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South Korean Authorities Fine Bithumb $136K over Sharing User Information Overseas

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South Korean Authorities Fine Bithumb $136K over Sharing User Information Overseas

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb was order to pay a $136,000 fine after it was found to have breached personal information protections rules when it sent user data overseas.

In a Thursday notice, the country’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) said that its investigation into Bithumb found that the exchange had “transferred personal information overseas without the separate consent of the data subjects during the process of order book sharing and virtual asset transfer with overseas virtual asset exchanges.”

The incident was connected to Bithumb sharing its Tether (USDT) order books between September and November 2025 with BingX, despite obtaining consent to share the data with Stellar, as well as sharing user information with 13 overseas exchanges.

“The Personal Information Protection Commission determined that there is a necessity to provide personal information for anti-money laundering purposes when transferring virtual assets to other exchanges, but regarding the overseas transfer of personal information and the data subject’s right to self-determination, it was determined that, as this is a closely related matter, it is necessary to strictly comply with the requirements and procedures stipulated in the Protection Act,” the notice said, in translation.

Source: PIPC

One of the largest crypto exchanges in South Korea, Bithumb has been subject to intense scrutiny from authorities. 

The country’s financial watchdog imposed a six-month suspension of the exchange’s activities in March over alleged violations of South Korea’s Financial Information Act, but a court reversed the decision in April. Earlier this month, police reportedly raided Bithumb’s offices as part of an investigation into alleged nepotism involving South Korean lawmaker Kim Byung-gi.

Related: SBI to acquire Bitbank in $289M deal creating Japan’s biggest crypto exchange

South Korean crypto tax set to take effect in 2027

South Korea’s Finance Ministry confirmed in May that a 22% tax on cryptocurrency gains would be imposed beginning in January 2027. The tax has faced several delays in implementation after initially expected to go into effect in 2025, but will likely affect many South Koreans who hold crypto.

According to the Yonhap news agency, about 16 million South Koreans were invested in digital assets as of March 2025.

Earlier this month, Chainalysis said that it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA), aimed at building investigative capability within South Korea’s law enforcement. 

One of the driving factors behind the pact is to better combat North Korea-linked crypto attacks, with South Korea’s police “at the forefront” of tackling these threats. 

Magazine: Japanese pension fund tips 1% in crypto, G7 urges action on NK hackers: Asia Express

Kraken eyes 15% stake in DeFi lender Aave in deal valuing protocol at $385 million

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Kraken eyes 15% stake in DeFi lender Aave in deal valuing protocol at $385 million

Aave is the largest decentralized lending protocol, allowing users to lend and borrow crypto assets without intermediaries. Depositors earn yield by supplying tokens to liquidity pools, while borrowers post crypto collateral to take out loans, with smart contracts automatically managing the process.

The protocol was thrust into the center of one of DeFi’s biggest crises in April after attackers tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group exploited KelpDAO’s cross-chain bridge to mint roughly $292 million of unbacked rsETH.

The hackers deposited the tokens as collateral on Aave and borrowed real assets against them, leaving the protocol with an estimated $190 million to $230 million in bad debt when the collateral became worthless.

Although Aave’s own smart contracts were never compromised, the exploit triggered more than $8 billion in withdrawals as users rushed to reduce their exposure, highlighting the contagion risks of DeFi’s interconnected ecosystem.

Kraken has stepped up acquisitions as parent company Payward prepares for a potential public listing, targeting businesses that expand its regulated trading infrastructure.

In April, Payward agreed to acquire crypto derivatives exchange Bitnomial for up to $550 million, adding a full suite of U.S. CFTC licenses covering brokerage, clearing and exchange operations. The deal follows Kraken’s broader push beyond spot crypto trading as it builds a multi-asset platform ahead of a widely anticipated IPO.

Bitcoin Rebounds Off Yearly Lows But US Stocks Flash Warning Sign

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Bitcoin Rebounds Off Yearly Lows But US Stocks Flash Warning Sign

Key takeaways:

  • Surging spot Bitcoin ETF outflows and a put-heavy options expiry point to fading institutional demand.
  • Risk-reward shifts toward tech stocks, leaving crypto traders to seek catalysts beyond macroeconomic tailwinds.

Bitcoin (BTC) traded down 9% in three days, hitting its lowest level since September 2024. The $58,000 retest triggered over $1 billion in liquidations across bullish BTC leveraged positions. Despite a modest recovery to $59,500, Bitcoin traders remain uneasy as the S&P 500 index and gold prices fully erased their intraday losses.

