In a recent interview with CoinDesk, Story Protocol co-founder SY Lee defended the project’s decision to delay unlocking its first major IP token until August 2026, saying “more time” is needed to build blockchain usage and that near-zero on-chain revenue is a “wrong indicator” for intellectual property and AI data networks.
The six-month delay leaves teams and investors’ tokens locked up as the story pivots toward licensing human-generated datasets for artificial intelligence training from a popular IP registry.
He pointed to WorldCoin’s decision in 2024 to extend the lockup for investors and teams from three to five years, a move that reduced short-term circulating supply and was disguised as an extension of the development runway, causing the token to post double-digit gains in the hours following the announcement. The story follows the same logic, Lee said.
“If we were all mercenaries, we would want a shorter lockup,” he said, explaining that the extension was a sign of long-term commitment rather than pain.
Story’s daily revenue reached $43,000 in September 2025 and is currently $0 per DeFiLlama, which is a concern for many investors.
Lee argues that these numbers underestimate Story’s activity, as much of the intended monetization occurs off-chain through licensing agreements rather than transaction fees.
In his view, gas revenue is a lagging indicator for networks designed to record rights, provenance, and terms of use before they can begin to extract meaningful value from them.
“We intentionally set our chain gas rates quite low. We are more of an IP chain,” he said. “You may not find the type of revenue stream you are looking for, like a DeFi chain.”
Instead, the short-term focus of the story is on documenting ownership terms and usage rights for datasets and models used to train artificial intelligence systems (something the project announced last year), as well as payments and royalty splits embedded in smart contracts, he said.
This shift moves the project away from the tokenization of media content and collectibles and towards what Lee describes as “unscrapeable” data provided by humans, such as multilingual audio samples and first-person videos. These assets are difficult for AI developers to legally obtain at scale through traditional web scraping, he argues.
However, the transition will delay on-chain revenue visibility, as much of the expected value is tied to enterprise license transactions rather than retail transaction fees. Lee compared this timeline to the previous experience of a Web2-based startup that raised $440 million in 2021, noting that it took years for meaningful revenue to materialize.
The practical implication for token holders is that supply expansion has slowed while the team looks 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 argued that extending the vesting schedule is healthier than rushing liquidity into a weak market.
“The best founders, the best teams, the best companies typically stay in this work for 10 years or more, but we’re working for the long term, over longer innings,” Lee said.
