When the Bellevue, Washington-based startup was founded in 2022, the original plan covered everything from music royalties to patents and trademarks. The idea was to let owners register their intellectual property on a blockchain and set terms for how others could use it. The problem, Muttoni said, was that many of those industries already had systems in place, while large rights holders had little interest in making their intellectual property available for permissionless licensing.
“We were kind of spreading ourselves way too thin across so many different types of IP,” he said.
Then came the rebrand earlier this year.
However, after that, the team began to question whether it still needed to maintain an entire blockchain, given that most of its work centered on a single product: Trace, which is a registry that records where training data comes from, who contributed it and what rights buyers have to use it.
Also, running a blockchain comes with costs, including engineers, validators, audits and infrastructure providers.
“Does it still make sense to run our own L1, or should we focus most of our energy on the protocol, on the product, on Trace?” he said.
That line of thinking led to the decision to shut down its blockchain and move to Sui.