Bitcoin/USD (orange) vs. gold/USD & Nasdaq 100 futures (green). Source: TradingView

The market downturn on Thursday lined up with the release of the US Personal Consumption Expenditures index, which showed a 4.1% increase in May from the prior year. Yet as Crude Brent oil prices pulled back to $75 from $95 just one month earlier, investors grew more confident that inflation had peaked. As a result, the cash freed up by lower energy costs is boosting the stock market.

Shares of Micron, Sandisk, Applied Materials. Source: TradingView

The tech sector kept delivering strong surprises, with Micron Technology (MU) jumping 16% after solid quarterly earnings and Sandisk (SNDK) riding along with an 18% gain. Applied Materials (AMAT) rose 10% thanks to its new chipmaking tools. Investors’ renewed faith in the sector also mirrors the US government administration’s recent emphasis.

Fixed income offers a more compelling hedge alternative

Even if Bitcoin does not directly compete with the artificial intelligence sector, traders’ risk-reward views have likely tilted toward stocks. This shift followed the US government taking a 9.9% stake in Intel, proposing $2 billion for quantum computing firms, opening federal lands for data center projects, and setting a framework for “frontier models” releases.

Investors worried about inflated AI valuations after Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX) shares fell 32% from their peak can find comfort in 5-year US Treasuries yielding 4.15%. Demand for non-yielding assets like Bitcoin faded as traders now see an 80% chance of US interest rate hikes by December, up from 68% a month ago, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs daily net flows, USD. Source: SoSoValue

Bitcoin’s appeal also took a hit from the massive $469 million net outflows in spot BTC exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on Wednesday. The metric serves as a key proxy for institutional demand. Sentiment worsened further as Strategy (MSTR) now sits on a huge unrealized loss after buying $64.1 billion worth of Bitcoin since 2020.

Related: 21shares trims 2026 crypto forecasts despite institutional adoption gains

Strategy (MSTR) Bitcoin reserves and cash position, USD. Source: Strategy

The upcoming $13 billion Bitcoin options expiry on Friday heavily favors put (sell) instruments. Most neutral-to-bullish strategies will likely expire worthless, since 78% of call (buy) options are priced at $72,000 or above. Put options open interest on Deribit will exceed call options by $3.4 billion.

Bitcoin’s price momentum shows little tie to stocks due to heavy ETF outflows, a bearish options expiry skew and Strategy’s mounting unrealized losses. Bitcoin traders must now hunt for unique catalysts beyond equity market tailwinds to spark a turnaround.

Aave’s Kulechov Disputes Report, Says Firm Won’t Sell AAVE at ‘70%’ Discount

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Aave’s Kulechov Disputes Report, Says Firm Won’t Sell AAVE at ‘70%’ Discount

The founder said all Aave protocol and GHO revenue flows to the AAVE token and that the brand and software belong to holders, responding to a report that Kraken is in talks to buy a 15% stake at a $385 million valuation.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov on Thursday disputed a report that crypto exchange Kraken is in talks to take a stake in the largest decentralized lending protocol, saying the team would not sell its AAVE tokens cheaply.

“First off, there is NO WAY we’d sell AAVE at a 70% discount lol,” Kulechov wrote on X, addressing what he called “lots of discussions around Aave.” He said an allocation of AAVE held by Aave Labs is what “multiple market participants have discussed purchasing, directly or indirectly, through deeper long-term partnerships,” and that “the article’s framing is inaccurate.”

The valuation at the center of the report sits well below where the market prices the token. CoinDesk reported Thursday that Kraken, part of Payward Inc., was in talks to acquire a 15% stake in Aave at a $385 million valuation, citing three people familiar with the matter. That figure is about 69% below AAVE’s roughly $1.24 billion market capitalization, according to CoinGecko data.

Aave is the largest decentralized lending protocol, with about $11.6 billion locked in its main V3 markets, according to DefiLlama.

What Kraken Is Said to Be Weighing

The proposed deal would see Kraken invest 35,000 ether in return for 250,000 AAVE tokens and a 15% common equity stake in Aave Group, according to a document CoinDesk said it reviewed. At current prices, that AAVE allocation is worth about $20 million, per CoinGecko. CoinDesk reported the transaction was worth around $71 million and that Kraken was looking to syndicate it, and described the investment as the first in a series of deals to build out Payward Asset Management.

Kraken’s parent has been acquisitive ahead of a planned public listing. In April, Payward agreed to buy crypto derivatives exchange Bitnomial for up to $550 million, and CoinDesk reported in May that the company was raising capital at a $20 billion valuation.

