• Story Protocol, a blockchain-based IP-tracking platform, has partnered with the AI startup Ritual to let builders create AI models and track their outputs on-chain.

• Story Protocol raised more than $54 million last year from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Paris Hilton’s 11:11 media, and it is currently still in beta testing on Ethereum.

• The first initiative under the new partnership involves MyShell, a generative platform for building AI apps and chatbots. Creators using MyShell will be able to host their models on Ritual and register them as IP Assets on Story Protocol, ensuring control over usage, attribution, and revenue sharing.

After raising more than $54 million last year from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media, Story Protocol, a blockchain-based platform focused on intellectual property (IP) rights, says it will be used by the crypto-meets-AI startup Ritual to let builders create AI models and track their outputs on-chain.

Under the so-called partnership, Ritual will begin posting its user-made AI models to Story Protocol to “prove that outputs like text, image, and voice are generated by specific models” and provide “advanced watermarking schemes that will give developers stronger security guarantees around provenance and traceability,” Story Protocol said in a statement. According to Story Protocol co-founder Jason Zhao, a new software development kit (SDK) is also in the works that will allow Ritual developers to seamlessly register their models as “IP Assets” on Story Protocol.

Story Protocol pitches itself as a “programmable IP layer” that creators can use to keep track of their IP to ensure it is paid for when used and properly attributed. Currently in beta testing on Ethereum’s Sepolia test network, Story Protocol was a cat-nip for investors last year with its pitch infusing the “code-is-law” tenants of blockchain with broad overtures toward Web3 and the creator economy.

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Its partnership with Ritual, a decentralized computing platform that raised $25 million last year in a bid to help developers build and run AI models, comes as AI talk is dominating the crypto realm along with the wider tech industry. Investor money is flooding faster than ever into AI-linked blockchain projects, and a new category of “AI Tokens” has surged recently with the tech stock of the moment, Nvidia (NVDA).

By collaborating, Ritual and Story Protocol’s leaders seem hopeful that crossing AI with blockchain-based property rights might present the crypto industry with its surest bet yet towards seizing hype around both sectors.

“Even though we’ve brought media on-chain, we haven’t brought IP on-chain, because IP is rights plus media. It’s not just media alone,” said Zhao, who worked as a product manager at Google’s Deep Mind AI lab before starting Story Protocol. According to Zhao, Story Protocol has introduced “programmable IP” by “allowing people to attach the sort of rules for engagement and the rights to each piece of IP on-chain so that it can move across different apps and different platforms.”

With Story Protocol, Zhao says the rules governing how IP should be used and paid for can be hard-coded into smart contracts. Zhao says those contracts can help people create derivative works from IP without fear of infringement and can ensure IP holders get automatically compensated for their work when others use it.

“We see ourselves as providing more efficient rails, or infrastructure, for licensing IP than the traditional pen and paper world,” said Zhao.

The first project to take advantage of the Ritual-Story partnership will be MyShell, a generative platform that people can use to build AI apps and chatbots based on made-up characters. MyShell users will be able to host their models on Ritual and then register them as IP Assets on Story Protocol.

“By partnering with MyShell, Story Protocol allows creators to have control over the AI use cases they create, where attribution, authorized remixing, and revenue sharing are all captured on-chain,” Story Protocol said in its statement.