Story's Initial Incentive Program: Rewarding Real Users and Ensuring Long-Term Alignment of Goals

The initial incentive program is specifically designed to reward Story end users and community members with the $IP token distribution plan.

The initial incentive program is specifically designed to reward Story end users and community members with the $IP token distribution plan. We will implement strict anti-farmer and anti-witch measures on the first day of the public mainnet launch to ensure that more rewards can be fairly distributed to community members in future initial incentive activities. The initial incentive program starts on the launch day, but this is just the starting point of the plan. In addition to the initial incentive program, we will also introduce other token distribution plans that will provide long-term support for the ecosystem.

Story Incentive Philosophy

The incentive philosophy of Story is based on three core pillars:

Reward real users

Incentivize practical applications and innovative use cases

Ensure long-term alignment of goals

Let’s briefly explore the logic behind these three principles.

A strong incentive mechanism is one of the most exciting and promising advantages of blockchain-based products. However, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of ineffective incentive mechanisms in the crypto space. Initially a powerful launch mechanism, it has now turned into an unhealthy expectation, forcing projects and their communities into zero-sum conflicts.

The natural state of a healthy project is a strong long-term alignment between the community and core contributors. Despite this natural harmony, we believe that the current unhealthy opposition is due to the emergence of a third type of actor: those who are neither truly aligned with the long-term interests of the community nor with the overall interests of the project—these individuals are the Farmers.

Farmers create a false tension between the project and its real users by siphoning rewards from users who are aligned with long-term goals and leaving the project immediately after the rewards are distributed, thereby harming the interests of both users and the project. These exploitative behaviors create an unnatural and inefficient zero-sum environment right from the project's inception.

Based on these lessons, Story will filter out Farmers to ensure true alignment of goals between the project and the community, thus creating a positive feedback loop: users bring meaningful actions to the network and are fairly rewarded for it.

From Witch Attacks to User Redistribution

All token distribution amounts saved through Story's anti-witch measures will be 100% redistributed to real users in future initial incentive programs, ensuring that Farmers cannot encroach on the rewards of participants aligned with long-term goals within the Story network.

In fact, we will increase the reward quantity in the initial incentive pool by staking all unclaimed tokens (which are preserved by filtering out unclaimable witch attackers) to validators from the Story rewards platform. Through the staking rewards obtained during the initial claiming phase, we ensure that the user incentive pool continues to grow as the initial incentive program expands, and all these rewards will be redistributed to the community.

Story's Initial Incentive Program

The initial incentive program accounts for 10% of the total supply of $IP tokens, all of which will be used to reward end users and community members. This portion of tokens will reward users for their valuable activities and contributions during the launch phase of the Story ecosystem (starting from the first day of the public mainnet launch until the network matures).

However, the initial incentive distribution is just a small part of the overall distribution of $IP tokens, with more tokens specifically allocated to support the Story ecosystem, community, users, and developers.

Initial Incentive Distribution Details

All initial incentives will ultimately be distributed to users and the community.

These rewards will be distributed to users through two channels:

Direct claiming

Ecosystem project allocation (based on ecosystem incentives)

Direct Claiming: Half of the initial incentives (5%) will be distributed to users through direct claiming. Direct claiming includes rewards distributed through ongoing initial incentive activities on the first day of the public mainnet launch and in the following months.

Ecosystem-Based Incentives: The other half of the initial incentives (5%) will be allocated to ecosystem projects, with a clear stipulation that all rewards must be distributed to end users. The advantage of the ecosystem-based incentive model is that the Story community can earn broader rewards through a range of actions across different ecosystem applications. In the future, this portion of incentive distribution may exceed 5%, funded by the tokens unclaimed by filtered witch attackers during the claiming period on the launch day.

Ecosystem-based incentives will apply to various application categories on Story, including AI, IPFi, and consumer applications. Initially, these incentives will focus on IPFi activities, covering applications from decentralized exchanges (DEX) to IP RWA protocols to lending protocols. Each project will announce its incentive plan separately, and all rewards from the initial incentive pool will be directly distributed to users, with the projects themselves retaining no rewards.

It should be noted that Story's core contributors will not be able to claim any initial incentives now or in the future.

Launch Day Story Reward Claiming

There will be multiple rounds of rewards distributed in the initial incentive program. The first round starts on the first day of the public mainnet launch and remains open for