Story Protocol Logs Off IP, Rebrands as DATA Foundation to Train AI on Everything You Do 📸

Story Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain built around intellectual property licensing, is rebranding as the DATA Foundation and shifting its focus to artificial intelligence. The company announced Thursday it will build what it called "essential infrastructure for training AI," describing the sector as "the most valuable and least solved category of IP."

The company said frontier AI labs have hit a "multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck, where the internet has been effectively exhausted for scraping." It added that "the remaining supply is either expensive and bespoke or legally undocumented, leaving labs without a way to source data at scale, prove its provenance, or guarantee its quality."

As part of the pivot, the organization is launching Trace, an on-chain registry for AI training data provenance and licensing, and integrating with Kled, a provider of licensable data sets for AI training. Story president and product chief Andrea Muttoni will become CEO of the DATA Foundation, while Kled founder Avi Patel will join as chief data officer and adviser. Story founder Seung-yoon Lee will serve as an adviser.

Muttoni said that a year ago Story had "set out to build the IP layer for the internet," but added that "the companies behind the most valuable music, games, and brands guard their most valuable IPs jealously, and the open nature of permissionless licensing clashed with the very control the companies want to keep." He said Story instead found traction with Poseidon, an AI data-processing project it incubated that raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025. Muttoni said that as AI companies "effectively run out of internet to scrape," suppliers of "clean, verified, licensed data at scale are going to become some of the most valuable businesses ever built."

Under the new structure, Poseidon will serve as the protocol's processing layer, while Trace will allow AI companies to verify entire data sets and let contributors enforce their terms. Kled, which pays contributors for tasks such as capturing videos of their surroundings or ambient audio for AI training, will become the "flagship app" on DATA. Lee said that "the most important IP of this era is the data you can't scrape: how a surgeon's hands move, how a robot grips, how people speak, drive, and work in the real world," adding that "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."

The rebrand places Story among a growing group of crypto projects leaning into AI, a list that includes miners that have begun running high-performance compute workloads to lift revenue during the broader crypto downturn.