My friends, you're about to experience an honest review and a realistic price prediction for Story. I have some serious concerns with this one, and I don't want to see you lose a bunch of money in Story just because it's a new coin that happens to be trending at the time I'm writing this. To me there are some huge, obvious problems that I'm going to point out right here, and I hope they'll be useful for you.
First off, I don't like new coins. I want projects that have lasted the test of time and that have real technology behind them. I don't see either of those fundamental things here. This is a new coin, and in my experience the absolute worst time to buy is when something is sitting at all-time highs. The fully diluted market cap is over $6 billion. To put that in perspective, Internet Computer Protocol has, in my opinion, the best technology in crypto by far. I use that blockchain every single day to host my website and to host my community on OpenChat, and its fully diluted valuation is half of what Story has as a brand new project. I see that as extremely problematic. From where I sit, there's a 99.9% chance it's drastically overvalued. And that's just where the problems begin.
What Story Claims to Be
If you look at what Story actually is, it's a layer one blockchain designed to serve as the foundation for intellectual property on the internet. Well, ICP has already set up the technology to actually do all of this and much more. The technology for Story to deliver on this promise, though? I don't see anything impressive about it at all. And this is the thing: I believe people have got to stop investing in stuff like this.
Who are the founders of Story? Because ultimately, when you're investing in something, you're investing in people. Yes, there's underlying technology, but you're investing in the work produced by people. Maybe in the future you'll invest in AI-built things, but for now it's people. For example, look at DFINITY.org, the team behind Internet Computer for comparison. They're the largest research and development team in blockchain. Look at where I'm holding my entire portfolio, on Internet Computer Protocol, and look at the people working on the protocol I'm investing in. Now compare that to Story. Story says it was founded by a team of experienced entrepreneurs and engineers with backgrounds in blockchain, AI, and digital media. I could create a coin and put that exact line on the page too. Show me the proof.
So I went looking for proof. The website definitely stands out a bit, but a slick website doesn't impress me. They talk about the IP market value, the value of all the intellectual property in the world, and they point out that IP is the world's largest asset class. But nowhere can I find evidence that Story actually lets you take control over your IP and earn when it's used. To me this appears to be seriously misleading, because the only way you can do that is if the technology itself supports you doing it. I see no proof that this tech does. I do see proof that Internet Computer Protocol actually does this, because on ICP you can run AI models fully on-chain. Yes, I'm holding ICP, and I'll say it plainly: I'm biased toward it. But you've got to compare the best tech in crypto with everything else. When you can serve a website from smart contracts and run AI directly on-chain, that's genuinely enough to do what Story is claiming to do.
The Gas Tracker Gives It Away
Then I found a little thing on their explorer, and it's called the gas tracker. Guys, busted. This is not new technology. When a blockchain uses a gas tracker like that, it means, in the simplest terms, it's basically an Ethereum copy. That's the actual truth about the technology from what I can see. They're literally using the same gas concept as Ethereum. From what I see, they appear to have just taken the Ethereum blockchain, or the basic open source Ethereum code, and copied it, or used a very similar version, modified a couple of things, and they couldn't even be bothered to change the gas name. Same as Ethereum.
Under no circumstances that I'm aware of, and I've researched thousands of altcoins, can Story actually let you take control over your IP and earn whenever it's used. That doesn't mean I know everything; I know but a little. But all the blockchain could do here is hold tokens. If your IP is hosted off the chain, you can't really do anything meaningful with it on-chain. It can be hacked, it can be stolen, and you're not earning whenever it's used. It can be scraped by Google, and you're not earning whenever it's used. I see no proof otherwise.
My empathic read on this project is that this is a fraud. And honestly, you could give me the entire CoinMarketCap listing and I'll scroll through everything and tell you that almost all of them are frauds. Sorry to break it to those of you who didn't know, but this project looks like an absolute fraud to me in terms of what they're saying and what they're making you think they can do, versus what the tech itself can actually do.
Reading the Foundation's Vision Post
Let's look at more problems. I read the Story Foundation vision post introducing the project, and there are two people named Jason on it, which is interesting. It was posted August 10th, 2023, introducing Story Protocol. Almost all of the posts talk about generic stuff. I have trained ears and eyes in crypto. I've seen a lot. Now that I understand Internet Computer and I've seen tech that actually does what it says it does, I can fairly quickly go through and find the holes and figure out where others are being dishonest, which in my experience almost all of them are.
