Chris Dixon

Today we released our latest State of Crypto report.

It shares insights on key trends — like stablecoins, L2s, and AI — plus, crypto’s rise as a policy issue, new data on builders and users, and more.

7 takeaways from the report:

1. Crypto activity and usage hit all-time highs

2. Crypto has become a key political issue ahead of the U.S. election

3. Stablecoins have found product-market fit

4. Major scaling upgrades have drastically reduced onchain transaction costs

5. DeFi remains popular — and it’s growing

6. Crypto could solve some of AI’s most pressing challenges

7. More scalable infrastructure has unlocked new onchain applications

Read the full report here: https://t.co/sBmQApTbuT

Today we’re announcing that @a16zcrypto is leading an $80M Series B financing of PIP Labs, developer of @storyprotocol. We want to help Story become the infrastructure for AI systems and creative people to happily co-exist.

For decades, the internet has operated on an implicit economic covenant between creators and platforms: creators provide supply, and platforms provide demand. Writers allow search engines to index their articles in the hope of driving traffic to their sites. Artists upload images and videos to social networks to build audiences. The system worked because it benefited both parties.

Advances in generative AI are likely to break this covenant. A new wave of AI-powered search engines give comprehensive answers instead of guiding users to websites. Social networks are increasingly populated by AI-generated images and videos. These AI systems were likely trained on original, human-created content but often don’t credit or cite their sources. If there’s no attribution or compensation, what incentive will there be to publish original creations on the open internet?

Story is a blockchain protocol that allows creators to register their intellectual property so they can track and monitor use, ensuring their legal and economic rights are protected. This means that creators of original content are rewarded, no matter how their content gets used and distributed. Meanwhile, licensing IP becomes low friction and standardized, encouraging widespread sharing and collaboration. The goal is to create foundational infrastructure that can underpin a new economic covenant between creators and platforms.

Some examples of projects that are building on top of Story include @magma_com, @joinsekai, and Ablo by @spacerunnersnft. Magma is a collaborative art platform enabling artists to register their IP, set the rules of engagement (commercial, remixing, AI usage), and open up assets to contributions from collaborators. Sekai is an AI storytelling platform that helps storytellers, artists, and fans co-create immersive interactive stories via simple prompts. Ablo allows anyone to use generative AI to customize and remix the latest fashions, using Story to handle IP registration and creator attribution, and share revenue between designers and brands.

The team behind Story brings deep expertise from both the tech and creative worlds. We first met CEO/cofounder @storysylee three years ago, after he sold his company, Radish Fiction, to Kakao. He has consistently impressed us with his combination of big-picture vision and world-class tactical execution. His cofounder @jasonjzhao studied CS at Stanford, dove deeper into AI at DeepMind, and now leads technical development on the Story Protocol.

For AI systems and creative people to both thrive, creators need a modern way to ensure they get compensated for their work. Story takes a proven approach — intellectual property law — and updates it for the age of AI.

We are excited to support the Story team on this important mission.