Story Protocol co-founder SY Lee defended the project’s decision to push its first major IP token unlock to August 2026 in a recent interview with CoinDesk, saying blockchain needs “more time” to build usage and that near-zero on-chain turnover is “the wrong metric” for an intellectual property and AI data network.
The six-month delay keeps team and investor tokens locked up as Story pivots from a general IP registry toward licensing human-generated datasets for AI training.
He pointed to Worldcoin’s 2024 decision to extend investor and team lockups from three to five years, a move that reduced circulating supply in the short term and was framed as an extension of the development trajectory, with the token posting double-digit gains in the hours following the announcement. History, Lee said, follows the same logic.
“If we were all mercenaries, we would have wanted a shorter lockup,” he said, describing the extension as a signal of long-term commitment rather than distress.
Story’s daily revenue peaked at $43,000 in September 2025 and is currently $0 per share. DeFiLlama, has also been a concern for many investors.
Lee argues that these numbers understate Story’s activity because much of the intended monetization occurs off-chain through licensing agreements rather than in transaction fees.
In his view, gas revenue is a lagging indicator for a network designed to record rights, provenance and terms of use before it begins to extract meaningful value from them.
“We’ve intentionally set our chain gas fee quite low. We’re more of an IP chain,” he said. “You may not see the type of revenue stream you’re looking for as a DeFi chain.”
Instead, he said Story’s near-term focus is on registering ownership terms and usage rights for datasets and models used to train artificial intelligence systems — something the project announced last year — with payments and royalty splits embedded in smart contracts.
This shift moves the project away from tokenizing media content or collectibles and toward what Lee described as “unbreakable” human-contributed data, such as multilingual voice samples and first-person video, assets that he argues are harder for AI developers to obtain legally at scale through traditional web scraping.
However, the transition delays the visibility of income in the chain because much of the expected value is tied to corporate licensing agreements rather than retail transaction fees. Lee compared the timeline to his previous Web2-based startup experience — which earned him a $440 million exit by 2021 — and noted that it took years for meaningful earnings to materialize.
For token holders, the practical implication is that supply expansion is slowing while the team tries to demonstrate traction in AI data partnerships and rights-cleared dataset collection.
Whether that strategy ultimately translates into a sustainable business model is an open question, but Lee maintained that extending vesting times is healthier than rushing liquidity into a weak market.
“The best founders, the best teams, the best companies usually do it for a decade plus, we’re in it for the long haul and longer innings,” Lee said.
