💊 Key Takeaways

The $Ghibli incident sparked a debate over whether a “style” itself can be considered intellectual property (IP), highlighting the expansion of the IP concept and the need for new methods of protection. IPFI is a Web3-based infrastructure that transforms creative works into on-chain financialized assets, enabling real-time royalty distribution and compensation for derivative works.

Story Protocol supports the entire process from on-chain IP registration to royalty distribution, aiming to build a decentralized creative ecosystem where fans, creators, and AI can all participate.

More than just protecting copyrights, Story presents a new IP-driven economic paradigm by technically preserving the identity and value of creation and ensuring real-time rewards.

Raising the Question — The Eroding Rights of Creators

We now live in an era where the perception of creation and IP is fundamentally shaken.

AI generation technology is advancing at an unimaginable pace. With just a few lines of text—such as “in Ghibli style,” “Disney style,” or “Miyazaki Hayao vibe”—anyone can generate thousands of images instantly, which are then circulated across social media and online communities. What once took studios months or years to develop stylistically can now be replicated with just a few clicks.

Amid this change, we must ask a crucial question: Who is the true creator of this content?

$Ghibli Incident: A Brand Sold with Just a Single Prompt

In early 2025, the crypto market saw the emergence of the $Ghibli token, accompanied by AI-generated images in the Ghibli style. The issue was that the project had nothing to do with Studio Ghibli itself—it was created by a decentralized community, with no official license or IP usage rights, only the claim that it “followed the Ghibli style.”

Nevertheless, the project spread rapidly through the community within hours and began trading among so-called “degen” investors, generating notable profits. It quickly recorded thousands of dollars in trading volume, while social media buzzed with its spread as a kind of meme.

Even Binance’s official account remarked, “The whole world is a Ghibli meme.” At the time, X (formerly Twitter) was flooded with images in the Ghibli style. By simply typing prompts like “Ghibli-style village” or “Draw it like a Ghibli character” into an AI tool, users could generate results that looked as if they had been drawn by Hayao Miyazaki himself. The community consumed, shared, and remixed these images as memes, fueling the frenzy.

$Ghibli, a meme coin riding the wave of the Ghibli style craze, surged to $40M in the stagnant Solana meme coin market. Yet in the midst of this frenzy, Studio Ghibli did not receive a single cent in royalties. Decades of accumulated aesthetic language and style were “summoned without permission” through a single prompt, with no one tracking the process.

This is not a trivial incident. Cases like this are expected to increase in the future. As IP remains inadequately protected and styles are indiscriminately appropriated, original creators risk losing both brand control and revenue. This episode starkly illustrates how an ungovernable IP environment can infringe upon creators’ rights and distort ecosystems.

The issue at hand is not merely one of copyright law. It is a question of how to restore a creator-centered order, design fair compensation structures, and build infrastructure capable of tracking and preserving the value of creation on-chain.

To address this, we must turn to three emerging keywords—IP, IPFI (IP Finance), and Story Protocol—and examine their trajectory. In the following section, we will explore in detail how this new framework seeks to technically safeguard creators’ rights while redefining IP distribution and royalty structures.

“Where does IP begin, and where does it end?”

This raises several questions:

Is the “Ghibli style” itself IP?
Who should own popular meme formats?
Who holds the rights to the countless traces of works that AI has been trained on?

IP is no longer just a matter of “copyright protection.” It has become a “networked asset”—created everywhere, consumed everywhere, and remixed everywhere. The earlier case of Ghibli-style AI images is a symbolic example: the community was ecstatic, social media overflowed, and fans actively “participated”—yet the original creators received nothing. The reasons are clear:

• Traditional IP law is too slow and legalistic

• AI prompts and memes spread within seconds, making them impossible to track

• Even when fans and communities contribute to the growth of IP, there is no mechanism for them to be rewarded

To address these problems, Story has turned its attention to IPFI.

Structural Solution: What is IPFI?

IPFI (Intellectual Property Finance) is the fusion of “Intellectual Property (IP)” and “Finance.” It represents a Web3-driven approach that financializes creative works and enables their distribution, investment, and securitization. Whereas traditional IP was viewed primarily as an object of protection, IPFI attempts a fundamental shift by redefining IP as a tradable asset.

The core of IPFI lies in on-chaining IP to ensure scalability and traceability. Once on-chain, IP can be governed by smart contracts, allowing automated usage conditions and revenue sharing. This drastically simplifies the traditionally slow and complex licensing process.

In addition, IPFI designs structural reward systems for derivative works, encouraging participation from secondary creators and fan communities while ensuring fair compensation. This fosters organic growth within the content ecosystem and expands the value of IP as a structural foundation.