They say things like, imagine the next Game of Thrones level mega franchise emerges on Story Protocol. That's an irrelevant example, because you could not host the videos on Story Protocol. Those would have to be hosted off-chain, which then could not be guaranteed to monetize on-chain. You could write this exact vision for Internet Computer Protocol. They talk about AI, and they talk about how the internet needs a standard to track the origin and evolution of IP. Yes, agreed, and you could put all of that fully on-chain on Internet Computer Protocol. But you cannot put all of that, or hardly any of it, fully on-chain with Story. And if it's not fully on-chain to track all this, then to me it's fraud. Because if you're just putting tokens on the blockchain plus hashes for stuff that lives off-chain, the blockchain itself has no real control over the off-chain stuff.
What's amazing is that ICP actually can do all of this. Nobody has built something that fully delivers on it yet, but from what I see, Story hasn't either. I see no evidence that they're actually doing anything genuinely useful today, and I'll point out more of that in a minute.
The Most Blatant Claim
Here's the thing that appears to be massively dishonest. Right here is what looks to me like the most blatant lie in the post: the claim that the entire infrastructure, the data structures and the modules, is built on blockchain. Really? Show me some evidence of that. I don't see any, especially when you're using a tool to track gas fees.
To make a claim like that. Now, on Internet Computer Protocol, I can verify all of this. My website is on the blockchain, because I can go interact with the blockchain without a third-party wallet. I can go directly to the website the blockchain serves, interact directly with the blockchain, and modify my website. All I have to do is log in with my internet identity, which is fully on the blockchain, and then I'm able to interact with everything on the blockchain itself. With Story, this is not the truth. The claim that the entire infrastructure is built on blockchain? No, it's not. Is the Story website itself on the blockchain? No. Where is there any evidence? Look at their explorer. Where is there any intellectual property that's actually on the blockchain? I don't see any.
On ICP, you can put phone photos and videos on-chain. In fact, you can do this for free. You can go into my OpenChat and see photos people have taken, and those are actually on the blockchain. Where are the phone photos on-chain with Story? I don't see any. So this appears to be a blatant misrepresentation. What's funny is that if you swap "Story" for "ICP" in everything they're saying, it could be a great pitch for Internet Computer. But I'm going to keep pointing out more problems.
The Roadmap and the Self-Inflicted Contradiction
Look at their blog. There aren't very many posts for a project created back in August, with the first one on August 10th, 2023. There's not that much actually here. Let's look at a technical roadmap update. It talks about the launch of the Story mainnet, and you're looking at their planned releases. Right now, all they have is mainnet. This is so early that there's nothing you can actually use besides sending transactions, which makes it extremely speculative. And what they're putting up here doesn't look anywhere near as advanced as what ICP has already had for years.
They talk about releasing a public portal, a homepage that allows simple, no-code registration of IP onto Story. I don't see why anyone would actually do this. There's also an attestation service. If you set aside the crypto element and just look at it as fundamental tech for the world, this looks useless to me. I have tens of thousands of videos that are my intellectual property. Why would I go log into this IP portal and register them there? That makes no sense.
And here's the kicker. Remember that earlier blog post where they claimed the entire infrastructure is built on blockchain? Here's proof, in their own words, that the claim was false. Right here they write that they're exploring native, cost-efficient ways to store large files directly on the blockchain, providing an alternative to external services like IPFS. So the fact is that right now nothing is on the blockchain, and Arweave isn't on the blockchain either. Internet Computer Protocol is the thing you can actually use to store large files directly on the blockchain, but not on the Story blockchain. And if the files are hosted on Internet Computer Protocol anyway, why would you even use the Story blockchain at all? That seems unnecessary. You'd just build the whole thing on ICP.
What's funny is they've now told you the truth. The 2023 post claiming everything was on the blockchain was, by their own later admission, not accurate. ICP is, in my view, the most cost-efficient way to store large files directly on the blockchain. So the fact that the team didn't even seem to know this, that they launched their protocol without understanding this crucial element to begin with, looks to me like clear incompetence. I am not a developer. I coded a Monopoly game and stuff like that back in high school, and I ran a node, a witness, for Steem. I'm not a developer, and yet I already know how to do this.
An Incompetent Team Making Big Claims
How incompetent is a team that launches a blockchain, makes these big claims, and doesn't know the most important part of it? Come on, it's right there in front of them. The governance and all of this stuff could easily be built on the Internet Computer Protocol, because the governance is the easy part. They want you to believe this is just the beginning. From my view, this is the end. This is a rug pull that has no real value. That's how I see it, and now I want to walk through more of what convinced me.
