Story Protocol trades Storybook IP for AI training, becomes the DATA Foundation

Story Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain originally built around intellectual property licensing, is rebranding to the DATA Foundation as it pivots its focus to artificial intelligence. The company said Thursday that it will concentrate on building what it described as "essential infrastructure for training AI," calling it "the most valuable and least solved category of IP."

The rebrand reflects a broader industry shift, as multiple crypto miners have also moved into running high-performance computers for AI, providing a significant revenue boost during a prolonged crypto bear market. According to the company, "Frontier AI labs have hit a multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck, where the internet has been effectively exhausted for scraping," leaving remaining datasets either expensive and bespoke or legally undocumented, and leaving labs unable to source data at scale, prove its provenance, or guarantee its quality.

As part of the transition, the company is launching Trace, an on-chain registry for AI training data provenance and licensing, and is integrating with Kled, a platform that provides licensable datasets 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.

Muttoni explained that a year ago Story had "set out to build the IP layer for the internet," but found that companies "guard their most valuable IPs jealously, and the open nature of permissionless licensing clashed with the very control the companies want to keep." The company said an AI data-processing project it had incubated, called Poseidon, showed "immediate traction" with major AI firms and raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025.

The DATA Foundation also announced that it is developing an on-chain registry that will allow AI companies to verify entire datasets and allow contributors to enforce their terms. Muttoni noted that as AI companies "effectively run out of internet to scrape," those that can supply them with "clean, verified, licensed data at scale are going to become some of the most valuable businesses ever built." He added that Poseidon will serve as "the processing layer of the protocol," while Trace will function as the on-chain registry.

Story founder Seung-yoon Lee, who will serve as an adviser to DATA, said: "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." He added: "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." Story's pivot comes as other major crypto platforms are retooling for AI.