-click save as, but it's still a $2 billion company of just stock photography, right? Because people like the New York Times doesn't want, it's not worth it for them to break the law for, to save a hundred bucks on a photo, right? And so we're basically building an on-chain Getty Images, but for the entire internet of content and we're not tied to a single platform, right? So that's kind of how we think about it. And we think that having the programmable IP license really encourages people to follow this happy path, but still provides a backstop if people aren't following.

Nicholas: I'm interested because, I mean, for someone like Tease, I mean, presumably it's not really in their interest to have to go through all the trouble to figure out whatever infringement, I mean, it's like, you know, it doesn't affect them particularly. It affects maybe the creators of the original artwork, but I guess by having partnerships with both Teespring or someone like that, and I know you mentioned it in your talk, the like digital creator, I don't know, it's like a sort of deviantart kind of community or something like that, that maybe you can, it can, you can imagine it like the way that websites used to have, like searching for Flickr, Creative Commons imagery as a primitive built into a website for creating works. And you might have derivatives from another partner of yours or someone who's integrated Story so that there is that relationship. But I guess I'm curious, why does someone like Teespring or what's the motivation? You can see the motivation amongst tools that are helping people create content, but if the content depends on derivatives, but the platform doesn't really pay, if it's an externality that they don't pay the price for, what is their interest in integrating something like Story?

Jason Zhao: Yeah, I think to be honest, and, and you look at, gaming, it's probably the most advanced form of IP and every entertainment company wants to monetize like a gaming company because they just generate way more revenue. How are the most successful games or the Holy Grail of gaming? What do they look like now? It's the Robloxes of the world, Fortnites of the world. And what they've done successfully is create a UGC marketplace. Like, like Roblox created a platform, Minecraft created a platform, Fortnite created a platform for other people to create and monetize. And so if you're a Teespring or if you're, you know, any of these apps, like one of the things you're thinking about is how do I like build a trust and community that creators to generate content that can then bring traction and volume and revenue to my platform. And so for Teespring, it's really important that you're creator first, that you're creator centric and that you appropriately compensate those creators. Cause the best creators are going to be on the places where they can earn the most. Right. And honestly, like if you over time, I mean, you might be able to not enforce things or not use Story in the, in the, in the short term, but if artists are finding that all their work is being copied on Teespring, then that's going Yeah. For the company. And they're going to be unable to bootstrap this essentially like Lego land of IPs or this UGC environment where people are staying on Teespring, they're creating on Teespring. They're creating for Teespring because they know that Teespring is going to treat them well. And, and so I think this is sort of a fundamental thesis of crypto in general, which is that your take rate is my opportunity. And for, um, for creators, what we're trying to do is make it easier for them to be aligned with the platform where, you know, the platform isn't just taking from the creators, but the platform is actually giving to the creators. And that's good for the creators. It's good for the platform. And that builds a virtuous cycle that allows that network effect for, for like a game like Roblox or for a platform like Teespring to have that community. And that's a, that's a real note, right? Um, because in the era of AI generating content, I think content itself will be relatively cheap, but IP and origination will become very, very valuable, right? Because I can create anything in any one style, but what's really important is that, you know, if I'm creating a Drake song that Drake put his blue check mark on my song, right. Or the weekend, put his blue check mark on, on my song, because anyone can create any random Drake song at this point. And so the authenticity and the sort of consent of the author becomes, you know, valuable in the same way that counterfeits that look very, very similar are nowhere near as valuable as the original.

Nicholas: Yeah. It becomes important for distribution as the price of content generation tends towards zero, then in influence only becomes more important. Uh, and so the imprimatur creator is potentially a way, a way to, to, uh, it will ultimately depend on how the recommendation algorithms do or don't privilege things. But, uh, yeah, I, I see, I see what you mean. It does make me wonder in what jurisdictions does story protocol, like, is it, is it primarily situated in American legal context because that's where IP origination is most important right now, or does it apply globally? How can you think about jurisdictions if you're thinking about registering something on story protocol?

Jason Zhao: Yeah. Jurisdictions is a really important topic and the way we think about it. And luckily for us is that copyright is at this point, relatively globalized. And it, you know, it's important that it is because if Pikachu is created in Japan, you know, I shouldn't be, you know, no one should be able to use Pikachu randomly in the U S just because it was created in Japan. Right. So there have been international conventions essentially around copyright. And there's one called the burn convention, which is, you know, like hundreds of countries got together and they decided, Hey, let's follow the same basic set of rules. There might be some fine tuning. We might enforce them differently, but I mean, at the end of the day, we follow the same set of copyright principles. And so when we, we really focused on, you know, the U S and Asia as markets, and that's what we thought about when creating the programmable IP license, but like we really want to emphasize that this is a global license and it can stand up anywhere. Um, well, practically anywhere that has essentially agreed to the burn convention, which at this point is every relevant country when it comes to IP. And so for all intents and purposes, the copyright license is global just because our global standards around IP.

