Looking back at multiple cycles in the crypto market, we can observe that the protocol layers leading the market in each cycle have always shared two core elements.

The first element is narrative. A new protocol layer must possess enough appeal to convince users that it can deliver innovations that were previously impossible, creating strong expectations. At the same time, it needs to have sufficient market attraction to drive the growth of its token market in order to truly succeed.

The second core element is that the protocol layer must be able to solve key issues in the crypto ecosystem.

In two words, these elements are brand building and problem-solving capabilities. Successful crypto projects such as Ethereum, Solana, and Uniswap provide clear examples of these two core elements. While these concepts may sound easy to articulate, in reality, even achieving one of them can be incredibly challenging during the project’s development.

This article will explore how Story can simultaneously meet these two core elements in the crypto market of 2025, and analyze its potential impact on the future market.

How to Address the Flaws in Crypto Narratives?

Turning a narrative into a profitable venture seems like a dream come true for aspiring entrepreneurs. Even without a solid business foundation, it’s possible to attract significant financial backing as long as an appealing narrative can be built. People who are not invested in cryptocurrency may find it difficult to understand the value of meme coin narratives. To clarify this, let’s use gold—a universally recognized example.

Gold is also a typical illusory asset shaped by narrative. Despite the existence of metals rarer than gold, none have achieved the same recognition as a store of value. In fact, gold’s current status as an asset is entirely due to the long-held narrative that “gold is precious.”

When we introduce Bitcoin, it can be described as an electronic cash system based on distributed ledgers and blockchain technology. However, for those with a sensitivity to narratives, they are more likely to refer to it directly as “digital gold.” Bitcoin not only shares a scarcity narrative similar to that of gold, but it also provides a superior user experience in terms of ownership management, tracking, storage, and trading.

Users don’t need to deeply understand Bitcoin’s technical advantages. As long as the “digital gold” narrative spreads widely and is continuously reinforced over time, Bitcoin’s position as an asset could surpass that of gold. In fact, in just 16 years, Bitcoin has grown into an asset class with brand value comparable to gold, which has been established for over 10,000 years.

As the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum’s narrative logic is less intuitive compared to “digital gold,” but it is still relatively easy to understand. Ethereum leverages smart contract technology, allowing anyone to create contracts based on code and record information via the blockchain. This has resulted in the creation of a “world computer” that operates autonomously without intermediaries. Ethereum’s native token, ETH, acts as the fuel driving this world. Therefore, the more people use the Ethereum ecosystem, the more the value of ETH naturally rises.

Around 2017, when cryptocurrencies began to gain mainstream attention, this narrative-driven economic model was particularly active. As long as you had a good vision and carefully crafted a narrative, raising funds was relatively easy. However, participants in the crypto ecosystem quickly realized that the narrative-driven economic model had serious flaws. They found that many people were creating seemingly reasonable narratives using smooth talk, raising funds from the community, but failing to fulfill their promises.

In the early days of the crypto community, users successfully used tokens to assign economic value to narratives. However, they failed to invent a mechanism to ensure that these narratives could persist and truly materialize. While the tokenization of narratives succeeded, the tokenization of trust ended in failure.

Over time, various forms of market manipulation became rampant in the crypto world. Despite the launch of Bitcoin spot ETFs and an increasing flow of capital from traditional finance into the crypto market, ironically, there was almost no substantial progress in the narrative space. And so, we arrive at 2025.

If we were to pick the breakout product of the crypto market in 2024, there is no doubt that meme coins would be the winner. As long as liquidity is sufficient, meme coins can be traded smoothly without requiring complex narratives to back them. If this trend continues, the market will only see an influx of new meme coins, and users may gradually lose their expectations for innovative products in the crypto industry. Today, the market urgently needs a platform capable of achieving trust tokenization.

What Changes Will Happen by Solving Both IP Protection and On-Chain Trust Issues?

