Why IP-Based Protocols Are The Hottest New Thing In Crypto

Over the final ten years, a slew of real-world commodities have come on-chain, from valuable metals and actual property to carbon credit and authorities securities. Christened real-world belongings – RWAs – they’re mentioned to signify an incredible market alternative, with McKinsey projecting the market to balloon to $2 trillion by 2030.

One real-world asset class that has undoubtedly captured buyers’ consideration of late is mental property (IP), a class made up of innovations, literary works, designs, and picture rights. And it’s no shock: blockchain appears nearly purpose-built for safeguarding and licensing IP, the distributed ledger an excellent bulwark in opposition to misuse of patents and logos. Some are even forecasting an IP ‘supercycle’ due to the emergence of tradable IP-backed devices.

As for IP protocols themselves, they remodel mental property – music catalogs, leisure franchises – into an investable asset, one which advantages from automated licensing and an immutable possession file. Rather than bringing monetary belongings on-chain, these protocols are successfully financializing cultural belongings: model identities, fictional characters, hit songs.

A Global Repository for Sports IP

One of the prime movers on this fast-growing area is Sweet-developed SCOR, which calls itself a “peer-to-peer community for programmable fandom.” Sweet boasts licensing agreements with high sports activities leagues just like the National Hockey League (NHL) and Major League Soccer (MLS).

Earlier this 12 months, Sweet built-in the $SCOR token issued by the SCOR Foundation into its fan engagement ecosystem, the place it powers key interactions corresponding to unique fan rewards, in-game upgrades, and entry to aggressive tournaments. Built on the EVM-compatible Base community, $SCOR additionally bridges to ecosystems like TON and is ready to develop into the long run native token of the forthcoming SCOR protocol.

Gaming is central to the Sweet imaginative and prescient: a number of viral cellular sports activities video games have been developed, apps that mix sports activities IP, fandom, and rewards. From the attitude of gamers, the enchantment is to build up collectibles, participate in sports-centric challenges, and compete for rewards to unlock recent in-game experiences. 

As for leagues and groups themselves, it’s about driving retention and engagement by bringing the fan economic system on-chain, and in so doing, rewarding followers’ ability and loyalty. 

Some readers could also be questioning what precisely constitutes an IP asset. According to SCOR, they embody athlete likenesses, tickets, and collectibles like images, spotlight clips, and artwork. Many of those IP belongings may even be endowed with distinctive in-game skills, giving them utility in a number of gaming dApps and in addition making them engaging commodities on the secondary market. 

Fans, in the meantime, can have their very own soulbound digital id within the type of a SCOR-ID, an id platform that ensures a verifiable “footprint” of consumer actions inside the SCOR ecosystem.

Tokenizing Tracks

Away from the world of sports activities, one other IP-based protocol has been making waves: Story. A Layer-1 blockchain constructed to digitize mental property, Story now purports to safe a whole lot of 1000’s of IPs, together with songs and AI coaching knowledge. Anyone can use the platform to register their unique work, embed licensing phrases, and obtain automated royalties.

Last month, Aria – a Story-based IP protocol centered on music IP possession – raised $15 million at a $50 million valuation. Its co-founder David Kostiner, a former music and leisure lawyer, says the protocol was created to fight the truth that music royalties and IP possession have historically been illiquid, exhausting to entry, and confined to well-connected fairness buyers; Kostiner has additionally promised to develop into extra IP classes, together with artwork and movie, and TV.

Here to Stay

If the primary period of Web3 was about constructing programmable cash, the following period might come to be outlined because the one the place tokenized IP took flight.

Unlike some here-today, gone-tomorrow Web3 fads, the continued transformation of mental property into programmable belongings guarantees to be a multi-year course of, one that each one creators (filmmakers, actors, musicians, writers, artists) will probably be watching with avid curiosity.

The publish Why IP-Based Protocols Are The Hottest New Thing In Crypto appeared first on Metaverse Post.