Nicholas: Got it. Um, stories, success kind of depends on becoming like a shelling point for IP rights on chain. Uh, I'm curious, I haven't heard of anything that's really, really, really, really, really, really, doing anything quite like story protocol in an on-chain context. but do you think of any kind of competitors or maybe not even competitors but equivalent kind of attempts or efforts that have been made maybe even in the traditional world and that have failed? is there anything like in the same lane a story or is it really the only project trying to do something like this?

Jason Zhao: yeah in the traditional world i would say the closest there's. there's two types of comparisons. i would say one is like an open version honestly see story as an open version of like meta horizons or like this metaverse concept that mark zuckerberg and facebook like to talk about which is basically let's you know let's bet on this trend that more and more digital assets or more and more value are moving into the digital world as opposed to the physical world. that's essentially what the metaverse is from an economic perspective. and if you're facebook you want to capture that in one place you want to capture that in a platform that makes sense for you as a company. but if your story we we think yes we agree. the same thing like more values moving digitally more values occurring to ideas as opposed to physical goods. but can we make it an open substrate right like you have this global library of assets and things in ip but anyone can use it whether it's meta horizons or a small uh video game developer. right. so that's one comparison. another comparison is more on the licensing side which is like we said before like a shutterstock or a getty. i think that captures another element of it which is can we automate the monetization of ip? right in many ways right in many senses that is licensing and that is royalties right. so you combine the two together about automating through code some of the processes around monetizing ip and then also bringing digital value into an underlying infrastructure. i think that's kind of where you land at story um but there's no like direct call it i would say. and then in terms of the uh the sort of on-chain world i think the closest things are things like um story dao or things like um nfc projects like yugo labs like you know like you know like you know like you know like you know like what they're trying to do and and what we see a lot and you know honestly how we got the idea for story. one of them was we saw a lot of these efforts and we realized like they just didn't have the infrastructure to be truly composable right like think about how much work luca and the pudgy penguins team and props to them had to put in to build overpass which is like a licensing platform for pudgies. our vision is that you shouldn't need to build a licensing platform like you should just like just like you don't need to build a dex for every erc20 token. that it's kind of absurd. so what we want to do is build the infrastructure to build the infrastructure that allows all of these interesting cultural experiments happening on chain to share the same tooling and to share the same like ip liquidity so to speak the same ip graph and so we i wouldn't even call them competitors. they're more like inspirations for us because we want to be able to power the next generation of these projects and these ips without them needing to have the speed and scale of a pudgy penguin team that has the excellence to build their own.

Nicholas: licensing marketplace makes sense makes us. how will story make money in the future?

Jason Zhao: yeah so it's a combination of a couple things but the main is around the protocol fees. So I think it was actually really interesting to see the Uniswap fee turn on a few months ago and be relatively successful. The way we think about it is, and this is all going to the treasury. at the end of the day, because we are decentralizing the protocol and that's why we use blockchain at all is because we don't want to be this holding company. Essentially think about every IP licensing remixing monetization interaction as a transaction on story. And these IP transactions or IP interactions carry monetary value. And so we just take a very small slice of all the value that's flowing through the system in the same way that, you know, like you might have a tax on goods flowing in and out of the country. So that's kind of how we think about our business model is if people are monetizing IP, they're generating IP on story, stories facilitating that revenue, then we'll take a very, very small slice in the same way that Uniswap takes a very small fee on every swap that they facilitate.

Nicholas: And I mean, just for the, to complete the Uniswap comparison, I mean, Uniswap is doing it on the front end currently. I guess they've, they're also experimenting with doing it on certain pools in the protocol level, but you're talking about doing it at the protocol level.

Jason Zhao: We're talking about the protocol level. Yeah, exactly. But we can imagine like building maybe some first party apps that showcase the protocol and then those apps could be front. But I think unlike Uniswap where the protocol is, you know, if you ask what's being built on Uniswap, it's, it's a dex, right? It's going to, maybe it's a purple dex or a green dex or it's a dex with fewer or less buttons or more buttons, but it's a dex. With story, you can imagine powering something like Yugo. You can imagine powering like we, you know, with, you know, some sort of AI focused tool, like a character AI. So there's not like one front end that we could build. that would capture a lot of value. And I think the value for us is more on building this protocol that facilitates many different types of apps in an ecosystem that way.

Nicholas: Yeah, it'll be invisibly integrated into lots of different things. Your co-founders, Seungyoon Lee and Jason Levy, both have experience building these massive storytelling protocols, Radish and Episode, which are, I guess, UGC storytelling protocol platforms, web two, but maybe you can also think of them as like fanfic or maybe romance literature oriented kind of, but essentially UGC storytelling. At least that's how I understand it. First of all, how did you meet them? And second of all, how did that background influence story? Because it seems to me like there's a lot of connective tissue, but these UGC storytelling platforms kind of don't get a lot of play in like the tech discussion circles.

