The intellectual-property blockchain that raised $140 million led by a16z crypto is migrating its $IP token to $DATA one-to-one and integrating data marketplace Kled, registering 1.1 billion user records on the network.
Story, the layer 1 blockchain built to put intellectual property onchain, rebranded as DATA Foundation on Thursday and refocused the project on supplying AI training data, the company said in a blog post and press release. The project is migrating its $IP token to a new token, $DATA, on a one-to-one basis.
The token, now trading as DATA, jumped about 12% over 24 hours, compared with a 0.2% slide in Bitcoin, according to CoinGecko. The relaunch registers 1.1 billion user-contributed records from Kled, a data marketplace that DATA Foundation named its flagship app. Story has raised $140 million in total venture funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto.
The shift is a bet that the most valuable form of intellectual property is now the data used to train AI models. DATA Foundation said frontier labs have largely exhausted the public web available to scrape, leaving them without a way to source data at scale, prove where it came from, or verify its quality. The pivot is also a retreat from the broader IP-licensing thesis Story launched with last year: total value locked on the Story chain has fallen to about $349,000, down from a peak near $45 million in September, according to DefiLlama.
“The challenge in AI has shifted from compute and architecture to sourcing and provenance,” said Andrea Muttoni, who becomes CEO of DATA Foundation, in the press release. “As the scrapable web fractures, the question for labs now is who is keeping the receipts.”
Muttoni, previously Story’s president and product chief, takes over as CEO. Co-founder Seung-yoon Lee moves to an advisory role. Avi Patel, founder and CEO of Kled, joins as chief data officer in a part-time advisory capacity while continuing to lead Kled, the company said.
Kled Integration Anchors the Launch
Kled, which describes itself as the world’s largest opt-in human data marketplace, lets people upload images, video and other files and get paid when AI labs license them. Starting Thursday, Kled’s licensing rails, contributor receipts and stablecoin payouts run on DATA Protocol, with 1.1 billion records registered on the network at launch, the company said. Kled said its app processes more than 5 million uploads a day.
“Frontier labs have exhausted the supply of high-quality, human-generated public text available on the open web,” said Patel in the press release. “Suppliers showing data-sourcing provenance will win the next decade of deals, and that’s our bet.”
A Public Audit Layer Called Trace
Alongside the Kled integration, DATA Foundation launched Trace, a public audit and search platform where every record registered on the network can be looked up. Trace generates a receipt for each contribution that includes a content hash, consent terms, the license, payment status and timestamps, the company said. The underlying data is not stored on Trace, so labs can verify a dataset’s provenance without exposing the data itself.
Quality control runs through Poseidon, an AI data-processing project Story incubated that cleans, structures and scores raw human data, screening out content that was scraped, synthetic or altered. Poseidon, which is backed by a16z, raised a $15 million seed round in 2025 and runs a live contributor app called Numo that pays users in stablecoins in real time.
Token Migrates One-to-One
The $IP token migrates to $DATA on a one-to-one basis with no action required from existing holders, the foundation said. It said migration guidance, exchange timing and an FAQ would be published before any deadline at datafdn.org/faqs, and warned holders to ignore any message asking them to migrate manually or send tokens to a new address.
DATA has a total supply of about 1.03 billion tokens, of which roughly 356 million are circulating, putting its market value near $122 million and its fully diluted valuation around $351 million, per CoinGecko. The foundation said the network’s validator set and existing integrations are unchanged.
Difficult Stretch
The rebrand follows a difficult stretch for the project. DATA is down about 29% over the past 30 days and trades more than 97% below its September high of $14.78, per CoinGecko. Onchain activity has thinned to near zero, with chain TVL at about $349,000.
The project has also drawn criticism. Co-founder Jason Zhao departed in August 2025 amid community backlash, and Adam Cochran, a partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, argued at the time that Story exemplified richly backed startups that raise large sums on the strength of founder pedigree but attract few users. Story is also the latest crypto project to retool around AI as funding flows toward the sector.
The record counts and Kled’s market-leading claim are company-provided and have not been independently verified.
DATA Foundation said its Confidential Data Rails product will reach mainnet in the third quarter, and that contributor apps Numo, Oto and Miso will expand into new languages and data types in the coming weeks. The foundation said it would publish step-by-step token-migration timing and exchange details before any deadline.
