All right. We are continuing here at the sixth annual Canaccord Genuity Digital Asset Symposium. Once again, I'm Joe Vafi, Equity Research Analyst here at Canaccord Genuity. Up next, we are pleased to have with us the team from IP Strategy Holdings, and that is Justin Stiefel, CEO, and Phil Blows, Chief Investment Officer. IP Strategy Holdings is the first Nasdaq-listed company to hold. How do you guys call it the IP token? Is that what you call it?
Correct.
Correct.
Yeah. The IP token as its primary reserve asset, and it operates a validator on the Story Protocol. We view the company as very interesting, as the use case for the Story Protocol does seem compelling. In simplest terms, intellectual property is under pressure from AI LLMs, which are more or less taking copyrighted material without permission. Once in the LLM, the IP ownership rights get harder to prove out. Story Protocol is a purpose-built L1 focused on IP protection via tokenization. In addition to being a validator for the IP or for the Story Protocol blockchain, the company is also experimenting with yield generation using a covered call strategy on its IP tokens. Really interesting stuff. With that, thanks for being with us here today, Justin and Phil. Maybe we just start quickly.
You can introduce yourself, and then the company in your own words.
Sure. Thank you. I'm Justin Stiefel, CEO at IP Strategy. Phil Blows is our chief investment officer. We really have a couple main tenets that IP Strategy is working on. First, we have 53 million of the IP tokens. We acquired those as part of a PIPE transaction in August 2025. We are one of the largest validators on the Story network. Story Layer 1 as a blockchain is a proof of stake blockchain, not a proof of work. We drive yield by staking the large part of those tokens we own. That drives additional revenue for us, as opposed to proof of work, which would require you to spend a lot of money throwing computing power to do mining. We are, as Joe noted, in the process of evaluating options to also acquire intellectual property-based assets.
Think about things like music catalogs. User-generated video content is becoming important and the debate around the rights and payments for that, news content. Anything that is focused on the creator, the intellectual property, primarily the copyright. If it generates revenue, if it generates royalties or licenses or yield, we could begin to acquire those, get those registered on the Story Layer 1 blockchain, and that then helps to create the flywheel effect. Because as Joe noted, the growing use of all the things that are created that are IP-based, music, video, digital content, written content, datasets, DNA, all those things that get loaded into AI and LLMs, they're producing outputs, and the creators should be rewarded for them. We sum it up in a very simple three-word thesis: create, track, and collect.
That's where the Story Layer 1 blockchain is purpose-built for intellectual property.
That's great. Phil, maybe you could introduce yourself, your background, and what your role is at the company.
Yeah. My name is Phil Blows, Chief Investment Officer, and, you know, my job really is to ensure that the treasury assets themselves are generating the best yield possible. As Justin says, we run a validator system which generates anywhere, given current yields, around sort of 10%-20% per year. We also have a covered call strategy that we've recently sort of executed with only a small portion of the treasury. You know, given the volatility of the token, that's something that has been yielding around about 60% per year. Something that really does help generate additional cash flow for the business.
That's great. Company is still, you know, on a, you know, it's on a growth trajectory, but it's interesting to see the different pieces of, you know, of the business already emerging, and each one could be, you know, kind of material in its own right. You know, let's talk a little bit. Let's start here on the Story blockchain itself, which looks like it's been relatively purpose-built around the world of intellectual property. You know, we've talked a lot here at this broader symposium on tokenization of different assets. You know, IP has not come up until right now, which is great.
You know, this is a big area, and it has always been an area where I think protecting intellectual property is very important. You know, maybe blockchain and tokenization here is finally solving like a real world problem. Maybe kind of just talk us through the Story blockchain, its robustness, and what attracted you to it.
Sure. Thank you. First off, when we think about intellectual property, we use the term IP. It's comprised of three things, generally: patents, trademarks, copyrights. For patents and trademarks, the creator or the owner needs to go to a federal office and apply for permission. Hello, I'd like this patent. I think this patent sums up my invention, and I want control and ownership of it. Or this is a trademark that is unique to me, identifies me as the producer or source of the goods or service. Copyrights on the other hand, are self-effectuating. Under the Copyright Act, if you create something, you have both statutory and common law copyright protections. This is the largest area that allows creators wherever they are to continue to create.