Jason Zhao: Yeah. So I met, first I met SY, who, we actually met through a mutual friend building the crypto ecosystem. And so I got introduced to a mutual friend to SY and we were both thinking about pretty much the same things. Like SY just sold his last company, which was a very, as you mentioned, a very successful company called Radish to Cacao, which is a green conglomerate. And he was very interested in how blockchain could solve some of the problems he faced as an operator in a web two media business. And then I was thinking about, like I said, how come there's so much financial infrastructure, but very little creative infrastructure in crypto. And so I have a more of like a research and product and engineering mind. He has a very business and, and sort of a media, entertainment mind. And so that's kind of, it was very obvious that we should work together. And then Jason is someone that SY has known for a long time because they both built companies in similar industry, right. And in this sort of mobile storytelling industry. And so they had known each other. and Jason has a really great mind. for essentially, you know, how do we take this ancient crap of storytelling and translate it for the blockchain era in the same way that he did for the mobile era? Because every new technology moves content forward and arguably entertainment is sort of always the first to change in a new technological paradigm shift. How we got to know each other. And as you said, like, I think there's a lot of good synergies between the founding team in terms of having that experience in entertainment, having an experience in technology, but being, you know, having a shared vision of building infrastructure for a new era of creativity that is powered by AI that is powered by the internet that is powered by social media. And right now we're still using essentially the same IP tooling, which is pen and paper as people invented 400 years ago after the Gutenberg press. Right. So we're still kind of trying to apply that to the internet. And it's not working. So that's kind of how the company got started.

Nicholas: Yeah, I'm particularly interested. I mean, both of their backgrounds and particularly SY's background, both doing Radish and then also working at Kakao, which acquired Radish subsequently, seems to me like it seems natural enough that you'll be able to establish partnerships with kind of UGC creator platforms that are interested in engaging with Story Protocol in order to sort of broaden their offering. But the Kakao connection also strikes me as potentially answering the big question. The big skepticism people might have about something like Story Protocol, which is how do you convince big brands to actually put their IP on chain? Because it's a huge risk for them. Nobody wants to do it first, presumably. But I imagine that the connections that he has and the sort of understanding of their perspective of the industry may help you achieve that. Is there any light you can shed on how you're going to manage to convince big IP holders to put their content on chain?

Jason Zhao: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, we're working with some pretty large creators right now in Hollywood and, like I mentioned, some platforms that have millions of users. So we're definitely starting to get that adoption and that traction, that interest. That being said, our belief is that every new content platform that's truly revolutionary starts by sort of, you know, engaging with the long tail of creators that were neglected by the previous system. Right. And I think the canonical example here is YouTube, where YouTube didn't start and they say they go to Steven Spielberg or James Cameron in Hollywood and say, hey, we have this video platform that you can share videos on the Internet. They went to the guys who just got phones, either whatever, iPhone, 3GS or whatever, and they're in their bedroom creating home videos that look like they look like really that and they look like kind of toys. Right. This idea that everything that's important eventually starts initially looking like a toy. Right. And so YouTube got this whole class of creators that just could not have existed without YouTube that were completely neglected by Hollywood. And they started creating videos on YouTube. Right. And that's that's what led to Mr. Beast today. And so we have a similar thesis. It's like, is it really? The. Teams. that already are generating millions of revenue and have teams of lawyers and know how to manage IP. Is it really them that they're gonna be the most desperate and feeling the most pain? It's probably not. I mean, it's very encouraging that we have like people in Hollywood who are very excited about this. And it just goes to show like how powerful this is and also the need for change in that industry. But we really are focused on crypto native use cases, IP5, AI, tokenizing creativity, because honestly, I think that's where we're really focused is the people who just could not have, did not even know they had IP and certainly could not do anything with it. Those are the people that are gonna do the most interesting things and gonna be the most motivated to use and build on story. And so even though we do have this advantage, this unfair advantage that we have connections to Webtoons and Wattpad and these big platforms in Hollywood, like the real focus for us is to be pragmatic and to really look at who's gonna be the most creative with our tech and who's gonna want it the most and who's gonna get the most benefit from it. And we think that's this 99.9% of people creating content on social media, or using AI that understand crypto. And so we're starting there. And hopefully that can show, once there's success stories there, we can show that to the bigger players and that'll sell them more than any picture on the technology cat.

Nicholas: - Awesome. Jason, I know you got to run. Thank you so much for sharing all this great information about Story Protocol. We got through almost all of my questions, which is a good start. If people wanna check out more, where should they keep tuned to the Story Protocol story?

Jason Zhao: - Yeah, so you could follow us on Twitter at Story Protocol. And then my handle is @JasonJZao, that's Z-H-A-O. So I'll be sharing as many updates as we can. And we have some exciting updates in the coming weeks. So stay tuned.

Nicholas: - Very cool. Thanks so much.

Jason Zhao: - Thank you, Nicholas. Appreciate you.

Nicholas: - Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. To keep up with everything Web3, follow me on Twitter @Nicholas with four leading ends. You can find links to the topics discussed on today's episode in the show notes. Podcast feed links are available at web3galaxybrain.com. Web3 Galaxy Brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2200 UTC on Twitter spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.