Kulechov’s Revenue and Ownership Claims

Kulechov used the post to lay out how Aave directs its income. He said 100% of Aave protocol and GHO stablecoin revenue goes to the AAVE token under the “Aave Will Win” proposal, and that the arrangement extends to product revenue from the Aave App, Aave Pro and Swaps. No protocol or product revenue goes to Aave Labs, which he described as a service provider to the DAO responsible for building and growing Aave.

He said Aave generates $134 million in annualized revenue that flows to the Aave DAO. DefiLlama, which tracks onchain fees, shows Aave produced about $123 million in protocol revenue over the trailing year. Kulechov also said all intellectual property, including the Aave brand and any software built for Aave, belongs to the token.

Kulechov said the team is designing “Aavenomics 3.0,” which he said would include a new automated and non-discretionary buyback mechanism, without providing details or timing. He said Aave is building for the broader finance asset market, including tokenized real-world assets, and that “everyone at Aave Labs and Aave DAO works for $AAVE.”

AAVE rose about 5% over the 24 hours through Thursday, outpacing a roughly 3% slide in ether over the same period, according to CoinGecko.

The KelpDAO Overhang

The talks come as Aave continues to recover from the largest DeFi exploit of the year. On April 18, an attacker exploited KelpDAO’s LayerZero bridge to mint roughly $292 million of unbacked rsETH, then deposited the tokens on Aave and borrowed real assets against them, as The Defiant reported. Aave’s own smart contracts were not compromised, but the protocol was left with between $124 million and $230 million in modeled bad debt, according to a later incident report, and its total value locked fell by roughly $10 billion as users withdrew, The Defiant reported. LayerZero attributed the attack to the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group.

Aave coordinated a “DeFi United” relief effort with other protocols to restore rsETH backing, The Defiant reported, and Aave LLC later asked a New York court to vacate a restraining notice on about $71 million in recovered ether frozen by Arbitrum, The Defiant reported.

The reported terms come from a document and three anonymous sources cited by CoinDesk, not from Aave or Kraken, both of which declined to comment or did not respond to that outlet.

Kulechov said Aave will host its quarterly community call in the coming weeks, where the team plans to share updates on its roadmap.

Invesco, $2.5T asset manager, files for tokenized fund targeting stablecoin reserves

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Invesco, $2.5T asset manager, files for tokenized fund targeting stablecoin reserves

Invesco’s move is another sign of asset managers increasingly chasing a new business opportunity created by stablecoins. These cryptocurrencies are designed to maintain a fixed value, typically tied to one U.S. dollar, and are backed by reserve assets such as cash and short-term Treasuries. As issuance grows, so does demand for firms that can manage those reserves.

Citigroup projects the stablecoin market could expand to as much as $4 trillion by 2030, up from roughly $300 billion today, creating a potentially lucrative market for fund managers.

BlackRock, State Street and ProShares also filed to launch funds aimed at serving as stablecoin reserve vehicles, reflecting intensifying competition to provide the infrastructure behind digital dollars.

The filing also builds on Invesco’s broader tokenization strategy. Earlier this year, the firm took over management of Superstate’s roughly $900 million tokenized Treasury fund, becoming the first third-party asset manager to use Superstate’s blockchain-based FundOS platform.

That move placed Invesco alongside firms such as BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity that have embraced tokenized money market funds as a way to modernize how traditional assets are issued, transferred and settled using blockchain rails.

Matt Corallo Urges Bitcoin Projects To Exit GitHub After Rust Lightning Ban

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Matt Corallo Urges Bitcoin Projects To Exit GitHub After Rust Lightning Ban

GitHub has been the home to Bitcoin Core and many other software projects in the Bitcoin industry for over a decade, but it was not the first collaborative version control platform to host the digital currency’s code, and it may not be the last.

Recent performance issues in GitHub have triggered a new wave of criticisms of the platform, reviving old concerns and dissatisfactions with its design and reliability. Matt Corallo, one of the longest-acting Bitcoin core contributors, took to X recently to announce the decision to migrate off the platform, not Bitcoin core’s code base yet, but the Rust Lightning dev kit, a code base he is closely involved with. 

In an X quote retweet thread that goes back through multiple viral posts complaining about the platform, Corallo said, “our org currently has no CI (quality testing processes) because GitHub wrongly flagged a contributor, not an admin or maintainer, just someone new who opened a few pull requests. We’ve escalated it through corporate account managers and still basically nothing.” A week or so later, he added: “GitHub has decided our open-source project has been permanently banned with no explanation and no option to appeal, pointing to a ToS that clearly does not cover anything we’ve ever done.” – “I guess it’s time for Bitcoin projects to leave GitHub.”

