Story: The initial incentive program will promote healthy ecosystem development
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Story: The initial incentive program will promote healthy ecosystem development
The initial incentive program accounts for 10% of the total $IP token supply and is entirely allocated to reward end users and community members.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Overview
The Initial Incentives Program is a $IP token distribution plan specifically designed to reward Story end users and community members. On the first day of our public mainnet launch, we will implement strict anti-farmer and anti-Sybil measures to ensure that more rewards in future initial incentive events are fairly distributed to community members.
The Initial Incentives Program begins on launch day, but this is merely the starting point of the plan. Beyond the initial incentives, we will also introduce how other token distribution mechanisms provide long-term support for the ecosystem.
Story Incentive Philosophy
Story’s incentive philosophy is built upon three core pillars:
1. Reward real users
2. Incentivize practical applications and innovative use cases
3. Ensure long-term alignment
Let us briefly explore the logic behind these three principles.
Strong incentive mechanisms are among the most exciting and promising advantages of blockchain-based products. However, in recent years, the crypto space has seen numerous broken incentive models. What started as a powerful launch mechanism has now become an unhealthy expectation, forcing projects and their communities into zero-sum conflicts.
The natural state of a healthy project is strong long-term alignment between the community and core contributors. Despite this inherent harmony, we believe the current unhealthy opposition arises due to the emergence of a third type of actor: those who are neither truly aligned with the community's long-term interests nor with the overall project—these are the Farmers.
By seizing rewards from users who are genuinely long-term aligned and then immediately leaving the project after receiving them, Farmers create artificial tension between the project and its real users, harming both parties. These extractive behaviors establish an unnatural and inefficient zero-sum environment right from the project’s inception.
Based on these lessons, Story will eliminate Farmers to ensure genuine alignment between the project and its community, thereby creating a positive cycle: users bring meaningful activity to the network and receive fair rewards in return.
Redistribution from Sybils to Users
All token allocation savings achieved through Story’s anti-Sybil measures will be 100% reallocated to real users in future initial incentive programs, ensuring Farmers cannot claim rewards meant for long-term-aligned participants in the Story network.
In fact, we will increase the size of the initial incentive pool by staking all unclaimed tokens—which are preserved by filtering out ineligible Sybil attackers—via validators on the Story Rewards Platform. Through staking rewards earned during the initial claiming phase, we ensure the user incentive pool continues to grow as the initial incentive program expands, with all such rewards fully redistributed back to the community.
Story's Initial Incentives Program
The Initial Incentives Program accounts for 10% of the total $IP token supply, entirely dedicated to rewarding end users and community members. These tokens will incentivize valuable activities and contributions made by users during the early stages of the Story ecosystem (starting from the first day of public mainnet launch until the network matures).
However, the initial incentive distribution represents only a small portion of the overall $IP token allocation, with significantly more tokens reserved to support Story’s 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 delivered to users through two channels:
1. Direct claims
2. Distribution via ecosystem projects (ecosystem-based incentives)
Direct Claims: Half of the initial incentives (5%) will be distributed directly to users. Direct claims include rewards distributed through ongoing initial incentive events beginning on the public mainnet launch day and continuing over subsequent months.
Ecosystem-Based Incentives: The other half of the initial incentives (5%) will be allocated to ecosystem projects, with the explicit requirement that all rewards must be passed on to end users. The advantage of ecosystem-based incentives is that the Story community can access broader rewards through a range of actions across different ecosystem applications. In the future, this portion of incentive allocation may exceed 5%, funded by unclaimed tokens from Sybil attackers filtered out during the Day-One claiming period.
Ecosystem-based incentives will apply to various application categories on Story, including AI, IPFi, and consumer apps. Initially, these incentives will focus on IPFi activities, covering applications ranging from decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to IP RWA protocols and lending protocols. Each project will announce its own incentive plans separately, and all rewards drawn from the initial incentive pool will go directly to users—with no retention allowed for the projects themselves.
To be clear, Story’s core contributors cannot and will not claim any portion of the initial incentives, now or in the future.
Day-One Story Rewards Claim
The Initial Incentives Program includes multiple rounds of reward distributions. The first round begins on the public mainnet launch day and remains open for 30 days.