Look at the accounts. I would expect these are bots or airdrops. They had 100,000 new accounts in a single day, which you could easily generate by spinning up a pile of bots. Then 128,000 on another day. But look at it now, and there is almost nothing happening. This is brand new. This is supposed to be one of the most important times in a project's life, and you're seeing a few thousand new accounts on something with a market cap bigger than ICP. For something like this, a reverse gas model would be ideal, but they clearly don't have that. So it looks like they're supplementing their transactions with bots, which is unfortunately normal, or they've got some kind of short-term airdrop thing going on that simply isn't going to last.
Checking the Social Media: Bots and Empty Engagement
To do your research properly, you want to check all of this. So let's look at the YouTube and the Twitter. When I looked at Story Protocol's account, in my view they have absolutely botted the crap out of it. Seven hundred thousand followers. You can be sure they botted their X account heavily to get a number that high. All of these cryptos do the same things, and the accounts joined at the end of the last bull market. It's an exact template, used to rip people off over and over again. They buy up their followers to make people think they're popular.
And when I say they've botted their followers up, look at how poor the engagement is. Then there's the circle jerk, if I can put it a little more politely, where these junk coins cooperate with other blockchains and other junk coins to push everybody's coins up together. Generic, useless posts. You can tell what real looks like by comparison. Look at my own X account. I don't put much effort into my X. I have about 10,000 followers. All I do is upload my videos, which don't even perform that well there. Yet almost every one of my posts goes over 1,000, and some of them, like one of mine, went out to 15,000. So Story Protocol has roughly 70 times as many followers as I do, and the engagement rate is horrible. Hardly anybody is engaging. Think about it: this just launched. If it were organic and the launch were real, this would be extremely hyped.
They're talking about real-world assets, and the truth is you have to actually put real-world assets on the blockchain or it's not going to work out. What's amazing is that across several cryptos I've reviewed, it's like they all use the exact same social media management company, because they do the exact same things. They post a picture and say, "This is the last tweet in the thread." The only place I consistently see that is on these blockchains that, in my opinion, are fraud coins launched by what I call the crypto matrix to rip you off. It looks like they share the exact same social media managers. Almost all of these coins do the exact same things to trick you into investing in them, and I hope you're not tricked.
Why I Would Never Put Money Into This
This protocol looks horrible to me. Under no circumstances would I put any money into it. If I somehow found that some money of mine had ended up in this, I would immediately sell all of it. From my perspective, this looks like a perfect time to sell, with a very high probability of loss. I don't see any real value here. They're talking about AI agents and similar buzzwords, but as far as I can tell, this blockchain can't actually do anything.
Their YouTube has 14 videos on it. The last one was two months ago with 238 views. "Introducing Story Smart Contracts," two months ago, 308 views. There's one about protecting AI-generated content with the Story SDK. Why would you even need to? You can't really protect your content. Once you generate something with AI and put it out there, anybody can rip it off anywhere. The thing is, these projects often don't fake their YouTube channels as aggressively, so you can see how little genuine interest there really is. Compare that to my main crypto YouTube channel, where I have around 40,000 subscribers and thousands and thousands of views on my videos.
I think I've made it very clear. In my honest opinion, this is a project that I have high confidence is going to zero. It fundamentally has no value, it is making claims that I believe are dishonest, and it is part of the crypto matrix that launches infinite numbers of coins with infinite numbers of narratives to try to trick you into investing in things with no value. I couldn't easily find anyone involved with the project, aside from a couple of people in a video or two. There's no team website anywhere that I can see. To me, this is an extremely dangerous project.
Why I Do These Honest Reviews
I want to be straight with you about why I do this. I don't get paid for these reviews. In fact, I give up a lot of money to tell you what I actually think is useful. I could easily get paid to hype up garbage like this. Instead, I take almost nothing to give you something I hope makes a real, positive difference in your life. I'm happy to roast your whole portfolio if you want to have a call with me, and I keep chat directly on the Internet Computer Protocol blockchain.
I'm very real, and I'm very transparent, which is the opposite of these fraud coins. You know exactly what you're getting with me. I share my life openly, one day at a time, and I talk every day about the projects I actually like rather than the ones I'm warning you away from. If you want to go deeper into how I think about all of this, you can explore my Money playlist, where I walk through what I've learned about money, crypto, and protecting yourself from these kinds of schemes.