The world’s most iconic brands, from Disney’s beloved characters to Apple’s groundbreaking innovations, owe their immense value not just to physical products, but to their intellectual property (IP). Yet, despite IP being a cornerstone of global commerce, its traditional market has remained largely illiquid and inaccessible. Imagine if these cultural and narrative assets could be traded, financed, and scaled with the same efficiency as stocks or bonds. This vision is precisely what City Protocol aims to achieve.
Singapore, Singapore, October 14th, 2025/Chainwire/–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.
The Untapped Potential of Intellectual Property
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. Their journeys showcase the power of robust financial ecosystems supporting innovation.
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, yet even its model relies on centralized control.
For countless creators and nascent intellectual property, securing early-stage financing and scaling opportunities remains a significant hurdle. Ideas often languish due to a lack of liquidity and structured financial pathways, preventing them from realizing their full economic and cultural potential.
City Protocol: Reshaping the IP Landscape
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.
What is City Protocol? It 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 through three core tenets:
Firstly, disintermediated issuance means ideas can be tokenized from Day 1, immediately entering liquidity markets for pricing and funding. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for new intellectual property.
Secondly, community co-creation transforms supporters from passive consumers into active co-owners of the IP, allowing them to grow alongside it and share in the upside. This fosters a more engaged and invested ecosystem.
Thirdly, cultural assetization evolves creativity into a financialized cultural asset, capable of being traded, combined, and expanded. This unlocks new pathways for value creation and distribution for on-chain cultural assets.
Through this infrastructure, City Protocol supports the full lifecycle of IP: from birth, where decentralized issuance and capital backing solve the cold-start problem, to growth, through community-driven content creation and narrative expansion, and finally to maturity, with on-chain financial instruments and index products capturing long-term value.
A Full-Stack Ecosystem for On-Chain IP
City Protocol’s product architecture covers the entire IP assetization flow, forming a closed-loop ecosystem built around four core components. These modules provide a robust framework for managing and growing intellectual property on-chain.
The IP Verification Layer ensures authenticity and copyright ownership on-chain, establishing trust for creators, communities, and investors. This foundational layer is critical for the integrity of any on-chain IP capital market.
IP RWA (IP Strategy) enables financing and liquidity for small, early-stage IPs, ensuring that creators and communities can share growth value from the very beginning. This transforms early concepts into accessible digital assets.
An AI + Growth Scaling Engine, powered by tools such as City ID, Viral City, and The Totem Toy City, amplifies IP impact, drives viral distribution, and extends virtual IPs into real-world brands. This engine provides intelligent support for scaling narrative assets.
Finally, the Launchpad acts as a fair, transparent issuance and trading platform tailored for IP projects, protecting creator rights and ensuring open access to capital. It serves as the gateway for new on-chain cultural assets to find their market.
Who is Behind the Vision? Team and Backing
Supported by a group of Web3-focused investors, City Protocol is building a full-stack ecosystem. The 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, crucial for establishing a credible and scalable IP capital market. Their blend of digital asset foresight and traditional market acumen is a key advantage.
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. These partnerships underscore the potential recognized by leading players in the decentralized finance space.
The Future of Culture: An On-Chain Revolution
If DeFi brought the capital markets on-chain, City Protocol’s vision is to bring culture and storytelling on-chain. This represents unprecedented empowerment for creators, who are no longer bound by centralized platforms or intermediaries. Instead, they can directly engage communities to launch, fund, and grow their intellectual property, lowering barriers and turning ideas into tradable, scalable assets.
For supporters, it’s the first time they can participate as true shareholders in cultural assets, rather than passive consumers. Communities can capture both early and long-term IP value, becoming true co-builders of cultural ecosystems and sharing in the success of their favorite narrative assets.
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, creating a dynamic new sector for digital asset innovation.
Conclusion
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. This is not just an upgrade to the traditional IP industry—it is the starting point for the on-chain cultural capital market.
City Protocol positions itself as more than just a protocol—it represents a structural transformation in the intellectual property 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.
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. 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.
