City Protocol is developing a decentralized protocol designed to establish capital market infrastructure for intellectual property (IP). By bringing IP on-chain, the project aims to make it a more accessible and liquid asset class, supported by tools for IP verification, financing, and scalable growth.
In traditional capital markets, companies such as Apple and Tesla have demonstrated how access to early-stage capital and financial infrastructure can contribute to long-term growth into trillion-dollar enterprises. In contrast, IP—despite being one of the world’s most valuable assets—has historically been limited to royalties, licensing agreements, and fragmented ownership structures. Disney, with a market capitalization in the $200–300 billion range, exemplifies the scale of value that IP can generate when paired with capital infrastructure.
City Protocol seeks to address this imbalance by introducing an on-chain IP capital market. The protocol is designed to enable creators to tokenize their IP from the earliest stages, with infrastructure that facilitates participation from communities and access to capital through decentralized mechanisms.
Supported by a group of Web3-focused investors, City Protocol is building a full-stack ecosystem that includes IP verification, financing tools, launchpads, and infrastructure for scaling IP-based projects on-chain.
What is City Protocol
City Protocol is a decentralized IP protocol with a mission to liberate cultural and narrative assets from closed ecosystems and bring them into the on-chain capital market making them liquid, scalable, and globally accessible.
In traditional models, IP growth depends on centralized platforms or publishers. Creators are bound by their rules, capital requirements, and distribution bottlenecks, which often bury early-stage creativity and hand disproportionate value to intermediaries. City Protocol disrupts this by introducing the logic of the on-chain capital market:
- •Disintermediated issuance: Ideas can be tokenized from Day 1, immediately entering liquidity markets for pricing and funding.
- •Community co-creation: Supporters become more than consumers—they are co-owners of the IP, growing alongside it and sharing in the upside.
- •Cultural assetization: Creativity evolves into a financialized cultural asset, capable of being traded, combined, and expanded.
Through this infrastructure, City Protocol supports the full lifecycle of IP:
- •Birth: Decentralized issuance and capital backing solve the cold-start problem.
- •Growth: Community-driven content creation and distribution enable sustained storytelling and narrative expansion.
- •Maturity: On-chain financial instruments and index products capture and invest in the long-term value of IP.
Ultimately, City Protocol builds an IP Capital Market where IPs are no longer dependent on single platforms or publishers, but instead co-shaped by communities and markets—unlocking sustainable cycles of growth and value creation.
Team and Backing
The City Protocol core team brings both crypto-native expertise and traditional entertainment and finance resources. They have been deeply involved in leading Web3 projects like Animoca, The Sandbox, Dapper Labs, and Memeland, while also holding experience at institutions such as HSBC, MediaAsia, and LVMH. This cross-industry background allows City Protocol to uniquely bridge on-chain innovation with real-world networks.
On the funding side, City Protocol is backed by top-tier investors including Jump Trading, Dragonfly, and CMT Digital, providing strong capital market support for building its IP ecosystem.
Core Product Ecosystem
City Protocol’s product architecture covers the entire IP assetization flow, forming a closed-loop ecosystem built around four core components:
- IP Verification Layer – Ensures authenticity and copyright ownership on-chain, establishing trust for creators, communities, and investors.
- IP RWA (IP Strategy) – Enables financing and liquidity for small, early-stage and established IPs, ensuring that creators and communities can share growth value from the very beginning.
- AI + Growth Scaling Engine – Powered by tools such as City ID, Viral City, and The Totem Toy City, this module amplifies IP impact, drives viral distribution, and extends virtual IPs into real-world brands.
- Launchpad – A fair, transparent issuance and trading platform tailored for IP projects, protecting creator rights and ensuring open access to capital.
Together, these four modules create a full-stack on-chain ecosystem that covers incubation, growth, distribution, and governance—allowing creators, communities, and investors to jointly participate in and benefit from the growth of cultural assets.
Future Outlook: Unlocking Infinite Potential for the IP Market
If DeFi brought the capital markets on-chain, City Protocol’s vision is to bring culture and storytelling on-chain.
- •For creators, this represents unprecedented empowerment. They are no longer bound by centralized platforms or intermediaries. Instead, they can directly engage communities to launch, fund, and grow their IPs—lowering barriers and turning ideas into tradable, scalable assets.
- •For supporters, it’s the first time they can participate as true stakeholders in cultural assets, rather than passive consumers. Communities can capture both early and long-term IP value, becoming true co-builders of cultural ecosystems.
- •For the industry at large, City Protocol marks the shift from closed to open, opaque to programmable, and isolated value to composable capital markets. IPs evolve from being mere content or entertainment products into financialized cultural assets with investment potential.
City Protocol positions itself as more than just a protocol—it represents a structural transformation in the IP capital market. By significantly reducing the friction traditionally associated with IP trading, the project aims to make the exchange of cultural and narrative assets as seamless as financial and physical assets on-chain.
City Protocol provides the answer: by building end-to-end on-chain infrastructure for IPs, it allows creators, supporters, and investors to co-create and co-capture value in a single ecosystem.
Every idea can become a capitalized cultural asset. Every community member can be a value co-creator. Every investor can join the early growth of IP markets.
This is not just an upgrade to the traditional IP industry—it is the starting point for the on-chain cultural capital market.
About City Protocol
City Protocol is a decentralized protocol powering IP Capital Markets; designed for creators to launch, scale, and sustain IP. We bring IP assets, DATs and RWA onchain, powering IP as a global asset class. For the first time, creativity gains liquidity and scalability like companies unlocked through IPOs — now powered by decentralized markets.
Supported by: Jump Trading, Dragonfly, CMT Digital, and other institutional partners