Moreover, IPFI enables IP to be used as collateral for liquidity, allowing creators to generate stable revenue from their works or secure funding for initial production costs. Examples include IP-based royalty distribution, fractionalized NFT ownership, and the tokenization of licensing revenues.

Ultimately, IPFI represents a departure from viewing creative works solely as objects of protection. Instead, it seeks to transform them into financialized, tradable digital assets, introducing a new creation–distribution–finance ecosystem that delivers tangible rewards to both creators and communities.

For instance, if a particular artistic style is registered as on-chain IP, the use of that style in AI prompts could automatically generate royalties. Similarly, if a popular meme format is registered as community-owned IP, derivative works built upon that format could automatically channel a share of revenue back to the community that created it.

Furthermore, elements such as worlds, characters, and music could all be registered as digital assets, enabling tracking and ensuring real-time compensation whenever they are used or consumed. This structure goes beyond conventional IP protection, functioning as infrastructure that can track and reward the full cycle of intellectual property—from creation to utilization to monetization—within the real-time digital environments shaped by AI, memes, and communities.

In conclusion, IPFI adapts to the evolving content consumption landscape by presenting a new paradigm where creators and communities can jointly generate and share value.

Comparison of IP Models: Web2 vs. Web3

In today’s content industry, fans are no longer just passive consumers. Under the traditional Web2 model, fans merely consumed content, while IP was monopolized by creators or platforms, and profits flowed exclusively to them. In contrast, under the emerging Web3 and IPFS-based model, fans are transforming into active stakeholders who can invest in or fractionally own IP. Through NFT technology, IP can be shared and co-owned by many, with profits automatically and transparently distributed to participants via smart contracts. Fans are now simultaneously consumers, creators, and collective IP holders.

As a result, we are entering an era where fan = consumer = creator = co-owner of IP.

In this new environment, what is needed is not a new legal framework, but a technical infrastructure that can transparently track such organic creative structures and ensure fair compensation. The project that aims to bring this vision to life is Story.

Real-World Case of IPFI
Aria Protocol: Connecting Real-World Assets

Although IPFI is still largely discussed at a theoretical and conceptual level, a real-world implementation drew significant attention in January 2025: Aria Protocol.

Aria Protocol acquired a portion of the copyright to global pop artist Justin Bieber’s hit song “Peaches” and tokenized it, transforming it into a form tradable on-chain. Through this process, traditional music copyright was converted into a digital asset using blockchain technology, enabling anyone to invest in the token and participate in revenue sharing.

“Peaches” is no longer just a piece of music—it now functions as assetized IP that can be distributed and monetized. Aria Protocol’s experiment demonstrates that IP liquidity, fractional ownership, and smart contract–based royalty distribution are indeed feasible in practice, aligning closely with the on-chain IP ecosystem and philosophy pursued by Story.

Color: A Living Experiment for IPFI

Color is an IPFI experiment built on the Story Protocol. It is a universe co-created by the AI creative lab Sekai and the AI agent toolkit Mahojin.ai, and it operates under the following structure:

• Creative elements such as characters, worlds, and stories are broken down and registered.

• Anyone can participate in the universe using AI tools or through direct creation.

• All contributions are recorded on the Story Protocol.

• The IP is not fixed but evolves through community contributions, generating rewards along the way.

In this way, Color represents an innovative case of treating IP not as a static asset, but as a living ecosystem.

Through Color’s IP Graph tab, we can clearly observe the expansion process from Parent IP to Child IP. What is difficult to convey through mere text or tables becomes visually apparent, allowing for an intuitive understanding of how IP evolves and branches into derivatives.

This visualization carries meaning far beyond a simple diagram. Each node represents an independent creative work, yet is tightly interconnected within a single IP ecosystem. As a result, users can systematically track how a single IP is reinterpreted in diverse forms and evolves into new sub-IPs through collaboration with other creators.

In particular, the IP Graph highlights the infinite scalability and value-creation potential of IP. Creators can visually confirm how their content is inherited and expanded upon by others, which both motivates further creation and fosters trust in the collaborative environment.

Ultimately, this visualization serves not just as an IP management tool, but as tangible evidence of creative chains and a network map recording flows of collaboration. It stands as an essential mechanism for realizing the decentralized philosophy of creation and sharing that underpins Web3-based IP ecosystems.

ATCP/IP: Core Infrastructure for Agent-Centric Contribution Tracking and Rewards

Color’s IPFI structure is implemented through ATCP/IP (Agent Transaction Control Protocol for Intellectual Property), a blockchain-based protocol that tracks the creative activities of both AI and human agents while ensuring fair distribution of rewards. This protocol equips the Story Protocol with key functionalities that open the door to a new era of IP.

• Agent-level contribution tracking: Records the original contributors of ideas, whether AI or human.

• Derivative usage and revenue sharing: Automatically rewards original contributors when derivative content is created or commercialized.

