👁️ IP, meet eyeball

We’re baaack.

Yesterday I went on Crypto Twitter (as one does) and dropped another hot take (shocker). 

Airdrops gotta go. 

Like perish, die by fire, go to dumpster and never return. Let them rot in the past where they belong.

I just don’t think they’re good for crypto more broadly. They’re not good for the so-called “communities” that grind to receive a shred of them, either. 

It attracts the wrong people (ahem, bots) and creates built-in sell pressure. 

Some tough-love advice: If your “community” consists of farmers there to extract as much as possible from your startup and power-traders who quickly sell your “stimmy” to buy the next thing, I’m worried you won’t find PMF and will have wasted a wild amount of tokens on people who will dip the moment the second you stop doling out the cash.

I’m over the airdrops — they’re lame. Please consider reshaping your marketing strat around actual utility.

You can absolutely, by all means, have a token — but if you’re building an app, tell me what it does first. 

We like apps that do things!

Let’s look at two projects that are trying to tackle the bot problem — and figure out what being human means in an AI-saturated world.

— Kate Irwin

World ID is coming to Story Protocol

Story, an IP-focused EVM L1 blockchain, is adding Tools for Humanity’s World ID tech in a move to increase transparency around who’s human on its IP Portal licensing database currently in open beta.

“We’re just coming out of an age where the big AI companies, right, basically scraped the whole internet, and rather than ask for permission, they’re just asking for forgiveness,” Story Foundation President Andrea Muttoni told me in an interview. 

“We haven't really fully understood the magnitude of it. You know, the whole concept of like, the dead internet theory, right? It's going to be so challenging in the future — the better the AI models get, the more content is being produced by AI models — to distinguish what is human and what is not,” he added.

The upcoming integration means users can connect their World IDs to verify their crypto wallets when they engage with the platform. They can then register a piece of content and set it up for fee-based or royalty-based licensing, including by adding a legally-binding Programmable IP License (PIL).

The goal is that the World ID tie-in can add an extra layer of verification and trust that creators are who they say they are on Story. World currently has 13 million verified humans, meaning people with accounts who got their irises scanned at an Orb.

Muttoni sees Story as a place not only for licensing all types of art, but also for real-world assets and data for AI training and even individual people, too.

“We're definitely going to see humans scaling themselves,” he said. “Anyone who has a name, image, and likeness that might want to be licensed, I think, is a huge untapped IP angle.”

Tools for Humanity is the primary for-profit builder working on the World blockchain, which was cofounded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while the World Foundation is behind the WLD token. 

Ajay Patel, Head of World ID at TFH, told me that he met the founders of Story about six or eight months ago and saw a potential for collaboration. 

“It’s really this underlying primitive of the internet,” Patel said of World ID.

World ID’s profit mechanism is still in development at the moment, with plans to roll out a fee system at some point next year. 

“The key problem to solve there is tying utility to the economics. And so what’s going to happen is that any relying party to World ID, based on their usage of World ID, will end up paying back into the protocol. And so that’s kind of how the system would work,” Patel told me.

“That entire kind of infrastructure for how that would work is something that we're actively working on right now,” he added.

When asked, he said TFH did not receive any kind of grant from Story in exchange for the integration. 

TFH has increasingly ramped up its blockchain-powered software push this year, from updates to its World app to adding World ID to Razer accounts to unveiling the “Mini Orb” and a US launch.

The integration with World ID is slated to go live at some point this fall. 

• ICYMI: Gaming-focused Cross Protocol has applied for MiCA review, founder Henry Chang has said. 

  • Chang, who was previously the CEO of Korean gaming studio Wemade, was indicted in 2024 for allegedly failing to disclose information about its Wemix tokens.