Digital asset manager Grayscale has a new investment product: the Grayscale Story Trust. It is using accredited investors to provide direct exposure to IP, the native cryptocurrency of Story Protocol. Grayscale has made a major push into blockchain-based intellectual property infrastructure this time around with its latest Bitcoin and Ethereum product.
A New Frontier: Blockchain Meets Intellectual Property
The Story Protocol integrates licensing, attribution, and royalty streams into on-chain assets. The smart contract-facilitated tools are especially relevant in an era rife with AI-generated content and mounting legal uncertainties surrounding data ownership.
“Grayscale Story Trust offers investors exposure to a protocol that is developing the underlying intellectual property layer for the information and AI era,” said Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Head of Product & Research at Grayscale.
The trust will operate similarly to Grayscale’s other single-asset products, holding IP as its sole asset and allowing regulated investment exposure to a market that is expected to be valued at $80 trillion worldwide.
Real-World Demand and Use Cases
Story Protocol is already processing over 1.7 million IP transactions a month, from music royalties to robotic surgery data sets. Its token, $IP, derives demand from creators and AI developers that need licensed, verifiable content — unlike the majority of speculative digital assets.
This blockchain-first platform gives AI companies buying training data transparency, and also allows artists, researchers, and developers to embed immutable ownership and revenue structures directly into their work.
Limited Access For Now
The Grayscale Story Trust is currently offered to accredited investors only, which means individuals with $200,000+ annual income or institutions with $5 million+ in assets. Listing on the secondary market may be next, pending regulatory approval.
This mirrors the strategy of Grayscale with its Bitcoin and Ethereum trusts, which started out as private placements and became ETFs. Those funds had $21.2 billion and $4.25 billion in AUM as of July 30, respectively.
The Bigger Picture
Grayscale’s foray into the IP token economy is a sign of growing institutional confidence in the viability of blockchain use cases beyond finance. With AI advancing exponentially, clean, licensed data is becoming an essential commodity — and Story Protocol’s tokenized infrastructure may offer the rails for a decentralized, transparent, and scalable intellectual property economy.
