Story Protocol addresses a problem in the creative industry: the potential threat of intellectual property theft and exploitation, especially with the growth of AI-generated content.
The project has raised $134.3 million in three rounds of funding with the participation of tier1 funds a16z, Polychain Capital, angel investor Balaji Srinivasan, and others.
The project is followed on Twitter by representatives of tier1 funds a16z, Animoca Brands, Fabric Ventures, Arrington Capital, Blockchain Capital, Coinbase, and others.
The launch of the Story Protocol mainnet is expected at the end of the year, with detailed information to be presented during the Korea Blockchain Week conference in Seoul in September.
Team
Judging by the page on LinkedIn the company employs more than 40 people.
They are recruiting people - there are five vacancies: https://www.linkedin.com/company/story-protocol/jobs/
The company has three co-founders.
Seung Yoon “SY” Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Story Protocol. Previously, he served as the Director of Global Strategy at Kakao Entertainment. He sold his startup Radish for $440 million in 2021. Venture partner at Hashed. He was included in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia.
He speaks quite often – he was at the ETHDenver conference, at Korea Blockchain Week.
Representatives of a16z, Coinbase, Sfermion, Binance, Animoca Brands, etc. follow the CEO on Twitter.
Twitter: https://x.com/storysylee
LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sy-seung-yoon-lee-8205a444/
Jason Levy is the COO and co-founder of Story Protocol. He is the former CEO of Pocket Gems, where he led the content team at the Episode mobile storytelling ecosystem (200+ million downloads, $100+ million in annual revenue). He worked as a financial analyst at Apple and founded the mobile entertainment startup Worlds Between Worlds. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Jason is followed on Twitter by a16z and Sfermion.
Twitter: https://x.com/JasonLLevy
LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/ in/jason-levy-98999548/
Jason Zhao is the third co-founder of Story Protocol. Previously worked as a product manager at DeepMind, where he was involved in implementing Google's advanced AI models into industrial and enterprise applications. Active business angel. Founder of Stanford Rewired, taught at Stanford's d.school. BA in Philosophy and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
He gives a lot of speeches and interviews.
Followed on Twitter by representatives of a16z, Animoca Brands, Fabric Ventures, IOSG VC and others.
Twitter: https://x.com/jasonjzhao
LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonjinzhao/
Competitors and evaluation
The project has no direct competitors. There is no particular point in comparing it with L1 blockchains without taking into account IP and AI. It can be compared with NEAR, it is also an L1 blockchain with a16z as investors, also in the AI sphere, but it is already quite an old and established project with FDV of $5.3 billion. Story is unlikely to receive such an assessment.
Let's look at the past successful investments of a16z and Polychain.
- Polyhedra – an infrastructure project to ensure interoperability, scalability, and privacy in Web3 using zero-knowledge proof technology.
Raise $45 million, FDV $1.19 billion. At its peak, the project was worth 3 times more.
Among the funds Polychain and Binance.
- AltLayer – a decentralized protocol that simplifies the launch of native and redistributed rollups using optimistic and zk rollups.
Raise $37.2 million, FDV $951 million. At its peak, the project was worth almost 7 times more.
Among the funds: Polychain, Jump Crypto, and Binance.
- Manta Network – L2 blockchain.
Raise $64 million, FDV $763 million. At its peak, the project was worth 5 times more.
Among the funds: Polychain, Multicoin, and Binance.
- Celo – EVM-compatible L1 blockchain. An old project, but still holding up well.
Raise $66.5 million, FDV $507 million. At its peak, the project was worth 15 times more.
Among the funds are Polychain and a16z.
- a16z is a lead investor in several rounds in projects such as Sui (raise $385, FDV $9.12 billion), zkSync (raise $458 million, FDV $2.57 billion), LayerZero (raise $263 million, FDV $3.7 billion).
As we can see, all projects are trading at a good valuation relative to their investors. Considering the large raise of $134 million and based on the above results, Story can be expected to be valued at least $1 billion. And if the AI bubble on the stock market continues to grow, the valuation could be much higher.
Activities
Let's get the Reverse role in Discord. Go to the channel #announcements and click on the red card:
The rare role Programmable OG can be obtained for activity in chats – communication and answers to questions from newcomers. You can also try to get it for memes and art that we publish in the channel #art-and-memes.
NFT Story
Minttime NFT in the Sepolia test network.
- Go to the website: https://explorer.story.foundation/register
- Connect the wallet.
- Click on Mint a test ERC721 NFT and Mint an NFT.
ETH faucets on the Sepolia network:
Leave your email for the newsletter on the website: https://www.story.foundation/newsletter
August 27 – we carry out the first activity in the testnet
- Story Protocol's testnet has started. First activity – NFT mint.
- Official announcement: https://x.com/StoryProtocol/status/1828455573513482607
- Deadline is August 29.
Procedure:
- Go to the website: https://mint.story.foundation
- Connect the EVM wallet
- Add the Story test network to the wallet
- Subscribe to Twitter, like the post, join Discord and Telegram
- Click on Get Tokens
- In the window that opens, insert your wallet address and receive test IP tokens
- Wait until you receive the test tokens and click on Mint NFT
Possible problems:
- If after going to the faucet, the message Failed to verify your browser appears, change the browser to another one.
- If the gas cost exceeds 1 IP, change the gas value manually through the settings in the wallet.
After minting, check for NFT by inserting the wallet address in the explorer: https://testnet.storyscan.xyz/tokens
Let's sum it up
The team has all the trump cards - a big raise, L1 blockchain, AI narrative, tier1 funds. Of course, it is worth remembering that all this does not guarantee a successful exit and generosity of the project. But you should definitely not ignore such stories.