Looking at past bull and bear markets, each cycle’s narrative tokenization market has contained over $10 billion in potential value, making it an enormous market. Historically, projects like Ethereum, Solana, and Uniswap have successfully solved core issues in the crypto industry, such as capital efficiency, liquidity, and user experience (UX). As a result, these projects have consistently maintained a dominant position in the market. Additionally, as iconic projects of their time, they continue to wield long-term influence in the next cycles.

In each bull market, a large number of new protocol layer projects emerge. Interestingly, the success models of these projects are constantly evolving. In the past, protocol layers that focused on general-purpose architecture were more likely to capture market attention. However, today, strategies that focus on solving core issues within the crypto market and promoting its expansion have become more important. Therefore, compared to the past, the problem-solving ability of new projects has become increasingly valuable in the market.

Recently, Sui and HyperLiquid have emerged as representative protocol layer projects that successfully adopted this strategy.

Sui focuses on optimizing user experience rather than following Ethereum’s official EVM ecosystem architecture, which inherits Ethereum’s user access barriers and high latency issues. Sui enhances its underlying ecosystem to improve low latency and fast transaction processing. By incorporating Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK Proofs), Sui introduced zk Login, allowing users to access wallets without understanding the underlying wallet principles, using just their Google account. This innovation enables users to interact with the crypto ecosystem as easily as they would in a Web2 environment, thus growing into a user-centric protocol layer.

HyperLiquid focuses on the on-chain market with strong demand for long-tail asset trading, offering robust liquidity and an exceptional user experience comparable to centralized exchanges (CEX). Compared to other perpetual contract trading platforms, HyperLiquid has lower trading fees and supports various long-tail asset trading pairs. Additionally, users can provide liquidity through Hyperliquidity Providers (HLP), facilitating trades with no liquidity risks. HyperLiquid did not adopt general-purpose protocol layer frameworks like Cosmos SDK or OP Stack but instead built a customized parallel EVM Layer 1 specifically designed for Perp and DeFi, further enhancing its existing Product-Market Fit (PMF).

The common thread between Sui and HyperLiquid is that they have accurately identified long-standing issues within the crypto market and launched protocol layers that align with Product-Market Fit (PMF). As a result, they have successfully earned the recognition of a large user base and attracted substantial capital flows from high market value funds.

Story is a protocol layer centered on the narrative of “IP (Intellectual Property) Tokenization on the Blockchain.” Its defining feature is that it doesn’t rely solely on smart contracts to build trust. Instead, it has constructed a protocol-level Proof of Creativity (PoC) mechanism to provide sustainable value support for tokenized brands. Currently, Story’s PMF has not been fully established, but because it tackles core problems that remain unsolved in the industry, it has garnered significant market attention.

In conclusion, the shift toward addressing IP protection and on-chain trust through novel mechanisms like PoC could drastically change the landscape, creating more stable and scalable models for brands and ecosystems to thrive in the crypto space.

Story: The Trust Machine of Crypto Brands

We often hear terms like “IP Powerhouse” or “Prestigious IP.” However, whether it’s a powerhouse or a prestigious brand, these are not built overnight. They are the result of long-term accumulation. Major IPs like Disney and Marvel were created over several decades by constantly reshaping their narratives and investing astronomical amounts of money to establish legal protection systems. Essentially, this process involves creating a value protection mechanism over the IP network, thereby fostering an environment that the public can trust.

Let’s take a closer look at this. Story primarily offers the following features:

Tokenization of Brand Ownership

The overall ownership of a brand will be tokenized through an IP account (based on ERC6551++).

This token functions as a wallet and can be used for the tokenization of multiple IPs within the brand, allowing for ownership management.

Ownership of the brand token can be programmed and controlled through various methods, such as individuals, multi-sig (multi-signature), and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).

IP Data Provenance

Through PoC (Proof of Creativity), data can be traced and updated in real-time starting from the creation phase of the IP, validating whether the data has been tampered with.

Programmable Brand IP

When brand creators issue tokens on Story, they can customize their brand’s value protection mechanism.