The banned contributor appears to be Luis Schwab, who replied “I’ve had my account banned twice within a week “by mistake”. Relying on GitHub’s goodwill is not a good long term strategy.” Multiple other Bitcoin and crypto engineers replied with similar experiences, saying they too had migrated off the platform or been banned without recourse, like Roman Storm, who replied, “In 2022, GitHub locked my account over Tornado Cash sanctions. I’m a US citizen. They told me to get an OFAC license to access my own account. The sanctions were later ruled unlawful and overturned. The account is still locked. I’ve filed ticket after ticket – now they don’t even respond. Abolish GitHub.”

Corallo blames the AI wave on the recent mass banning of accounts and increasingly aggressive measures taken by the massive platform. The popularity of vibe coding has brought a new wave of attention, amateur projects and automated bot-like behavior to the already overburdened platform. Today, GitHub claims to host over 420 million repositories and over 4 million organizations worldwide. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, which, to some, also explains its steady downfall. 

Even Andrew Poelstra, another senior Bitcoin Core and Rust Lightning contributor, with over a decade of experience in the industry, wrote a devastating take-down of GitHub, defending the decision to migrate. “This site has an overwhelming amount of LLM slop, and they have no intention of stopping it, though they did write this insane blog post taking credit for FOSS as a way of acknowledging the problem,” he began, continuing to explain that the merging of code into the master repositories had now been  “broken for several days.” This caused cascading issues that confused the “merge script,” a security program that makes sure updates to a code base are done properly. 

The bug meant that tracking and merging pull requests — contributions from other developers — didn’t work as expected. “Tracking PRs is the one thing GitHub is supposed to do, and it’s broken. It’s no longer more convenient to stay here than to leave, which was the only reason we’ve stayed so long,” Poelstra continued. “The usual problems where diffs and comments are hidden, the site being slow and unreliable, the permissions model being insane and broken, the lock-in, the crappy and slow API, etc. [All of] which we could live with if the basic functionality worked, but it doesn’t.”

As a result, the next destination for Rust Lightning and perhaps other Bitcoin projects in the industry may be Forgejo, a lightweight GitHub alternative optimized towards self-hosting and high agency projects. Corallo confirmed to Bitcoin Magazine that “rust-bitcoin already started migrating to git.rust-bitcoin.org” and Rust Lightning would follow. 

The repositories will likely continue to host a copy on GitHub, though no public statements have been made about any kind of long-term mirroring strategy of the code base, meaning it will eventually just live on their own site. 

Trezor Academy Releases Documentary On Africa’s Bitcoin Economy, Opens Education Donations

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Trezor Academy Releases Documentary On Africa’s Bitcoin Economy, Opens Education Donations

While Western financial media has spent much of 2026 tracking Bitcoin’s crash from its October 2025 all-time high near $126,000, Trezor Academy has released a documentary that documents a different story. 

Seeding Bitcoin: Trezor Academy and Africa’s Bitcoin Revolution follows educators, merchants, and community members across Sub-Saharan Africa who are using Bitcoin not as a speculative asset but as a functional monetary tool.

The film captures Bitcoin education centers in South Africa where students as young as teenagers complete a Bitcoin diploma course and receive weekly rewards in bitcoin, which some use to buy groceries for their families. 

It profiles a shopkeeper who refused Bitcoin due to volatility concerns until a local educator introduced him to stablecoin settlement, after which he became an adopter. 

It documents a woman who traveled 14 hours to attend a grassroots Bitcoin conference and a former drug addict whose life has shifted since engaging with the local Bitcoin circular economy.

The through-line across all of them is exclusion from the existing financial system. Speakers in the film describe populations — refugees, orphans, people without formal addresses or government-issued ID — who cannot access bank accounts, credit, or formal payment infrastructure. 

Bitcoin, as one participant puts it, “doesn’t recognize if you’re poor or rich, what color your skin is, whether you have some government ID or not.”

Chainalysis recorded more than $205 billion in on-chain value received across Sub-Saharan Africa in the year to mid-2025, up around 52% year-on-year — the third-fastest regional growth rate in the world. 

A larger share of those transfers fell under $10,000 than in any other region, a pattern consistent with everyday use by individuals rather than institutional flows. 

Remittance costs tell part of the story: sending $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa through traditional channels carries fees close to 9 percent, the highest of any region according to the World Bank. 

On Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, the equivalent transfer can cost a few cents.

Currency instability adds another dimension. When Nigeria’s naira was devalued in March 2025, on-chain volume across the region spiked as people moved savings out of local currency. For communities that have lived through rampant inflation across multiple generations, a fixed-supply asset outside government control carries practical rather than ideological appeal.

Trezor Academy: Global bitcoin education

Trezor Academy, which has run more than 300 meetups, graduated over 2,000 students, and now operates in more than 30 countries, built the documentary around local educators teaching peers in their own languages. 

“This program will not teach everybody in Africa about Bitcoin,” says one educator in the film. “What we’re doing here is planting seeds through local educators from which Bitcoin circular economies later grow.”

Alongside the release, Trezor has added a donation option to its online shop. Customers can contribute at checkout or donate without a purchase, with all proceeds directed toward workshops, meetups, and project sponsorships in the Global South.

Base blockchain resumes after two-hour outage disrupted network

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Base blockchain resumes after two-hour outage disrupted network

Coinbase-backed Ethereum layer-2 network Base resumed block production Thursday after a disruption of roughly two hours that halted the blockchain.

In an update, the Base team said the chain has resumed working and internal nodes were syncing correctly, though it continues to investigate the root cause of the incident. The team also advised ecosystem node operators to restart their Base nodes to restore synchronization.

The first public indication of problems came at 16:03 UTC, when Base reported that mainnet block production was “unhealthy.” By 16:52 UTC, the team said it had identified a problem and was pursuing multiple remediation efforts.

The incident temporarily halted transaction processing on one of Ethereum’s largest layer-2 networks. Base has not yet disclosed what caused the invalid block or whether the issue stemmed from a software bug or another consensus-related fault.

The network also previously suffered an outage in August 2025.

The team said it will continue to monitor network stability and provide further updates as its investigation continues.

Read more: Base Network Suffers 1st Downtime Since 2023, Halts Operations for 29 Minutes

Strategy (MSTR) Drops Down 25% In Five Days As BTC Crashes

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Strategy (MSTR) Drops Down 25% In Five Days As BTC Crashes

Strategy Inc. (MSTR) fell more than 9% at times on Thursday to its lowest level since March 2024, extending a five-day collapse of nearly 30% as Bitcoin broke below $60,000 and a securities investigation targeting the company became public.

Shares of the Michael Saylor-led Bitcoin treasury company hit $85 by midday Thursday, down from above $117 at the start of the week. The stock has now shed roughly 36% over the past month — nearly double the 18.5% decline in Bitcoin over the same period.

On top of this, Rosen Law Firm posted a press release saying it is investigating potential securities fraud claims against Strategy, alleging the company “may have issued materially misleading business information to the investing public.” The probe covers all five of Strategy’s publicly traded securities: MSTR, STRF, STRC, STRK, and STRD. 

The legal pressure compounds a financial squeeze that analysts say stems from Strategy’s own capital structure. 

The company holds 847,363 Bitcoin — the largest corporate stockpile in the world — purchased at an average price that now leaves the entire 2024, 2025, and 2026 acquisition tranche underwater. Unrealized losses on the Bitcoin portfolio stand at approximately $10.6 billion.

Strategy’s preferred stock breaks down

The deeper concern for investors is Strategy’s STRC preferred stock, which has crashed to an all-time low and now trades around $76 — roughly 24% below its $100 par value. The structure matters because Strategy has relied on selling preferred stock to fund ongoing Bitcoin purchases. 

When preferred shares trade below par, that capital-raise mechanism stalls.

As Strategy issued more STRC over the past six months, annual dividend obligations ballooned from $300 million at the start of 2026 to $1.2 billion — a fourfold increase. Cash reserves, meanwhile, fell 38% over the same period. 

CryptoQuant, the on-chain analytics firm, published a note June 23 urging Strategy to stop buying Bitcoin and rebuild its cash position to roughly $2.8 billion before resuming accumulation. The firm said dividend coverage has collapsed from more than seven years to approximately 14 months.

Strategy appears to have gotten the message before the report landed. In the week of June 22, the company bought just 520 Bitcoin for roughly $35 million — a fraction of its prior pace — and routed $300 million of a $335.5 million common stock raise into its cash reserve, lifting it to $1.4 billion.

Saylor has not commented publicly on the investigation or CryptoQuant’s warning.

Story Rebrands as DATA Foundation in Pivot to AI Training Data

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Story Rebrands as DATA Foundation in Pivot to AI Training Data

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.

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