Story Protocol co-founder SY Lee defended the project’s decision to push back the unlocking of its first major IP token until August 2026, in a recent interview with CoinDesk, saying blockchain needs “more time” to grow 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 a general intellectual property registry to licensing human-generated datasets for artificial intelligence training.
He highlighted Worldcoin’s decision in 2024 to extend the investor and team lock-up from three to five years, a move that reduced circulating supply in the short term and was touted 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 liked a shorter detention,” he said, describing the extension as a signal of long-term commitment rather than distress.
Story’s daily earnings, which peaked at $43,000 in September 2025 and are currently $0 per DeFiLlama, have also been a concern for many investors.
Lee says these numbers underestimate Story’s business because much of the planned monetization occurs off-chain through licensing deals rather than through transaction fees.
He said gas revenues are a lagging indicator for a network designed to record rights, provenance and terms of use before it begins to extract significant value.
“We’ve intentionally kept our channel gas fees pretty low. We’re more of an IP channel,” 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 goal was to record 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 distribution embedded in smart contracts.
This shift moves the project away from tokenizing media content or collectibles and toward what Lee described as “unrecoverable” human 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.
The transition delays on-chain revenue visibility, however, as 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 slowed while the team attempts to demonstrate its rise in AI data partnerships and the collection of entitlement datasets.
It remains an open question whether this strategy will ultimately turn into a sustainable business model, but Lee argued that extending vesting schedules is healthier than rushing liquidity into a weak market.
“The best founders, the best teams, the best companies usually do it for over a decade, we’re in it for the long haul and for longer innings,” Lee said.
