Vana Makes Reads Pay: Vega Upgrade Routes 60% of Data Fees Straight to Stakers 📊

The Vana Foundation said expanded staking as part of the Vega upgrade to the Vana network is complete, with staking now operating across three pools that each carry a 5 per cent operator commission. Stakers earn rewards from network fees, which accrue to the staked position and may be claimed as they accrue. Existing staked positions can be moved into one of the three pools in a single transaction at stake.vana.org by midnight UTC on 31 October 2026, after which unmoved positions no longer earn rewards. Principal can be withdrawn at any time with no deadline.

Under the network's fee model, an application that reads a person's data with a granted permission pays one cent per scope read. Fees are allocated by protocol rule: 60 per cent to stakers through staking pools, 20 per cent to the purchase and burn of VANA, and 20 per cent to ecosystem development. A public dashboard at token.vana.org reports network reads, fee income, buybacks, burns and token supply, with each buyback and burn published alongside its transaction hash. Total VANA supply and release schedules remain unchanged.

The Foundation also published the paper "VANA: The Asset Behind an Open Data Economy", which sets out the VANA token economics. Applications on the network have produced 2,937,447 verified reads to date as of 28 September 2026. "Every read of a person's data on the network is a paid transaction, and the fees pay the node operators and stakers who make that movement possible," said Art Abal, Managing Director of the Vana Foundation. "The split is written into the protocol, and every figure is published on chain."

Vana is an open network for personal data portability whose standard, the Personal Data Portability Protocol, was contributed to Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust as a Community Specification. The paper and the whitepaper addendum "The Vega Upgrade: Data Portability and Transformations" are available at token.vana.org, and the release is dated George Town, Cayman Islands, 29 September 2026.