Crypto.com has struck a strategic partnership with IP Strategy (Nasdaq: IPST) to support the Nasdaq-listed company’s move to put digital tokens at the center of its treasury, Crypto.com announced Tuesday. Under the deal, Crypto.com will provide execution, custody, over-the-counter trading and staking services for IP Strategy’s newly formed treasury reserve, which holds 52.5 million $IP tokens worth more than $230 million.
The arrangement follows IP Strategy’s August PIPE financing and marks a milestone: it’s the first time a company listed on Nasdaq has adopted $IP tokens as its primary reserve asset. For Crypto.com, the engagement builds on its institutional services offering, custody, liquidity and yield tools that the exchange says are designed to help corporate treasuries manage digital assets with scale and security.
“As companies embrace digital assets as part of their long-term treasury strategy, it’s essential they have access to secure, scalable infrastructure,” said Eric Anziani, President and Chief Operating Officer of Crypto.com. “We’re excited to work alongside IP Strategy to provide the institutional support needed to execute their digital asset strategy with confidence.”
“Intellectual property presents an $80T opportunity and this is just the beginning of a new era where IP unlocks a productive, investable asset class with real-world utility,” said SY Lee, Co-Founder and CEO of Story. “We’re proud to see $IP tokens at the center of this transformation, supported by the robust infrastructure of Crypto.com and the forward-thinking of IP Strategy.”
Marking a Milestone for Tokenized IP
IP Strategy, which operates under the registered corporate name Heritage Distilling Holding Company, Inc., bills itself as a vehicle for giving public market investors regulated equity exposure to the so-called programmable intellectual property economy, an asset class the company pegs at roughly $80 trillion. The treasury reserve’s direct participation in the Story ecosystem is intended to connect shareholders with on-chain registration, licensing and monetization of intellectual property.
The $IP token itself sits at the heart of Story, an AI-native Layer-1 blockchain designed to make intellectual property “programmable” and enforceable on chain. Story launched its mainnet in February 2025 and has attracted heavy early backing, roughly $136 million from investors including a16z crypto, Polychain Capital and Samsung Ventures, as it pushes tools for tokenizing media, data and AI-generated content and enabling automated licensing and royalties.
Industry watchers say the deal is notable because it ties a mainstream exchange’s institutional infrastructure to a publicly traded company that is explicitly allocating a large portion of its treasury to a single, non-fiat digital asset tied to an emerging blockchain use case. For Crypto.com, which has been expanding its institutional custody and treasury services, the agreement reinforces its push to be the infrastructure provider of choice for firms experimenting with tokenized reserves.
For IP Strategy, the partnership provides a practical layer of operational support, custody, execution and over-the-counter liquidity, as it seeks to convert a conceptual opportunity in “programmable IP” into a tangible portfolio strategy for public market investors. Both companies say the collaboration is an early step in what could be a broader effort to bridge traditional capital markets and tokenized intellectual-property markets.