If you like me, if you believe like I do that humans are gonna continue to create with or without AI, humans then are gonna also want to protect their creations and to be compensated for their creations. As everything is moving on chain, real-world assets, the team behind Story, rightly so, identified this $80 trillion dollar asset class intellectual property as a natural to load onto blockchain everything from music, video, news articles, software, data sets, anything that it can be copyrighted now can be digitized.
Once it's digitized, you can go into the Story layer one protocol and set the parameters of use, restrictions, royalties, licenses, derivative works, all the things that go along, and then allow the creator to continue to track and make sure that they're being paid and compensated for the use of their creations. It is purpose-built, unlike other chains like Ethereum or Solana that are primarily financially driven. This is purpose-built for the purpose of tracking IP. It allows layer two and layer three apps to be built that can then monetize and create the opportunity for very smart people to come up with ideas to interrogate data sets and what's in the blockchain to come up with ideas to then compensate the creators as it's being used.
Maybe just to add that, you know, I think as this as intellectual property becomes simpler to engage with using blockchain, it should really stimulate a kind of Cambrian explosion of new use cases. Everyday creators being able to understand very quickly and inexpensively how to interact with global IP. It just means that amount of global IP is gonna begin to start being used in different ways, all of which are allowed by the creator, but it's just gonna be a simpler way to create new things. As we're seeing with AI right now that, you know, the more kind of people are using AI and they're actually finding that they wanna use more AI, so it's almost sort of compounds on top of each other.
We think the same thing is gonna happen in intellectual property as more people more frequently begin to use it.
Joe Vafi, when you talk about up until today at the conference, AI has been a focal point, but IP has not. When you think about what the focus of AI has been in the last several years in the market, people focused on three things. Do you have real estate? Where is that data center gonna be built? What's your computing power look like? How many chips are you gonna have? How big will it grow? How fast can you do it? Then how much electricity do you have access to, and how is it driving electricity rates in the region? But the fourth leg is missing. Do the AI models have the legal rights to scrape and use what's out there to shape and form their outputs and the product that they wanna deliver?
that's why we say IP is the fourth leg of a fully combined ecosystem now, not just the first three.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think today if some of, you know, content's been created and scraped, and already scraped and put into an LLM, it's very hard at this point to claim your copyright against it or to get it out of those LLMs.
That's the challenge. That challenge is not going away, but as more content is being registered on chain, it equips the person, the creator, who owns the content to now attempt to go enforce their rights. We tell people all the time, first thing you should do is register your stuff on chain to get it there so that you can start forward enforcing. People aren't waiting. They are still attempting to backwards enforce. There's a battle and a conflict between content owners and creators and AI operators to try to force that black box to be opened and to disclose what has been used and how it's been used. The sooner we get more people loaded on chain, the better because it removes that friction, and it provides the clarity of the data.
Sure. At the very least, we've got a forward-looking model, date forward, register your IP on chain, and then, you know, being able to track its use gets easier.
Yeah. We have a couple examples that we wanted to maybe touch on.
Sure.
In the ecosystem. The first one is Poseidon. Poseidon is a Layer 2 app, and it's built one of the largest database sets of audio language. Now, why is that important? We talked about earlier about the agentic training. Customer service, training modules, education, healthcare translation, all of that up until now has been driven primarily at university research levels. Since launching last fall, Poseidon has created one of the largest data sets of non-English languages, and it's growing the fastest. It's now. They're now moving into video and other audio services. ZenO is very exciting. It's an egocentric focused video collection module that allows robotic training.
If you think about companies that wanna release these robot armies into the ecosystem to mop your floor, change a tire, change a bed, hold up, you know, do whatever. It's really gonna be trained by video, and the video needs to be licensable. Then the last one is Aria. Aria is a music platform that already has lots of different music loaded onto it, like Justin Bieber and Blackpink, that allows tokenized individual ownership of those music assets and the distributive sharing of the royalties and license fees that come along from that. These are just three really interesting examples. All of that is built on the Story Layer 1 blockchain. The last one I think that's really compelling recently is GenoBank.io.
Over 15,000 datasets of DNA have been loaded in partnership with Story to allow AI to continue to do research to find cures for cancers and rare diseases and to accelerate bringing drugs to market. All that is licensable because datasets are copyright protected.
