The launch of Story Mainnet, the world’s IP blockchain, marks the beginning of our journey to continuously improve the network and the foundation layer serving our entire ecosystem and community. These enhancements boost performance, reliability, user experience and open up new frontiers of possibilities. This document is a living public roadmap capturing the community’s vision to shape Story’s future and mapping out how we’ll get there.
Methodology
While many roadmaps are designed with a “build in public” approach to report progress to the community, we believe Story’s roadmap should go beyond that. It should be progressively shaped through active community participation across forums, Discord, and other ecosystem platforms.
This involves not just deciding what should be done for Story’s future, but also working closely with ecosystem partners, community members, research institutes, universities, and independent researchers to implement these decisions.
Future plans are divided into two categories: Planned Releases and Areas of Active Research.
Planned releases consist of concrete features and improvements with clear timelines, realistic targets, measurable goals, and well-defined deliverables. However, areas of active research represent ongoing investigations and experimental work that require further exploration before breaking into clear actionable items in planned releases. Breaking improvements into these two categories enables focused execution while maintaining flexibility to adapt to emerging needs and opportunities as our community evolves and learns throughout the journey.
Planned Releases
The work flows in a continuous stream of cycles, each spanning several months. Each cycle may include one or more items from different tracks:
Performance track aims to boost network efficiency by improving throughput and transaction speed, optimizing consensus for faster blocks and finality, enhancing resilience, and increasing decentralization through expanded validator seats. These improvements will support diverse transaction types and ensure reliable operations.
Product track focuses on unlocking new possibilities through Story’s purpose-built, multi-core execution environment. Utility is essential for the network’s long-term success. Key developments include the adoption of new cores (such as AI) and embedded large file storage. The track implements features like secure on-chain randomness, confidential royalty payments, and on-chain storage of large files.
Governance track focuses on evolving Story’s governance framework to ensure transparent, efficient, and decentralized decision-making. It encompasses improvements to tokenomics, voting mechanisms, proposal systems, and community participation processes to maintain a balanced and sustainable ecosystem.
Each item progresses through several stages: development, testing, security auditing, and release. Large items may be broken into multiple parts, with each part released within one cycle. Each cycle’s results, both successes and failures, must be transparent to maximize learning.
Upcoming Tech Release
Q2 2025
This release focuses solely on product aspect, thus don’t require node software updates, helping maintain network stability during the onboarding of a larger ecosystem. This release streamlines the IP onboarding process through two key components: the IP Portal and the Story Attestation Service.
Product track
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IP Portal (public beta) - The “Home Page” for Story that allows for simple and no-code registration of IP onto Story (and all applications leveraging Story). Further, a browsing experience that enables anyone to view all of the IPs registered on Story in an elegant and visual way. A consumer focused “GitHub for IP”.
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Story Attestation Service (public beta) - An attestation service that attests to the validity of every single IP Asset on Story by verifying social identities, IP infringement/similarity, and other real world signals offchain and delivering them onchain for users/developers. Results can be surfaced on any application and will be featured in the IP Portal.
Q3 2025
As the first cycle following Mainnet launch, this phase focuses on consensus and performance improvements while maintaining maximum network reliability. We’re implementing minimal breaking changes to ensure smooth integration for our ecosystem and community.
Here is a quick summary of what has been planned for this release:
Performance Track
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Consensus Optimization
Planned a set of parameter and code optimizations, along with improvements to consensus implementations, to achieve two goals: reducing block time and increasing validator seats by 10-20%. Also planned Implementation state snapshotting and synchronization features to help nodes quickly recover and catch up after extended offline periods.
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IP-core Optimizations
A set of optimizations has been planned for the IP-core to improve the performance and efficiency of IP-related operations across IP graphs.
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Dependency updates
Several updates has been planned to update the core software dependencies (CometBFT and EVM updates)
Product Track
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IPKit (public beta)
Releasing a seamless and elegant Frontend SDK with UI Components for registering, searching, and monetizing IP on any application in a few lines of code.
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PassKey Support
Support for WebAuthn passkeys to enable passwordless authentication through biometric verification and hardware security keys, enhancing both security and user experience while aligning with modern authentication standards
Governance Track
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Streamlined network upgrade
Implementation of a streamlined and secure upgrade process that allows nodes to transition seamlessly between versions using a single consolidated binary, reducing deployment complexity and minimizing potential security vulnerabilities during network updates
Active Research Areas
Each areas of active research encompass many smaller research initiatives with significant uncertainties, making it too early to commit to specific Mainnet release timelines.
These research initiatives focus on evaluating feasibility and prototyping. Since they often shift direction as new findings emerge, they are presented here as general areas of exploration rather than specific items.
Execution performance
This research area investigates methods to boost the network’s maximum throughput for various load types. Current initiatives include stateDB storage optimizations, execution concurrency, and specialized core optimizations, particularly for the IP-core. We are also partnering with Stanford FDCI to evaluate the possibility of supporting a secure, high-performance execution environment that operates closer to hardware as a core.
Consensus Research
This area of research explores optimizations and novel approaches to the network’s consensus algorithm. We aim to reduce end-to-end latency for users while gradually expanding the number of network validators. Currently, it covers a wide range of improvements to CometBFT and testing the feasibility of using HotStuff and BLS signatures under the ABCI interface.
On-chain Storage of Data Blobs
This area of research addresses a key user challenge: currently, storing large data on-chain requires users to first upload files to IPFS or similar platforms, obtain an ID (typically a hash), and then use that ID for on-chain actions. We are evaluating ways to natively and cost-efficiently support large files on-chain while using the same network itself to guarantee availability. This research also explores additional features, such as implementing decentralized access control for these files. Solving this challenge would streamline the IP onboarding process.
Confidentiality Research
This research area explores the feasibility and performance of confidential on-chain interactions. We are actively investigating operations like confidential IP on-chain agreements and royalty payments.
Governance Research
This area studies continuous improvements to governance processes, with a focus on streamlining participation, voting mechanisms, and system upgrades.