Story Protocol Rebrands as DATA Foundation To Build Provenance Layer for AI Training Data

The foundation says it has registered 1.5bn user-contributed records on its DATA Network through a flagship integration with Kled, an opt-in human data marketplace. Alongside the rebranding, DATA Foundation has launched Trace, an onchain registry that generates immutable receipts for every data contribution, allowing AI labs to verify the origin, consent status and handling of datasets before licensing them.

Andrea Muttoni becomes CEO of DATA Foundation. Avi Patel, founder of Kled, joins as chief data officer advisor to the foundation.

Why the rebranding

The shift from Story Protocol's original IP-layer mission reflects what DATA Foundation describes as a structural crisis in AI development. Frontier labs have exhausted publicly available text for model training, leaving the remaining supply either expensive, legally undocumented or both. Scraped data, long the default for large-scale model training, is increasingly untenable as enterprise buyers demand provenance documentation and courts scrutinize data sourcing practices.

"The challenge in AI has shifted from compute and architecture to sourcing and provenance. As the scrapable web fractures, the question for labs now is who is keeping the receipts," said Muttoni.

Kled integration, Trace

Kled's licensing infrastructure, contributor receipts and stablecoin payouts now run on DATA Network. Trace sits on top of that as a public search and audit platform, generating a receipt for every record uploaded by contributors worldwide and enabling compensation tracking for intellectual property.

"Frontier labs have exhausted the supply of high-quality, human-generated public text available on the open web. Suppliers showing data-sourcing provenance will win the next decade of deals," said Patel. "Instead of sourcing data blindly, Kled's data marketplace and DATA's auditable chain of custody converge on what labs actually need to license data with confidence and transparency."

Patel told Sandmark the integration addresses a fundamental trust problem in the AI data supply chain. "When you're dealing with billions of training examples from millions of contributors, you need a system that anyone can independently verify without relying on a central company. Blockchain provides that audit layer."

Poseidon, wider ecosystem

DATA Foundation also incorporates Poseidon, an AI data processing project incubated by Story Protocol that cleans, normalizes and scores raw human data for quality and authenticity before it reaches a buyer. Poseidon's contributor app, Numo, goes live today, allowing contributors to supply data to the network in exchange for real-time payouts.

The $IP token, Story Protocol's native asset, migrates one-to-one to $DATA with no action required from existing holders. 

(Corrected user-contributed records from 1.1bn to 1.5bn; Avi Patel's title from chief data officer to chief data officer advisor).