Story renames to DATA, pivots to the one IP no one's scraped yet 🤖

Story Protocol has rebranded as The DATA Foundation and is shifting its focus from intellectual-property licensing to building infrastructure for AI training data, the company said Thursday. Founder Seung-yoon Lee, who will serve as an adviser, said the pivot came after the project's leadership concluded that the most valuable intellectual property in the current 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." President and product chief Andrea Muttoni becomes CEO of the new foundation, while Kled founder Avi Patel joins as chief data officer and adviser.

The company cited a "multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck" facing frontier AI labs, which it said had "effectively exhausted" the internet for scraping. "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," the company said. Story president and product chief Andrea Muttoni, who becomes CEO of The DATA Foundation, said: "The challenge in AI has shifted from compute and architecture to sourcing and provenance. As the scrapable web fractures, the question for labs now is who is keeping the receipts."

Alongside the rebrand, the foundation launched Trace, an on-chain registry for AI training data provenance and licensing, and integrated Kled, a marketplace that pays people for tasks such as capturing videos of their surroundings or ambient audio for AI training. Kled's licensing rails and contributor receipts will run on DATA Network, with stablecoin payout support, registering 1.5 billion user-contributed records on the platform. Patel said: "Frontier labs have exhausted the supply of high-quality, human-generated public text available on the open web. Suppliers showing data-sourcing provenance will win the next decade of deals, and that's our bet." The foundation said the project it incubated, Poseidon, raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025 from a16z and will become the protocol's "processing layer."

The Story Protocol token, $IP, has been migrated to the Data Network token, $DATA, at a 1:1 ratio with no action required from holders. $DATA, which traded as high as $14.78 when it was $IP, was recently changing hands at $0.349, a roughly 14% gain over 24 hours, though it remains about 98% below its all-time high reached last September and had rebounded 25% from an all-time low of $0.275 earlier this month. The company framed the move as the clearest signal from its 2025 work, with Muttoni writing on X: "2025 wasn't wasted. It gave us lots of signals and learnings. The answer became unambiguous: The form of IP pulling hardest was AI training data."