STAMFORD, Conn., July 31, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Grayscale®, the world’s largest digital asset-focused investment platform, today announced the creation and launch of Grayscale® Story Trust (the “Trust”). The Trust provides investors with exposure to $IP, the native token of the Story network.
Story is a blockchain network that powers programmable intellectual property, making real-world data a licensable, attributable subset of intellectual property for the artificial intelligence (AI) era. Designed to support the growing needs of AI, the creator economy, and digital rights management, Story enables ownership that is secure, scalable, and easily integrated across blockchain applications. Specifically, Story is designed to make intellectual property, including music, media, personal likeness, and real-world data like video and speech, traceable, enforceable, and monetizable on-chain. By transforming intellectual property and real-world data into fully programmable on-chain assets, Story is laying the foundational infrastructure for the global intellectual property economy, which has been reported to be worth as much as $80 trillion.1
Although traditional intellectual property systems have served important roles, they can be fragmented, intermediary-dependent, and sometimes struggle to keep pace with the rapid evolution of digital content and AI. Story offers a new perspective designed to meet these emerging challenges. At the core of its architecture is a framework for representing intellectual property as smart contract-enabled non-fungible tokens, embedding licensing logic, attribution rules, and royalty flows, informed by intellectual property law, directly into the assets themselves. This aims to allow creators, companies, and even AI agents to register, remix, and monetize intellectual property compliantly.
Today, adoption of Story is accelerating, driven by real-world use cases across cultural and technical ecosystems, from major artists and global brands to next-generation AI platforms. With over 1.7 million intellectual property transactions and more than 200,000 monthly users,2 Story is demonstrating growing demand for infrastructure that treats intellectual property as a programmable, on-chain primitive.3 Story also develops original initiatives like Poseidon, which brings real-world data to AI systems, including robots, surgical assistants, and autonomous vehicles. These partnerships and projects reflect the protocol’s broad and transformative potential.
“Grayscale Story Trust gives investors exposure to a protocol shaping the foundational intellectual property layer for the information and AI era,” said Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Head of Product & Research at Grayscale. “That includes not just creative content, but real-world data — the force powering one of today’s most advanced intelligent systems.”
“This launch marks a significant milestone in bringing programmable intellectual property to institutional markets. Story was designed to support the full lifecycle of intellectual property; from music and media to the real-world datasets that power intelligent systems. The launch of Grayscale Story Trust reflects growing recognition that intellectual property, in all forms, has the potential to become one of the most important assets of the AI era. With $IP now available via a Grayscale Trust, investors can gain exposure to the infrastructure layer that enables programmable licensing and attribution across AI and creative applications,” said SY Lee, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of PIP Labs, an initial core contributor to Story.
The Trust is now open for daily subscription by eligible individual and institutional accredited investors.* The Trust functions like Grayscale’s other single-asset investment trusts and is solely invested in the $IP token underpinning the Story protocol. For additional information regarding the seeding of the Trust and other ways in which an investment in the Trust might differ from an investment in Grayscale's other single-asset investment trusts, please refer to the Private Placement Memorandum relating to the Trust.
This press release is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security in any jurisdiction where such an offer or solicitation would be illegal, nor shall there be any sale of any security in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of that jurisdiction.
*An accredited investor, as defined in Rule 501(a) of Regulation D under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, is an individual with income over $200,000 ($300,000 with spouse) in each of the past two years, an individual with net worth over $1 million, excluding primary residence, an individual holding certain financial licenses (e.g., Series 7, 65, or 82), or an entity with over $5 million in assets or all equity owners who are accredited.
Grayscale may attempt to have shares of new products quoted on a secondary market. However, there is no guarantee that Grayscale will be successful. Although the shares of certain products have been approved for trading on a secondary market, investors in the new products should not assume that the shares will ever obtain such an approval due to a variety of factors, including questions regulators, such as the SEC, FINRA, or other regulatory bodies may have regarding such products. As a result, shareholders of such products should be prepared to bear the risk of investment in the shares indefinitely. To date, certain products have not met their investment objective, and the shares of such products quoted on OTC Markets have not reflected the value of the digital assets held by such products, less such products’ expenses and other liabilities, but have instead traded at a premium over such value, which at times has been substantial. There have also been instances where the shares of certain products have traded at a discount.
Private placement securities are speculative, illiquid, and entail a high level of risk, including the risk that an investor could lose their entire investment. The Story protocol was relatively recently conceived and its particular underlying technological mechanisms may not function as intended, which could have an adverse impact on the value of IP and an investment in the Shares.
Extreme volatility of trading prices that many digital assets have experienced in recent periods and may continue to experience, could have a material adverse effect on the value of the Trust and the shares could lose all or substantially all of their value.
[1] According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2025 Global Innovation Index, the estimated value of intangible assets — including intellectual property, data, software, brands, and human capital — held by publicly listed companies worldwide exceeds $80 trillion. Source: WIPO, The Value of Intangible Assets of Corporations (2025).
[2] Story Blockchain Explorer, as of July 7, 2025
[3] “On-chain primitive” refers to a foundational building block of blockchain-based systems, like a token or NFT, that is natively programmable and usable within blockchain applications.
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