Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development.
Story Protocol, an intellectual property-focused blockchain, has officially launched its mainnet and unveiled an associated IP token ($IP). The blockchain, positioned as the "world's intellectual property network," enables users to register their IP and track its usage by others. The $IP token, announced earlier this month, serves three primary functions: covering transaction fees, offering users a vote in the platform's governance system, and facilitating the tracking and payment of others using data to train AI models. In a recent development, PIP Labs, the primary developer of the Story chain at the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence, has raised $80 million in Series B venture funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), bringing the project's total funding to $140 million. The funding round follows the launch of the Story mainnet, which is accompanied by the first unlock event for the just-announced IP token. According to the project, "Story is unlocking 25% of the initial 1 billion $IP, with 58.4% devoted to the ecosystem and community, foundation, and initial incentives."
In other news, a group of top Ethereum developers and leaders have banded together to create a new framework that would simplify and standardize cross-chain token transfers. The initiative, dubbed the Open Intents Framework (OIF), was spearheaded by contributors from the Ethereum Foundation and is supported by 25 projects, including teams building layer-2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, ZKsync, and Scroll, according to a press release shared with CoinDesk. The goal of the initiative is to bring “intents” to all corners of the Ethereum ecosystem, which is a technological feature that lets a blockchain user accomplish a specific goal by asking an intermediary to fulfill that goal (like a trade or transaction they want to make.) There are some standards out there that are already trying to make cross-chain transactions easier by using intents. ERC-7683, which was introduced by the team behind the decentralized exchange Uniswap and the Across protocol, is one of those standards circulating the Ethereum space lately, and is supposed to address fragmentation and allow more chains in the Ethereum ecosystem to interoperate. But the OIF team claims that they will build on that standard through their framework allowing intents to function at scale. “By offering shared infrastructure and execution coordination, OIF makes intent-based transactions permissionless, efficient, and accessible for all projects,” the press release said.
Monad, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) layer-1 blockchain about to launch its testnet, has joined forces with Orderly Network, a decentralized exchange (DEX) infrastructure supporting a range of other chains, as the platforms spread their nets wide in anticipation of a second decentralized finance (DeFi) summer. The arrival of the Monad testnet on Wednesday will provide traders with a fast EVM-compatible building site and the possibility of airdrops on the L1. Orderly’s band of 20 or so market makers includes Wintermute, Selini and Riverside, according to a press release. Firms in the decentralized trading industry, which includes major exchanges like Coinbase, are hoping for a surge of DeFi activity in the coming months as the crypto-friendly administration of President Donald Trump gives crypto a regulatory tailwind. The first DeFi summer, in 2020, came hot on the heels of Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts in response to the Covid outbreak. Orderly already offers users a shared order book across multiple blockchains, including Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Base, Mantle and Near.
Finally, Donald Trump isn't all that different from crypto. According to Rushi Manche, the founder of blockchain company Movement, "Crypto is an attention game." It's fitting, then, that Trump — the master of all things attention — is so at home selling memecoins. But it's not just Trump's inner circle that's managed to capitalize on his crypto ventures, which include the $TRUMP coin and World Liberty Financial. Once a vocal crypto skeptic, the president has become the industry's largest "key opinion leader" — or KOL, in blockchain industry parlance: a trader whose portfolio is closely watched by other investors deciding what to buy and sell. Trump's foray into crypto has created a new go-to-market playbook for ambitious token peddlers like Manche — blockchain founders who realize pumping the price of a token can be as simple as elbowing into a sitting president's crypto portfolio. The president's primary vehicle for blockchain trades is World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a decentralized finance (DeFi) venture he announced with his sons over the summer. After accruing more than $400 million by selling a token, the company, which does not yet have a product, has built up a portfolio containing millions of dollars in the assets of other crypto projects. On Wednesday, it announced it was launching an official "strategic reserve" of crypto investments. The trades
