Story's Genesis Block

The declaration of independence for IP.

Beginnings are singular. From the Declaration of Independence to Bitcoin's genesis block, beginnings are inflection points that mark the end of one era and the birth of another.

Blockchains declare their beginnings via software. A genesis block is a blockchain's first block — its founding document and philosophical anchor.

Bitcoin’s genesis block included a reference to this London Times article.

When Satoshi inscribed the London Times headline "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" into Bitcoin's genesis block, it was not merely a timestamp but a statement about the financial system that Bitcoin was created to transform. Centralized financial institutions had failed, and Bitcoin's genesis block marked the beginning of a new era of finance that would be recorded in the blocks that followed.

Story's genesis block is also a declaration of independence.

Bitcoin exists to address the deterioration of financial institutions, and Story exists to resolve the crisis in AI. Though AI promises godlike powers of creation, we are still trapped in a medieval, pen-and-paper intellectual property system that cannot match the capabilities of our technology. IP is a 61 trillion dollar asset class — encompassing all of science, software, and creativity — managed in an antiquated system that makes the Wall Street of 2008 look innovative.

The result is an open war between those who create IP and those who build AI. Traditional IP holders attempt to play cease-and-desist whack-a-mole with the internet, treating AI as if it were the printing press. Meanwhile, AI companies are ingesting terabytes of valuable creations without offering any compensation. We are in a war of all-against-all that threatens the fabric of an open, vibrant internet.

To document this struggle, inscribed into Story’s genesis block is the first line of the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI.

Story’s genesis block inscribes the NYT vs OpenAI battle.

The conventional view of the NYT vs OpenAI lawsuit is that it is yet another legal dispute. This is wrong. The lawsuit not only encapsulates the zeitgeist of the current era of intellectual property, but also articulates the need for an entirely new solution.

The battle between these two monolithic institutions — one from the old media world, one from the new AI world — exposes the fundamental inadequacies of our current IP system. Two giants fighting to control and monetize human knowledge — a zero-sum competition over who gets to serve as the ultimate intellectual property gatekeeper.

What if neither are right?

We are not taking sides in this battle. To do so would be to make the same mistake of people in 2008 who debated whether to side with massive banks or government regulators while ignoring the need for a fundamental transformation of money. Instead of moving from a traditional incumbent to an emerging one, Story is moving from monopolies to markets.

Story offers a solution to the zero-sum struggle between intermediaries. Just as Bitcoin aims to establish a new financial system based on cryptographic trust over institutional trust, Story is creating a peer-to-peer intellectual property system that allows for IP assets to become programmable, giving individuals control over how their ideas can be monetized in a permissionless digital market. And because Story makes IP programmable, it can be used natively by AI agents, who will be the largest consumers and producers of IP in the decades to come.

By embedding this lawsuit in the genesis block, Story is declaring the beginning of a fundamental transformation in how humanity coordinates its intellectual capital. The Times and OpenAI are participants in a zero-sum game. We invite them to join us in playing a new game.

The intellectual property revolution will not be litigated in court, but orchestrated in code.