If you think about every one of these protocols or layers, it sits on Story. Each one of them is doing thousands, if not tens of thousands of millions of transactions, all of which take place on the Story blockchain that feed into the kind of the revenue model of the actual ecosystem itself.
That's pretty compelling. Are there any kind of competitive change out there to Story that you're kind of aware of at this point?
Not that-
Do you think it has the chance to be the industry standard here?
We think this is the industry standard, and certainly when you look at who's behind it, a16z Crypto, Polychain Capital, several of the other biggest folks in the field have put almost $200 million into the ecosystem between the Story layer one blockchain, multiple investments in layer two apps, participation in the PIPE last August for us, IPST. We think certainly that's a conviction of awareness and acknowledging that creators wanna be compensated for what they create. In the world of AI, that conflict is just accelerating.
Even AI aside, when you think about music, TV, user-generated content, video online, news articles, those copyrightable materials need a better, more efficient way to be tracked and to allow monetization as everything moves into a digital world. I'll give you one example of music. Right now, if you own a bar or restaurant, you're visited once a year by a company rep from ASCAP or BMI, and they go count the number of seats in your location, and they send you a letter that says, "Hey, you're playing music, and you have X number of seats. The license you owe is $1,000, and that gives you rights to listen to this entire catalog for your customers." Well, that shouldn't be necessary anymore in the world of digital AI.
That should all be loaded on-chain, plays tracked on-chain, and then payments going out in an allocated way that are much more accurate than a random, you know, physical sampling out in the marketplace by humans. Yeah, so applications here. Even if AI never came into existence, you know, this is just a much more efficient way to track and manage intellectual property. Create, track, collect.
Right.
That's a very simple thesis.
You've started to accumulate the native token here? Yes?
Yes. We have 53 million of the tokens. The bulk of them are now locked in the validator, staked in the validator, performing work and generating yield. Again, because it's a Proof of Stake model, the more we lock in and stake, the better our returns are, as opposed to a proof of work model, which would require us to invest in a lot of computing power and mining operations. We don't have to do that. We simply run this. Margins are greater than 97%. And as a token goes to $1, $2, $3, you can see that at even a 1%-10% yield, as Phil will talk about here, we're talking about $5 million to $10 million to $15 million, of which the margins are among the highest you can imagine.
That's great.
Yeah.
Maybe Phil, if you wanna talk about, you know, what may influence this IP token's spot price. You know, obviously everything gets correlated to Bitcoin, which that's part of it.
Yeah.
You know, do you see a decoupling capability as utility here on this blockchain, you know, perhaps move forward?
I think we will, yes. You know, as much as we are long-term bullish on the whole digital asset space, you know, I think there very much is a feeling that as we see more of these proof points, more of these very, very high profile kind of use cases emerge on the Story Protocol, that you know, there's just a natural, you know, sort of new base of investors that come in and do increase the spot price of the token itself. You know, we're seeing that already. There's a number of other kind of chains more in the movement of money space. You know, just the solid fundamentals are seriously outperforming things like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
You know, if really what we're doing is supporting the foundation, the Story Foundation in whatever way we can to help them to continue to grow the ecosystem and find use cases, bring them on chain, and then shout about the, you know, the transaction volumes that are increasing and, you know, just how valuable this is becoming as a network. You know, the more we do that fundamentally, you know, the spot price will take care of itself.
Fair enough. I think it's a great use case for blockchain, and I think, you know, having a purpose-built blockchain for this, you know, makes a lot of sense.
You're generating revenue in staking today and then potentially acquiring your own IP portfolios. Is that right? Is there any other, you know?
That's right. Yes. I think worth just saying that we elected early on to build our own validator-
Yeah
Versus actually going out and, you know, putting our tokens on someone else's validator. Yeah, that allows us to capture 100% of the staking returns and, you know, often you can lose 20% through using a third party. It also allows us to attract assets from other members of the Story ecosystem. So we have other tokens that have been staked. We earn a 5%, you know, commission on those. As I mentioned, you know, we enhanced the yield on a small portion of the treasury. We're at about kind of 5% or coming up to almost 10% of the treasury through the covered call program, which is obviously enhancing the yield considerably. Really what we're trying to do now is using and recycling these rev
This revenue that we're generating into, you know, cash flowing intellectual property assets that we can go out, purchase, and then bring back into the ecosystem. Because the ideal is we're looking at, you know, something that's cash flowing now and doesn't have the kind of exposure to the blockchain use cases that we're creating. We can, by bringing that, not only, you know, help the ecosystem itself with more transactions, we can actually increase the value of that IP through new use cases and new revenue streams. Not only hopefully will this IP produce decent cash flow, the actual underlying asset, if ever we wanted to go back and resell it, is also more valuable.
