DATA Foundation emerges as Story Protocol shifts focus to artificial intelligence
The company formerly known as Story Protocol has transformed into the DATA Foundation, positioning itself to supply AI companies with legitimate, licensable datasets as web scraping reaches its limits.
A blockchain layer-1 platform focused on intellectual property licensing known as Story Protocol has undergone a strategic shift toward artificial intelligence, rebranding itself as the DATA Foundation in the process.
On Thursday, the organization announced its new direction would center on developing "essential infrastructure for training AI," describing this domain as "the most valuable and least solved category of IP."
Frontier AI labs have hit a multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck, where the internet has been effectively exhausted 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 transition makes Story one of numerous cryptocurrency initiatives pivoting toward AI amid surging investment and enthusiasm for the sector. Several crypto mining operations have similarly transitioned to operating the powerful computing infrastructure required for artificial intelligence workloads, providing substantial revenue increases during challenging periods for cryptocurrency markets.
According to the announcement, the organization is unveiling Trace, an on-chain registry designed for AI training data provenance and licensing, while simultaneously integrating with Kled, an entity offering licensable datasets specifically for AI training purposes.
In leadership changes, Andrea Muttoni, who previously served as Story's president and product chief, will assume the role of CEO at the DATA Foundation, with Kled's founder Avi Patel coming aboard as chief data officer and adviser.
According to Muttoni, approximately one year ago Story had "set out to build the IP layer for the internet," however the organizations controlling 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."
Muttoni continued by noting that Story discovered an AI data-processing initiative it had incubated, known as Poseidon, demonstrated "immediate traction" among leading AI companies and successfully secured a $15 million seed round in July 2025.
The executive explained that given AI corporations "effectively run out of internet to scrape," organizations capable of delivering "clean, verified, licensed data at scale are going to become some of the most valuable businesses ever built."
Muttoni further elaborated that Poseidon would serve as "the processing layer of the protocol," with Trace, the blockchain-based registry, enabling AI enterprises to authenticate complete data sets while permitting contributors to impose their conditions.
According to Muttoni, Kled, which compensates individuals for activities including recording videos of their environments or gathering ambient sound for AI training purposes, will additionally serve as the "flagship app" within DATA.
In conversation with Cointelegraph, he clarified that all IP and data previously registered on the Story blockchain would be preserved, though the shift to DATA "means that our product and tech roadmap will focus on building a full stack for AI training data moving forward."
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.
Seung-yoon Lee, Story founder
Lee stated, "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 strategic transformation at Story occurs as additional prominent cryptocurrency platforms undergo similar AI-focused restructuring efforts.
On Monday, Forbes published a report indicating that Immutable, a major player in Web3 gaming, has shifted away from gaming to introduce an AI-powered marketing platform targeting game publishers.
Earlier this month, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase revealed plans to introduce a tool enabling consumer AI models to interface with users' exchange accounts and execute trades or implement strategies, representing an effort to diversify beyond its core function as a cryptocurrency trading platform.