Story becomes DATA, token still down 98% — rebrand or rerun? 🪙

Story has rebranded as The DATA Foundation, pivoting from intellectual property licensing to building infrastructure for AI training data. The company announced the transition on Thursday, unveiling DATA Network and an onchain registry called Trace for AI training data provenance and licensing. The launch includes a flagship integration with Kled, described as the world's largest opt-in human data marketplace, registering 1.5 billion user-contributed records on the network.

Andrea Muttoni, Story's president and product chief, has become CEO of The DATA Foundation, while Kled founder Avi Patel joins as chief data officer and adviser. Story founder Seung-yoon Lee will serve as an adviser to DATA. The company cited a "multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck" facing frontier AI labs, stating that "the internet has been effectively exhausted for scraping" and that remaining data supply is "either expensive and bespoke or legally undocumented." The DATA Foundation said its mission is to address sourcing, provenance and quality for AI training data at scale.

The native token of Story Protocol, $IP, has migrated to $DATA at a 1:1 ratio, with no action required from $IP holders. $DATA was recently trading at $0.349, up roughly 14% over 24 hours but down nearly 98% from the token's all-time high of $14.78 reached last September as $IP. The token had rebounded 25% from an all-time low of $0.275 earlier this month. Daily trading volume surged 294% to around $206 million following the rebrand, while onchain transactions rose from 30,830 to 130,580 over the same period.

Muttoni said that in 2025, Story had "set out to build the IP layer for the internet," but that 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." The company instead pointed to Poseidon, an AI data-processing project it incubated that raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025 from a16z, as evidence of market demand. Muttoni added that "labs have effectively run out of internet to scrape" and that suppliers able to deliver "clean, verified, licensed data at scale" stand to build some of the most valuable businesses in the sector.

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 intended to "prove real-world data's origin, licenses it, and pays the people who made it." Patel said that "frontier labs have exhausted the supply of high-quality, human-generated public text available on the open web" and that "suppliers showing data-sourcing provenance will win the next decade of deals." The DATA Foundation stated that Kled will serve as the network's flagship app, with licensing rails and contributor receipts running on DATA Network alongside stablecoin payouts.