For example, programmable settings could limit token purchases, IP leasing, secondary creations, and automatic distribution of royalty earnings to authorized users only.

Dispute Protection of Asset Value

When a brand’s IP faces a dispute, it can be arbitrated through a decentralized on-chain/off-chain oracle.

Additionally, an off-chain legal framework can be employed to establish copyright infringement criteria.

Story strengthens ownership, profit rights, and asset protection to safeguard brand value. When a brand undergoes tokenization, it can set up detailed permission configurations, effectively aligning stakeholders. This not only reduces the cost of IP transactions but also encourages secondary creations that align with the brand’s positioning, offering infinite possibilities for brand value growth.

Moreover, the dispute resolution module of Story can prevent brand value from being damaged without the need for complex consensus processes. If someone maliciously forks the brand, the system will execute a Slashing mechanism based on the arbitration results to ensure the brand cannot be forked at no cost. Through this mechanism, all brands tokenized on Story can embed a consensus mechanism at the protocol layer without the need to build additional infrastructure.

$IP: The Accelerator of Crypto Brands

The core of the Story structure is $IP.
$IP is essentially the medium of value storage and exchange between brands and users, playing the role of base currency within the brand’s value chain.

In addition, $IP adopts a Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism, accompanied by a certain level of inflation. A portion of this inflation is used for brand building, helping startups overcome the cold-start problem and enabling early-stage growth (Bootstrap).

Early-stage crypto brands often propose grand narratives but struggle to attract stakeholders due to a lack of trust. Tokens issued by unfamiliar brands are typically seen as high-risk, making it difficult to generate network effects. To address this, brands first communicate their narrative and seek delegation from $IP holders before issuing tokens. Through the delegation mechanism, brands can secure a portion of staking interest to fund early-stage IP and token preparations, while users forgo this interest in exchange for future IP token rewards and returns. This model allows $IP holders to establish long-term beneficial relationships with brands while assuming relatively low risk.

Furthermore, if delegated $IP enters liquidity markets, it can further contribute to the DeFi ecosystem, generating liquidity rewards. The higher the liquidity of $IP tokens, the greater the value of the brand’s IP ecosystem, thereby driving brand value growth, enhancing the security of the Story protocol, and further increasing the value of $IP tokens.

Moreover, brands are not only built by their own issued IP tokens but are also supported by delegated $IP holders, forming a wide network of stakeholders. If malicious forks attempt to issue new brand IP tokens, the system can activate the dispute resolution mechanism for arbitration. In this process, $IP holders, brand creators, and IP token holders will jointly participate to reach a fair consensus and impose punitive Slashing on the attackers. As brand value is reinforced by $IP holders, the cost of attacks rises, reducing the likelihood of malicious attacks.

Conclusion

As the crypto market grows to $3 trillion, new infrastructures will emerge in each cycle to improve trust efficiency and create new liquidity, resulting in landmark growth. For instance, Dogecoin, built on the PoW mechanism, reached a market cap of $80 billion in just seven years, while Shiba Inu achieved a market cap of $40 billion in just one year through simple tokenization. This illustrates that the trend of increasing trust efficiency through tokenization will only accelerate in the future.

Currently, meme coins, AI projects, and other crypto-native brands frequently face the risk of value degradation. These brands, issued under specific token standards and with structures that allow risk-free forking, lead to PVP-style zero-sum competition, which ultimately results in the loss of value.

From the perspective of Story’s architecture, it can provide support for brands starting off-chain to some extent. However, because the interests between on-chain and off-chain are not yet fully aligned, complexity remains. Therefore, Story is more suitable as infrastructure for crypto-native brands that are initially built on-chain.

As time passes, Story will continue to introduce new token standards, helping crypto-native brands attract a wider range of stakeholders and provide the trust efficiency needed to build sustainable brands. In the future, crypto-native brands based on Story have the potential to play a core liquidity role in the enormous $61 trillion IP market.

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