Oh, it is actually a nice kind of cross-sell opportunity where you are generating theoretically more value from the datasets when you acquire them or the IP because you can monetize it better and the like. What about you know, what are some of the big guys that have you know, big datasets in the industry thinking about this? Or big IP portfolios. I mean, you know, we know, like the you know, the names like Getty, they're pretty locked down in terms of you know, the way they protect their IP. They've got to have a team looking at this and you know, how do you think they intersect you know, into this emerging world of kind of blockchain and intellectual property protection?
Yeah. Good question. We do need to separate us, IPST, IP Strategy from the Story Foundation and their own business development team. They have a team that are out there, working with groups, maybe some of the names you talked about and others, to talk about structures or portals to enable larger datasets to get registered online. We at IPST also have different discussions going on about how to acquire specific assets to bring online. Phil and I aren't always in a position to speak for the foundation on what they're doing.
Yeah. Sure.
We're focused on what we're doing on our box. But certainly I will tell you, there's not a lot required to get things registered. If at a base level, you're a large company with a large dataset, and you sit around with your team and you say, "The cost to get stuff registered on blockchain is not outrageous. We might as well go get it registered," and so it's there and trackable as smart people come up with really good ideas. If we think about the Story Layer 1 blockchain as a toll road, and you think about some of those, Layer 2 apps are being built, they acquire property on the toll road exit. It's like a shopping mall, and then layer three are being built as tenants on the inside.
If I'm a big brand, like you just talked about some of those names, I wanna register as much as possible because I want really smart people coming to me with creative ideas to interrogate my data and then pay me for it in ways I hadn't thought about or my team wasn't allocated resources to build out.
Yeah. You know, your IP tokens should accrue value just as the industry becomes aware of this over and above, you know, the utility that you're bringing, obviously.
Correct. Yeah. I'll give it. You know, the GenoBank.io slide I just showed you, that was a very recent announcement just in the last days.
Okay.
Phil and I didn't have a view to that because we're not involved in that negotiation.
Right
Partnership that the Story Foundation and they did. Boom, it hit the market. It's good for us because now it's something that we at IPST can talk about because it'll drive more utilization. It'll drive more demand for tokens. We're part of the validator. We're one-sixth of the tokens that are in circulation as part of validating. We're a big part of that double check in the ecosystem.
Yeah. No, there's a broader flywheel out there other than what you are yourselves doing here, so that makes a lot of sense. Anyway, you know, these sessions are pretty short, so what did we not hit on that you wanna get across?
I think tokenization. I think tokenization in the U.S. as policymakers work in D.C. to resolve when something is tokenized, is it an asset? Is it a security? As that gets resolved, and we think it will, some of these things that you're seeing overseas, like the Aria app and the token that allows for fractional ownership of assets, you'll see that accelerate in the U.S. If it's IP-driven, it should be built on Story, and we think that's a very compelling story for the U.S.-based investors.
Yeah. I think you're right. I may add, Justin, that, you know, maybe tokenization may get a bigger green light than people think just because, you know, you're taking things on-chain, and now they're easier to see and analyze than they were before. Maybe the regulators like that because it's easier to regulate because it's all much more readily accessible to analyze, so.
With copyright in particular, very few people go to the Copyright Office to actually.
Yeah.
Formally file for their copyright.
Yeah. Sure.
On-chain, why not?
Right.
Get it loaded and create the ability to track.
That's right. Really interesting story. You know, sounds like there's a great growth runway here for the company. You know, really great use case of blockchain and, you know, congrats on making a business, you know, a really compelling business opportunity out of, you know, what's going on out there in, you know, the blockchain world related to IP. Thanks very much for being with us today, Justin and Phil.
Thank you for hosting.
Appreciate it, Jay. Thank you.