Today, we're excited to announce a strategic partnership with Story, the first Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built to make intellectual property programmable. Together, we're redefining how creators protect and monetize their work through Bitcoin-backed financial products.

The Creator Economy Needs Better Rails

Despite the explosion in digital content creation, most creators still face the same old problems: slow payouts, opaque systems, and platform-dependent compensation models that limit attribution and fair value distribution. The infrastructure simply hasn't kept pace with the creative economy's growth.

Story is pioneering programmable intellectual property turning copyrights, data, and creative assets into programmable, on-chain primitives that can be automatically licensed, remixed, and monetized. As it scales into the core IP infrastructure for the internet, integrating with Lombard's Bitcoin infrastructure extends Story's capabilities into finance, allowing creators to not only license but also receive and secure value directly in Bitcoin.

"Access to the global IP economy shouldn't depend on geography or intermediaries. By integrating Lombard's Bitcoin infrastructure, Story enables creators and developers to license, settle, and secure IP value instantly and globally. With Lombard, that value can now flow across the world as Bitcoin, the most trusted and durable digital asset. Bitcoin's neutrality and permanence make it one of the most efficient store of value for intellectual property, and opens up access for IP holders while aligning the world's intellectual capital with its strongest monetary network" SY Lee, CEO & Co-founder of Story.

Two Game-Changing Integrations

By combining Story's Layer-1 blockchain for programmable intellectual property with Lombard's Bitcoin finance infrastructure, we're introducing two breakthrough innovations:

1. Bitcoin Revenue Distribution

Creators and studios often wait months for royalty payments while intermediaries take substantial cuts. Through our Bitcoin assets and infrastructure, Story can route royalties directly to creators in Bitcoin—instantly, borderlessly, and without banking friction.

Longer-term receivables can also be denominated in BTC, protecting IP owners against inflation that traditional fiat payouts cannot. This aligns with a broader shift in entertainment and sports where top names increasingly request Bitcoin compensation to preserve value globally, and Lombard makes that possible at scale.

2. Crypto-Economic IP Security

In a first-of-its-kind application, we're exploring the use of Bitcoin collateral to provide crypto-economic guarantees for IP assets. By tying IP rights to Bitcoin collateral, IP owners get a financial backstop that enforces royalty claims. Here's how it works:

• If a licensee defaults or disputes arise, the collateralized guarantees can automatically trigger payouts
• If a licensee defaults, the collateral is liquidated onchain, which turns slow and costly legal enforcement into instant, automated resolution
• Creators get insurance-like protection with transparent settlement

Bitcoin is uniquely positioned for this use case—no other asset combines the liquidity, neutrality, and global acceptance required to serve as reliable collateral at scale.

What This Means for Creators

This partnership demonstrates how Bitcoin can serve as the foundation for complex financial products addressing real-world use cases. By integrating Bitcoin finance with programmable IP, we're giving global creators:

• Faster, fairer compensation in sound money
• Financial protection for their intellectual property
• Access to global markets without intermediaries
• Tools built for the scale and complexity of modern creative work

As Jacob Phillips, Co-Founder of Lombard, notes: "The creator economy has lacked financial rails built for scale—Bitcoin provides that foundation. Our partnership with Story will provide global creators with tools to monetize their intellectual property with Bitcoin, and provide Story with Bitcoin-backed crypto-economic guarantees for IP assets."

Building the Future of Creative Finance

This is just the beginning. As Story scales into the core IP infrastructure for the internet, integrating Lombard's Bitcoin capabilities extends those benefits into finance—allowing creators to not only license but also receive and secure value directly in Bitcoin.

The alliance between programmable intellectual property and Bitcoin finance represents a new paradigm: one where creators maintain control, value flows transparently, and Bitcoin's monetary network aligns with the world's intellectual capital.

Stay tuned for more updates as we build out these innovations together.

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About Lombard: Lombard is the leading Bitcoin finance protocol, accelerating Bitcoin's evolution from idle capital to the foundation of productive trading, collateral, and yield generation. Through its flagship LBTC asset, Lombard has onboarded over $3 billion of BTC across 14 chains and 75+ protocols, achieving the fastest growth trajectory to $1 billion of any yield-bearing asset. Lombard has established strategic partnerships with leading institutions globally, including KODA, Franklin Templeton, Galaxy Digital, Kraken, Upbit, Bybit and more.

About Story:

Story is a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built to make intellectual property programmable. Backed by $136 million from a16z, Polychain, and Samsung Ventures, Story launched its mainnet in early 2025 and has quickly become a leading infrastructure for tokenized IP. The network enables creators, developers, enterprises, and AI labs to register content as on-chain assets with embedded rights, turning media, data, and AI-generated works into legally enforceable digital property. By bridging the gap between outdated legal frameworks and the realities of the AI era, Story makes it possible to track provenance, automate licensing, and unlock new markets for ideas. As the foundation for IP's evolution into an internet-native asset class, Story powers a more open, equitable, and composable creative economy.