Story Protocol signalled a strategic rebrand to DATA Foundation and repositioned its offering around an AI-native licensing stack, today June 25, designed to make intellectual property traceable and monetizable on-chain. The move follows the launch of an IP Portal in open beta and builds on the project’s claim to address a gap in rights‑cleared, uncrawlable training data for advanced AI models—an opportunity the organisation frames against an $80 trillion global IP market.
— Andrea | Devrelius (@devrelius) June 25, 2026
The transition is more an evolution of public identity than a simple corporate rename: public channels and site footers now reference DATA Foundation, while the blockchain and core technology continue to be described as Story Protocol. The organisation has raised $140 million across three rounds, including an $80 million Series B, and says it will use a purpose‑built Layer‑1 (Cosmos SDK, CometBFT) with EVM compatibility to host programmable IP primitives.
¿What is Next for DATA Foundation?
Story Protocol is getting a makeover. The project announced a complete rebranding to The DATA Foundation, a transformation that includes renaming its token from $IP to $DATA and the Story Network blockchain itself to DATA Network. More than just a branding adjustment, this is a strategic shift toward one of the most in-demand sectors in the tech industry: data for artificial intelligence.
The decision comes after a year in which Story sought to become an infrastructure layer for on-chain intellectual property. During that period, it made significant strides, such as the tokenization of music rights in partnership with Aria and the onboarding of millions of artists through Magma. However, the company acknowledges that major entertainment and video game companies were unwilling to adopt an open licensing model for their most valuable assets.
The turning point came with Poseidon, a project incubated by Story focused on data processing for AI. According to the foundation, the initiative saw strong demand from AI labs and secured a $15 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Moving forward, DATA will seek to become the infrastructure that enables the recording, verification, processing, and licensing of data used to train AI models. The premise is simple: companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google need verifiable data with traceability and clear usage rights—something that remains difficult to obtain at scale today.
To this end, the ecosystem will incorporate tools such as Trace, a public auditing platform that records the complete history of the data, and Poseidon, a network specialized in cleaning, validating, and structuring information before it reaches buyers.
The foundation also announced partnerships with companies in the sector, including Kled, one of the largest marketplaces for user-contributed data. This integration alone will add more than 1.5 billion data assets to the DATA Network.
For current users, the migration from $IP to $DATA will be on a 1:1 basis and will not require any immediate action. The network will continue to operate without interruption while the foundation focuses on its new mission: to become the trust layer for the AI data economy.
