The platform that made a name for itself by putting individualized AI music generation models and creator ownership on-chain is now going after something much bigger.
Suede Labs has recently advanced to the first stage of the Avalanche Build Games. The $1 million developer competition has become one of the most hotly contested builder programs in Web3 since its announcement earlier this year, and Suede’s entry gives a clear signal of where the company is heading next. Having established itself as a genuine player in the AI music space, the company is now building something with much wider ambitions: a full-stack intellectual property and rights registry on Avalanche, designed to let creators register, protect, and monetise their work through smart contracts from the moment it exists.
The Problem Nobody Fixed
To understand why this matters, you have to look at what the creator economy actually looks like beneath the surface. Over 70 copyright infringement lawsuits have now been filed against AI companies. A $1.5 billion settlement was reached in the Bartz v. Anthropic case after the company faced potentially massive penalties for using millions of pirated works as training data. Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and a growing coalition of artists and writers have all pursued legal action against AI platforms for training on their work without permission or compensation.
The legal system is catching up. But it was never built for this, and it shows. It is reactive, expensive, slow, and entirely dependent on which jurisdiction you happen to be in. For the 400 million independent creators who don’t have a label, a publisher, or a law firm on speed dial, the existing toolkit offers almost nothing practical. YouTube’s Content ID catches direct copies. Spotify has no equivalent. Neither comes close to addressing style cloning, AI training theft, or the wholesale scraping of creative work that has defined the last few years. And even where legal options technically exist, pursuing them requires resources most working creators simply don’t have.
That gap, the absence of ownership infrastructure actually built for the digital age, is what Suede Labs is going after. The company’s argument is a simple one: every platform, every payment rail, and every solution built for creators over the past two decades assumed that ownership was already established. It never properly was. That’s the root cause. Everything else is a symptom.
What They’re Building
The project is categorised as infrastructure inside the Build Games, which is the right framing. At its core, creators register their work on Avalanche and receive an immutable, timestamped proof of authorship tied to their wallet. But registration is just the entry point. Smart contracts then govern everything downstream: licensing terms, permissions around AI training rights, derivative works, and earnings routed directly back to the creator’s wallet when those conditions are met, automatically, without anyone having to chase anyone for anything.
That last part deserves a moment. The real bottleneck for most independent creators isn’t making work, it’s getting paid when that work is used, and being able to prove they made it when someone disputes it. A system that handles both of those things in the background, around the clock, without intermediaries, is a meaningfully different proposition to anything that currently exists for creators.
There’s also a business facing dimension that becomes increasingly significant as AI licensing compliance tightens. As legal pressure on AI companies continues to mount, the ability to demonstrate that training data was properly licensed rather than scraped is shifting from a reputational concern to a legal necessity. A verified on-chain registry of licensed creative assets is exactly the kind of layer those companies will need, and exactly the kind of infrastructure that could sit between creators and the platforms that want to use their work. Suede Labs also plans to integrate directly with games and social platforms across the Avalanche ecosystem, making IP protection automatic at the point of publication rather than an afterthought.
Why Avalanche
The choice of Avalanche as the foundation is worth examining rather than taking for granted.
For a registry designed to serve as permanent, globally accessible proof of ownership, the underlying infrastructure matters as much as the application sitting on top of it. Ownership proof only carries weight if the chain behind it is trusted and durable. Avalanche’s speed, low transaction costs, and rapidly growing developer ecosystem make it a credible home for something intended to be used by a creator in Lagos just as easily as one in London. That accessibility is not incidental to Suede’s thesis, it is central to it.
The Build Games competition itself was built to let serious builders surface organically, with no predefined tracks constraining what can be submitted. That openness suits a project like this well. Suede Labs isn’t building a gaming app or a DeFi variant. It’s building foundational infrastructure that could become part of how the entire Avalanche ecosystem handles creative ownership by default, with IP protection baked in rather than bolted on.
The Competitive Landscape
Suede isn’t the first to attempt to tackle this ownership crisis. Projects like Story Protocol and Camp Network have explored the same territory. But Suede’s argument is pointed: those solutions treat individual symptoms rather than the root cause. None successfully establish ownership at the moment of creation, none work across all creative mediums, and none give creators meaningful, enforceable power against AI companies currently profiting from their work without permission. The difference Suede is staking its position on is that it isn’t patching the existing system. It’s replacing the missing foundation beneath it.
The Bigger Picture
For anyone who has followed Suede Labs closely, this move makes sense as a natural evolution rather than a pivot. The company has spent the better part of a year building out a platform that has already paid out millions to creators while expanding its reach well beyond music into art, writing, and other creative mediums. The Avalanche Build Games entry takes that same underlying conviction, that creators deserve infrastructure that works for them rather than against them, and builds it at a scale that could serve anyone, anywhere.
The timing is pointed in a way that feels less like coincidence and more like deliberate positioning. As billion dollar lawsuits reshape the AI industry and legislators scramble to build frameworks for a problem that already happened, Suede Labs is constructing the layer that makes the question of AI and creative rights answerable before it ever reaches a courtroom.
