Heritage Distilling Introduces IP Strategy, Reflecting New Focus on $IP Token Treasury Strategy and the $80 Trillion Intellectual Property Economy

• First Nasdaq-listed company to adopt a treasury reserve strategy centered on $IP, the programmable digital asset powering the $80T intellectual property economy.
• As AI’s biggest bottleneck shifts from compute to rights-cleared data, $IP positions investors to gain exposure to the programmable IP infrastructure enabling AI’s next wave of growth.
• Advisory and governance team includes leaders from Google, CoinMarketCap, AQRU, and PIP Labs, bringing capital markets, technology, and crypto expertise to guide execution.

GIG HARBOR, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Heritage Distilling Holding Company, Inc. (Nasdaq: CASK) (“Heritage” or the “Company”) today announced its “IP Strategy,” reflecting the first of many steps in its imminent evolution into a public-market vehicle centered on the accumulation of $IP tokens, the native token of the Story network.

As part of this strategy, Heritage will be supported by an experienced advisory and governance team. Key figures that are expected to join Heritage include Phil Blows, Chief Investment Officer appointee (co-founder of AQRU and B2 Capital), Ben Sternberg, Strategic Finance Advisor (PIP Labs CFO, former CFO at Radish), David Lee, Board Member Nominee (former Google executive and Chief Corporate Development Officer at 451 Media), and Erick Zhang, Board Member Nominee (Founding Partner of Nomad Capital, former CEO of CoinMarketCap). Their collective experience across capital markets, technology, and crypto are expected to provide Heritage with world-class expertise to execute its IP Strategy.

The Company will leverage that expertise to participate in the broader programmable IP economy. For public market investors, this strategy offers a way to participate in the growth of AI-era IP without needing to directly manage tokens or crypto infrastructure.

“This new strategy marks our full embrace of intellectual property as a new, programmable asset class for this publicly traded company,” said Seung Yoon “SY” Lee, CEO and Co-founder of PIP Labs, Chairman of the Heritage Advisory Board, and original creator of Story. “By anchoring our reserves in $IP, we are positioning shareholders to participate in one of the most important shifts of this decade: the intersection of AI, data, and intellectual property.”

The Company will also launch a new website at www.ipstrategy.co, which will feature a Treasury Dashboard providing transparent visibility into key metrics for investors. The dashboard will include Heritage’s current share price and market capitalization, number of shares outstanding, the Company’s holdings of $IP tokens, current $IP token price, and the total value of $IP held in treasury. It will also display $IP per share and NAV calculations including headline market NAV and NAV per share, allowing investors to clearly track the relationship between token holdings and equity value. Stock chart data will be powered by TradingView with a 15–20 minute delay.

At its core, Story’s mission is to make intellectual property programmable, traceable, and monetizable in real time. With rights embedded directly into digital assets, Story enables automated licensing, transparent provenance, and enforceable royalties across industries. IP Strategy builds directly on this vision, bringing it into the public markets and giving investors regulated access to the programmable IP economy at the center of AI’s growth.

The strategy builds on Heritage’s recently announced $220 million PIPE financing, which included participation from leading institutional investors such as a16z crypto, Amber Group, Arrington Capital, dao5, Hashed, Mirana Ventures, Neoclassic Capital, Open World, Polychain Capital, Selini Capital, Stix, Syncracy Capital, and others, with Cantor Fitzgerald and Roth Capital Partners serving as placement agents. This broad participation underscores growing institutional recognition of $IP as a strategic asset class.

Why $IP?

Intellectual property represents an $80 trillion global economy. As AI accelerates, the scarcity of rights-cleared, monetizable data has become the bottleneck for innovation. Story, the AI-native blockchain behind $IP, is designed to make IP programmable: creators, enterprises, and AI labs can register assets on-chain, embed usage rights, and monetize through licensing, staking, or training data.

While other companies bet on individual AI models or platforms, IP Strategy offers exposure to the entire category of programmable IP and tokenized data, positioning ahead of one of the largest emerging markets in global finance.

Through $IP, investors gain access to a growing ecosystem already working with globally recognized IP and creators, including Justin Bieber, BLACKPINK, Madonna, Adidas, and Stability AI, while positioning ahead of the next frontier: tokenized real-world data for AI.

Seung Yoon “SY” Lee added, “Wall Street is beginning to recognize that IP is the gold of the AI era. First came Bitcoin as digital money, then Ethereum as financial rails. Now, $IP is emerging as the blockchain primitive for AI-era intellectual property. IP Strategy creates the first public market vehicle for investors to access this transformation.”

About IP Strategy

IP Strategy is the d/b/a name of Heritage Distilling Holding Company, Inc.’s (Nasdaq: CASK) new treasury reserve vehicle centered on $IP, the native token of Story. Through this strategy, Heritage offers public market investors both category-wide exposure to the programmable IP economy, a regulated, equity-based path to participate in its growth spanning media, brands, and AI training data without needing to hold crypto directly. Learn more at www.ipstrategy.co

About Story

Backed with $136 million from a16z crypto, Polychain, and Samsung Ventures, Story launched its mainnet in February 2025 and has rapidly become the leading blockchain infrastructure for tokenized intellectual property. Story is a blockchain purpose-built to make intellectual property a programmable digital asset with embedded rights. It enables creators, developers, enterprises, and AI labs to turn media, data, and AI-generated content into programmable, legally enforceable digital assets, fueling use cases across AI, entertainment, robotics, and more. Designed for scale, Story bridges the gap between outdated legal frameworks and the realities of AI-era creation, making it possible to track provenance, automate licensing, and unlock new markets for ideas. As the foundation for $IP’s evolution into an internet-native asset class, Story powers a more open, equitable, and composable creative economy. Learn more at https://www.story.foundation.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements may be identified by words such as "aims," "anticipates," "believes," "could," "estimates," "expects," "forecasts," "goal," "intends," "may," "plans," "possible," "potential," "seeks," "will," and variations of these words or similar expressions that are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Any such statements in this press release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements.

Any forward-looking statements in this press release are based on Heritage’s current expectations, estimates and projections only as of the date of this release and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those set forth in or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks related to the Company’s digital asset treasury strategy, the value of the Story $IP token, the stability or demand of the Story network, the ability of the Company to execute on its treasury reserve plans, the expected appointees to the Company and their ability to bring expertise to the Company’s execution of its IP Strategy, the Company’s yield and capital management strategies and the potential for $IP to be the blockchain primitive for AI-era intellectual property. These and other risks concerning Heritage’s programs and operations are described in additional detail in its registration statement on Form S-1 filed on August 26, 2025, and its latest annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and annual 10-K filings, which are on file with the SEC, as well as well as the supplemental risk factors included in Addendum A to the form of Subscription Agreement filed as Exhibit 10.1 to the Company’s Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on August 11, 2025. Heritage explicitly disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except to the extent required by law.

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Source: Heritage Distilling Holding Company, Inc.