Story Protocol rebrands as DATA Foundation, pivots to AI

Story Protocol announced Thursday it has rebranded as the DATA Foundation and will shift focus from operating an IP-licensing layer on a layer-1 blockchain to building infrastructure for training artificial intelligence models, including an on-chain registry for dataset provenance called Trace.

Company leaders said frontier AI labs have exhausted public web scraping sources and now seek verified, licensed datasets drawn from real-world recordings. They described much of the remaining open-web material as limited, costly or legally unclear, creating obstacles for developers to source large-scale, provable training data.

Andrea Muttoni, formerly Story’s president and product chief, will become CEO of the DATA Foundation. Muttoni explained that Story initially aimed to create an internet IP layer but found major rights holders in music, gaming and brand media resisted permissionless licensing. An internal AI data-processing project called Poseidon will serve as the protocol’s processing layer; Poseidon raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025 and attracted interest from several large AI firms.

The DATA Foundation is integrating with Kled, a company that pays people to capture videos, ambient audio and other real-world signals used for model training. Kled founder Avi Patel will join DATA as chief data officer and adviser, and Kled will operate as a flagship application on the network.

Founder Seung-yoon Lee, who will remain as an adviser, described the most valuable intellectual property today as data that cannot be scraped from the public web. ‘DATA is where that conviction goes next: an end-to-end network that proves real-world data’s origin, licenses it, and pays the people who made it,’ he added.

Trace is presented as an on-chain registry that lets AI developers verify the provenance and licensing status of entire datasets before training models and provides a way for contributors to record and enforce usage terms. Poseidon will focus on processing and standardizing raw inputs so they meet quality and format requirements for large models.

The announcement comes as several crypto infrastructure firms and miners have repurposed hardware or expanded offerings to serve AI workloads. The DATA Foundation said it will continue to develop the on-chain registry, expand integrations with data suppliers and deploy Poseidon to prepare datasets for training.