• Contribution flow visualization: Transparently shows the evolutionary paths of IP on the blockchain.

Through this system, AI-generated content is also recognized as a contributor and compensated accordingly, positioning Color as a foundation for a fair creative ecosystem where AI and humans collaborate side by side.

Mahojin: AI Is a Creator

In Color, AI is not merely a tool but an independent creative agent working alongside humans. Mahojin.ai drives this creative flow in the following ways:

• User prompt–based generation: Based on a user’s text prompt, Mahojin.ai generates character designs, setting images, and story elements.

• Automatic integration with the Story Protocol: Generated content is automatically registered on the Story Protocol as IP, along with contributor information, enabling transparent tracking.

• Configurable data usage conditions: The original creator (the prompt inputter) can set conditions for data usage (e.g., commercial use allowed, credit required) through the Story Protocol and receives rewards when derivative works are created under those conditions.

• A hub for derivative creation: Registered AI-generated content can be accessed by anyone through the Story Protocol and expanded into derivative works, with all contribution paths recorded on-chain.

Through this hybrid model—where AI leads initial creation and the community expands upon it—Color maximizes the synergy between AI and human creativity.

ZEREBRO: A Glimpse into the Future of Creative Structures

The Story ecosystem is widely diverse, extending into areas such as AI agents like Ai16z and ZEREBRO. Among them, ZEREBRO can be seen as a strong example that aligns well with the Story framework.

ZEREBRO, which emerged in late 2024, is a representative AI agent that gained attention not merely as a support tool but as an autonomous, independent creator. ZEREBRO actively posts and engages on social media, creates music, and functions as a unique brand through NFTs and digital identities. This demonstrates how AI can evolve beyond being just an executor to become a creator and a “personality” that interacts with the community.

Thus, the era has already begun in which AI creates content, interacts with fans, and accumulates IP. The thousands or even tens of thousands of AI-based IPs that will emerge—images, videos, stories, memes, and music—are generating a creative environment that cannot be adequately protected, distributed, or tracked through existing legal procedures or contracts alone.

In this context, the vision of IPFI proposed by the Story Protocol emerges as more than just a technological innovation; it has become a historical necessity. Within the Story ecosystem, IP is registered on-chain, derivative works, remixes, and re-creations are automatically tracked, and royalties are distributed to all participants in real time.

This applies not only to human creativity but also to AI-generated works. Creations made by AI, such as ZEREBRO, can be recognized as IP assets, freely circulated, and expanded into the broader ecosystem. Ultimately, we stand at the threshold of an era in which the rights and economic structures of creativity are being completely redefined.

Where Does Story’s IPFI Stand Today?

Built on the philosophy of IPFI, Story is creating a Web3-based IP infrastructure that supports the entire lifecycle of creative works—from on-chain registration, setting usage conditions, and tracking derivatives, to royalty distribution.

However, Story is not yet a fully mature system. While the technical foundations and conceptual framework are steadily being refined, the mechanisms for financializing (liquidizing) IP and encouraging active participation from mainstream creators are still at a very early stage.

The ultimate vision of IPFI that Story pursues can be described as follows:

For example, in a case like the “Ghibli incident,” when a generative AI or AI agent invokes a specific style or IP, a smart contract would automatically detect it and distribute royalties to the original creator in real time.

Such a framework goes beyond traditional copyright protection; it lays the foundation for establishing a new creative ethics in the digital age. In a complex creative environment where fans, creators, and AI all participate, there must be a system that can precisely track each contribution and distribute rewards accordingly. Story is preparing for exactly this future, and the large-scale expansion and financialization of the IP market is likely to accelerate around 2025–2026.

Still, the Story Protocol faces structural limitations. IP must currently be registered manually, and traditional IP holders—artists, writers, musicians—may struggle with adoption due to aging demographics and a widening technological gap. Technology is advancing rapidly, but the ability of legacy creators to adapt is slowing, raising the risk that existing IP could be left out of this new ecosystem.

Thus, while Story Protocol has strong potential as an infrastructure for new IP, it may still fall short in terms of inclusivity for existing IP, a point that could invite criticism.

GAIROS’s Vision of Story’s Ultimate Ideal

A structure where AI and humans, communities and creators, consumers and remixers are all connected in a flow of value—creating, contributing, and being rewarded together.

The future that Story is building goes beyond protecting creative rights; it holds the potential to expand entire industries around IP. Through IPFI, content evolves from being a simple object of consumption into an economic asset that anyone can help nurture.

Of course, it may be unrealistic to manage every fleeting memecoin launched on platforms like PumpFun as on-chain IP. Even so, isn’t Story’s true direction about securing the rights of meaningful IP and fully delivering its identity and narrative to fans and consumers?