Story Protocol has rebranded as the DATA Foundation and replaced its original intellectual property licensing strategy with a new focus on AI training data infrastructure. In a Thursday announcement, the layer-1 project said it will now build systems to source, verify, license, and compensate contributors for data used to train artificial intelligence models.
The announcement drew a strong market response. Shortly after the rebrand, the newly renamed DATA token rose 16.7% to $0.35. That move came while the broader crypto market was under pressure after U.S. PCE data showed annual inflation accelerated to 4.1% in May, contributing to nearly $1.5 billion in liquidations.
Open IP licensing gave way to verified AI data
Story said its initial goal was to build an IP layer for the internet, but the model ran into resistance from major rights holders. President and product chief Andrea Muttoni said companies behind valuable music, gaming, and brand assets were reluctant to place core intellectual property into permissionless licensing systems because they wanted tighter control over those assets.
Under the new structure, the DATA Foundation will concentrate on data that AI labs cannot easily scrape from the open web. Story argued that frontier AI companies now need legal, high-quality, and traceable datasets rather than more undocumented material collected from public pages. The company described AI training data as “the most valuable and least solved category of IP.”
Trace launches on-chain as Kled and Poseidon join the stack
As part of the shift, Story is launching Trace, an on-chain registry built to track provenance and licensing for AI training data. The company said Trace will allow AI firms to verify datasets while giving contributors a way to set and enforce licensing terms.
The leadership structure is also changing. Muttoni will become CEO of the DATA Foundation, Kled founder Avi Patel will join as chief data officer and adviser, and Story founder Seung-yoon Lee will remain involved as an adviser.
Story is also bringing Kled into the new setup as the flagship application on DATA. According to the company, Kled pays participants for real-world data tasks such as recording videos of their surroundings or capturing ambient audio, then turns that material into licensed datasets for AI training.
Muttoni said Poseidon, Story’s incubated AI data-processing project, had already shown “immediate traction” with major AI firms and raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025. In the new architecture, Poseidon will serve as the protocol’s processing layer, while Trace will handle on-chain verification and licensing records.
DATA strategy centers on information that cannot be scraped
Lee framed the new direction around forms of data that cannot simply be copied from websites, including physical movement, speech, driving behavior, and workplace activity. He said the most important IP of this era is the data that cannot be scraped, such as how a surgeon’s hands move, how a robot grips, and how people speak, drive, and work in the real world. DATA, he said, is meant to prove the origin of real-world data, license it, and pay the people who created it.
The pivot puts Story alongside other crypto companies chasing AI demand. The report noted that Forbes said Monday that Web3 gaming company Immutable is moving from gaming toward an AI marketing platform for game publishers. Earlier this month, Coinbase also said it is developing a tool that would let consumer AI models connect to a user’s exchange account and execute trades or strategies.