The Day-One initial incentives will be distributed to the following groups:
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Odyssey Badge holders
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Chronicles NFT holders
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Only users who hold both Odyssey Badges
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Snap time: February 9, 2025, 11:53 PM Pacific Time
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Active Story community members
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OG roles
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Other community roles
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Genesis IP creators
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Social rewards
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Kaito Genesis NFT holders
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Snap time: February 10, 2025, 9:00 PM Pacific Time
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High-quality Story Yappers
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Basing on data since 2023, prioritizing long-term contributors over short-term content farmers
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Other users who initiated high-quality discussions around IP (based on Kaito data)
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Regional contributors and community leaders
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Exchange-related programs
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Binance Wallet rewards
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OKX Wallet rewards
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Bybit Wallet rewards
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Validator rewards
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Validators who participated in the Odyssey testnet validator competition, including those who did not make it into the final 64
7. Ecosystem-based incentives
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IPFi rewards (e.g., PiperX, Story Hunt, Verio)
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IP ecosystem rewards (e.g., Aria)
These rewards will be distributed independently of the Story Rewards Claim platform
Beyond the Day-One claim event, we have established—and will continue to develop—plans to regularly reward users. Through our robust anti-Sybil measures (detailed below), we will reclaim substantial portions of initial incentives from harmful Sybil attackers and Farmers to reward genuine users and the community in future events.
We plan to continue offering initial incentives during the early stages of the Story network and will roll out additional reward programs in the future, all adhering to our principle: reward real users and long-term contributors.
Anti-Sybil Strategy
To ensure rewards are fairly distributed to authentic, long-term-aligned users and the community, we have invested significant team resources and effort into filtering out Sybil attackers. We have also engaged three independent firms to analyze and advise on on-chain and off-chain behaviors, maximizing our ability to detect Sybil actors while minimizing false positives against legitimate users. Based on Passport data estimates, assuming similar Farmer participation rates, we can filter out approximately three times more Sybil attackers (as a percentage of all eligible wallets) compared to similar projects. This does not even include the substantial number of Farmers we expect to filter out specifically on Day One of the Story Rewards Claim.
Our overall process begins with clustering algorithms to filter Sybil attackers. We combine multiple clustering techniques using both on-chain and off-chain data to identify Sybil groups. We also examine badge collection behavior to verify authenticity, especially cases where large groups collect identical badges at the same time and in the same order. We consider activity on other EVM chains as a reference factor, conducting deeper investigations on wallets with no activity on Ethereum, Base, Polygon, BNB, Optimism, Arbitrum, and other popular EVM chains. Funding source patterns are also considered, with large clusters of wallets receiving funds repeatedly from the same source at the same time being removed.
These methods are used in combination and cross-validated to clearly distinguish real users from Farmers. In most cases, the differences in activity and intent are highly evident. However, these clustering algorithms are not perfect; in cases of uncertainty, we still allow such wallets to participate in the Day-One Story Rewards Claim.
To further verify these wallets and filter out Sybil attackers, the Story Rewards Claim platform will require most wallets to achieve a relatively low Passport score to prove uniqueness and authenticity. Any user either already possesses such a score or can easily obtain one. We expect this to filter out a significant number of Sybil attackers during the claiming period, which will last one month starting from the public mainnet launch day.
Other Ecosystem and Community Programs
Beyond the initial incentive distribution—designed to bootstrap a strong and aligned ecosystem in the short term—there are numerous other allocation plans aimed at long-term ecosystem support. Some of these programs are already active, including hackathon rewards and ecosystem grants.
Ecosystem grants are live, with funding already disbursed to the following projects:
Hackathon rewards are underway, with rewards already distributed for the following events:
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Story’s Alpha Hackathon (2023)
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Story’s Beta Hackathon (2024)
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ETHDenver (2024)
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ETHGlobal SF (2024)
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Cursor Hackathon (2024)
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Livepeer/Encode Hackathon (2024)
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Autonomous Hackathon (2024)
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Agent to Agent Payment$ Hackathon (2025)
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TartanHacks (2025)
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AI Agents Bounty (2025)
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AI Framework bounties (2025)
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Sozu House (2025)
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EthDenver Hackathon (2025)
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Super Agent Hackathon (2025)
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Safe’s Agentathon (2025)
Toward a Vibrant Ecosystem
We firmly believe that incentive mechanisms are a core element in launching a vibrant ecosystem and a key differentiator that allows blockchain products to stand out—provided these mechanisms are executed with principle. While many may disagree with our approach, we believe it maximizes the likelihood of Story achieving its user-centric, long-term-aligned vision: making IP accessible, open, and programmable, thereby unlocking and expanding a multi-trillion dollar asset class.
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