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 the blockchain needs “more time” to generate usage and that near-zero on-chain revenue is “the wrong metric” for an IP and AI data network.
The six-month delay keeps team and investor tokens locked as Story transitions from general intellectual property registration to licensing human-generated data sets for AI training.
He pointed to Worldcoin’s decision in 2024 to extend investor and team lock-ups from three to five years, a move that reduced circulating supply in the short term and was framed as an extension of the development runway, with the token posting double-digit gains in the hours following the announcement. The story, Lee said, follows the same logic.
“If we were all mercenaries, we would have wanted a shorter lockdown,” he said, describing the extension as a sign of long-term commitment rather than distress.
Story’s daily revenue, which peaked at $43,000 in September 2025 and is currently $0 per DeFiLlama, has also been a concern for many investors.
Lee argues that those figures understate Story’s activity because much of the expected monetization occurs off-chain through licensing deals rather than transaction tolls.
In his view, gas revenue is a lagging indicator for a network designed to record rights, provenance and terms of use before beginning to extract significant value from them.
“We intentionally put our chain gas rate pretty low. We’re more of an IP chain,” he said. “You may not see the type of revenue stream you are looking for, like a DeFi chain.”
Instead, he said Story’s near-term focus is on registering ownership terms and use rights for data sets and models used to train artificial intelligence systems (something the project announced last year) with payments and royalty splits built into smart contracts.
That shift moves the project away from tokenizing media or collectibles and toward what Lee described as “non-disposable” human-contributed data, such as multilingual voice samples and first-person videos, assets that he says are harder for AI developers to obtain legally at scale through traditional web scraping.
However, the transition delays on-chain revenue visibility because much of the expected value is tied to enterprise 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 in 2021, noting that it took years for significant revenue to materialize.
For token holders, the practical implication is that supply expansion is slowing as the team attempts to demonstrate traction on AI data partnerships and the collection of rights-licensed datasets.
Whether that strategy will ultimately become a sustainable business model is an open question, but Lee maintained that extending vesting schedules is healthier than quickly injecting liquidity into a weak market.
“The best founders, the best teams, the best companies typically do it for more than a decade, we’re in it for the long haul and for longer turns,” Lee said.
