💸 Royalty Module

The Royalty Module defines how revenue flows between parent and child IP Assets. There are two common scenarios when revenue flow would happen:

1. Minting a License - sometimes there is a minting fee to mint a license from an IP Asset. When this is paid by someone (who wants to register a derivative), the revenue should flow up the chain.
2. Tipping Directly - if someone sends revenue an IP Asset directly, it should flow up the chain.

The below example shows what happens when an IP Asset 5 (IPA5) mints a license from IPA4. It cost $1M USDC to mint. Revenue flows to both IPA1 and IPA2 since they are ancestors of IPA4 and have negotiated some license agreement where they are due revenue from IPA4's earnings. Do not worry if you don't understand everything in the picture, this is just to show you what the Royalty Module is all about.

Royalty Policies

Royalty policies are a component of the license agreement between two IP Assets. It defines how revenue flow actually happens.

At the moment, the Royalty Module supports one royalty policy called Liquid Absolute Percentage, which is the default policy on every IP Asset. In the future, different royalty policies can be whitelisted by protocol governance and added to the Royalty Module.

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Note on Royalty Policies

An IP Asset without any parents can mint licenses with different royalty policies while a derivative IP Asset inherits the royalty policy of its parents.

Terminology

1. IP Royalty Vault - Each IP Asset has an IP Royalty Vault, which acts as a pool for all monetary inflows related to an IP Asset's commercial exploration or from minting licenses. Anyone who holds Royalty Tokens (defined below) has the right to claim their share of this pool.
2. Royalty Tokens - the IP Royalty Vault contract is also the ERC-20 contract for the Royalty Tokens of each IP Asset. Each IP Asset has 100,000,000 Royalty Tokens associated, where each token represents 0.000001% of those gains. The holders of these Royalty Tokens can claim the Revenue Tokens (defined below) that are in the associated IP Royalty Vault.
3. Revenue Tokens - these are the tokens that are actually used for payment (ex. ETH, USDC, etc). Royalty Tokens can be used to claim Revenue Tokens.

Whitelisted Revenue Tokens

An ERC-20 token must be whitelisted by Story Protocol in the RoyaltyModule.sol contract to be used as a Revenue Token in the Royalty Module. Here are the whitelisted tokens (you can mint tokens directly from the link):