In a recent interview with CoinDesk, Story Protocol co-founder C. Lee defended the project’s decision to push its first major IP token unlock in August 2026, saying blockchain needs “more time” to build usage and that zero on-chain revenue is the “wrong metric” for intellectual-property and AI data networks.
The six-month delay keeps the team and investors’ tokens locked in as the general IP registry’s story pivots toward licensing human-generated datasets for training artificial intelligence.
He pointed to WorldCoin’s 2024 decision to extend the investor and team lock-up from three to five years, a move that reduced near-term circulation supply and was framed as an extension of the development runway, with TokenPost posting double-digit gains in the hours following the announcement. The story follows the same logic, Lee said.
“If we were all renters, we’d want a little lockup,” he said, calling the expansion a signal of long-term commitment rather than an inconvenience.
Story’s daily income, which in September 2025, has reached the level of 43,000 and is currently $0 per Defilmahas also become a concern for many investors.
Lee contends that number understates the activity of the story because much of the desired monetization comes off-chain through licensing agreements rather than transactional tools.
In his view, gas revenue is a lagging indicator for networks designed to record rights, provisions and terms of use before they begin to extract meaningful value from them.
“We intentionally keep our chain gas fees very low. We are more than an IP chain,” he said. “You may not see the type of income you’re looking for like a defy chain.”
Instead, he said Storey’s near-term focus is on recording ownership terms and usage rights for datasets and models that are used to train artificial intelligence systems. The project was announced last year – Embed in smart contracts with split of payments and royalties.
The change moves the project away from tokenizing media content or components and assets that Lee describes as “intangible,” such as multilingual voice samples and first-person video, that are difficult for AI developers to obtain legally through traditional web scraping.
However, the move delays on-chain revenue exposure as much of the expected value is tied to enterprise licensing deals rather than retail transaction fees. Lee compared the timeline to his previous Web 2-based startup experience— That puts him out for $440 million in 2021 – Noting that meaningful revenue took years to materialize.
For token holders, this means in practice that supply expansion is being slowed while Team AI tries to gain traction in data partnerships and rights-cleared dataset collections.
Whether that strategy ultimately translates into a sustainable business model is an open question, but Lee maintains that extending vesting schedules is healthier than rushing in liquidity in a weak market.
“The best founders, the best teams, the best companies usually do it a decade apart, we’re in it for the long term and the long innings,” Lee said.