Story, the layer 1 blockchain built to put intellectual property onchain, rebranded as DATA Foundation on Thursday and refocused the project on supplying AI training data, the company said in a blog post and press release. The project is migrating its $IP token to a new token, $DATA, on a one-to-one basis.
The token, now trading as DATA, jumped about 12% over 24 hours, compared with a 0.2% slide in Bitcoin, according to CoinGecko. The relaunch registers 1.1 billion user-contributed records from Kled, a data marketplace that DATA Foundation named its flagship app. Story has raised $140 million in total venture funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto.
The shift is a bet that the most valuable form of intellectual property is now the data used to train AI models. DATA Foundation said frontier labs have largely exhausted the public web available to scrape, leaving them without a way to source data at scale, prove where it came from, or verify its quality. The pivot is also a retreat from the broader IP-licensing thesis Story launched with last year: total value locked on the Story chain has fallen to about $349,000, down from a peak near $45 million in September, according to DefiLlama.
