Story Protocol rebranded as the DATA Foundation on June 25, ending its IP-licensing product layer and repositioning its blockchain as a provenance and payment rail for licensed AI training datasets.
The pivot addresses a training-data shortage the foundation calls structural. "Frontier AI labs have hit a multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck, where the internet has been effectively exhausted for scraping," the foundation said in its launch announcement. Those supplying AI labs with "clean, verified, licensed data at scale are going to become some of the most valuable businesses ever built," CEO Andrea Muttoni told CoinTelegraph.
The foundation launched Trace, an onchain registry that attaches verifiable origin, licensing terms, and quality scores to each dataset. Two acquired products complete the stack. Kled, a marketplace with more than 1.5 billion user-contributed records spanning video, audio, and other real-world data, handles sourcing. Poseidon, which raised a $15 million seed in July 2025, validates and scores datasets before they reach buyers. The layer-1 chain is unchanged; the application layer above it was rebuilt entirely.
Leadership changed alongside the product. Muttoni, previously Story's president and product chief, takes the CEO role. Avi Patel, Kled's founder, joins as chief data officer. Story founder Seung-yoon Lee steps into an advisory role. Story replaced its executive lineup and its product layer on the same day. The scope distinguishes this from a cosmetic rename.
Story's native IP token migrates to DATA on a 1:1 basis; existing holders need not act. A previously scheduled token unlock was pushed to August 2026, roughly six months later than the original plan. Andreessen Horowitz backed the delay; governance proposals SIPs 0009 and 0010 enforce the revised schedule through automated smart contracts.
