Written by: Jesse, core contributor of Biteye
Over the past two decades, personal data has gradually evolved into the core currency of the Internet economy. While enjoying free services, users often inadvertently transfer control of their data to platforms. These platforms have gained huge economic benefits through targeted advertising and data transactions.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, private data has become a key resource to promote an AI-driven world. However, there are two significant contradictions in this ecosystem: individuals, the producers of data, often cannot obtain financial returns from it; and AI researchers face difficulties in obtaining high-quality data sets.
The early conception of the Internet was to build an open ecosystem where users could fully control their own data. However, with the popularization of cloud infrastructure and the convenience of free services, platforms have gradually monopolized the management of digital identities and built a centralized data economy system.
This situation obviously deviates from the original design intention of the Internet.
1. Data ownership and its importance
Today, two forces of change are challenging the existing data monopoly: on the one hand, the rapid development of AI has led to an exponential increase in the value of personal data; on the other hand, the rise of decentralized technology has provided individuals with new tools to regain control of their data. Vana is committed to leading this transformation and, as the first open protocol designed specifically for data sovereignty, has ushered in a new era of data economy.
Vana is an EVM-compatible AI public chain that focuses on the management and governance of user sovereign data. Its core goal is to build a distributed network that allows users to not only own and govern the data they contribute, but also directly profit from data assetization.
Vana not only gives users control over their data, but also provides developers with compliant and high-quality data resources, building a win-win ecosystem.
Vana uses private key permission management to ensure the portability and control of data, challenges the monopoly of centralized platforms in the Web2 era, builds a decentralized data market, eliminates intermediaries, and creates fair value for all participants.
User-oriented
Data Monetization: Vana allows users to extract data from centralized platforms and aggregate it into decentralized data collectives. By participating in decentralized data DAOs, users can obtain economic rewards for data sharing.
Sovereignty and portability: Users not only control their data, but can also unlock diverse value, such as personalized AI services or data insights.
For developers and researchers
High-quality data access: Vana provides user-owned and transparently governed data sets, significantly improving the efficiency of the data market.
AI model optimization: Developers can use compliant and portable datasets to drive AI innovation.
Towards the overall ecosystem
Efficient data market: Create a fair and efficient data ecosystem through interest alignment and disintermediation.
Driving responsible innovation: ensuring data contributors are fairly rewarded and promoting ethical and responsible data use in the AI economy.
Through Vana's technology and ecological design, the value of personal data has shifted from passive to active. Vana not only challenges the centralized monopoly of the Web2 era, continues the network effect of centralized platforms, but also brings a fairer, more transparent and efficient future to the data economy.
2. How does DataDAO better empower AI Agents?
Unlike traditional digital assets, the economic value of data relies on controlled access. Once data is made public, its market value will quickly depreciate. Traditional blockchains are not suitable for processing private data due to their emphasis on public verification. Vana successfully solves this problem by combining private data hosting with public ownership.
Vana maintains a global state network to ensure transparency of data ownership, quality verification, and revenue distribution. Its core functions include:
Data ownership record: Encrypted proof of user’s ownership of data.
Access rights management: define data access conditions and authorization scope.
Verification and certification: Ensure the quality, authenticity and integrity of data and metadata.
On-chain DataDAO contract and token balance: enabling governance and economic rights distribution.
Data is always encrypted and stored in a secure environment or on the user's personal server. The platform controls access rights programmatically and ensures that the benefits are returned to the data creators. Users can export their own data, protect it with encryption, and join data collectives called DataDAOs. Through these collectives, users negotiate the commercial use of data with researchers or developers to ensure that contributors receive reasonable returns.
Each DataDAO customizes the Proof of Contribution based on its data type and measures the value of data through the following indicators (including but not limited to):
Financial data: transaction accuracy, record completeness and consistency.
Social media data: user interaction levels, account activity time, and content engagement.
Health data: data freshness, measurement frequency, and device accuracy.
Data verification is done by the Satya Network, which consists of trusted execution environments (TEEs) that provide data quality verification while protecting privacy. In addition, some DataDAOs use zero-knowledge proofs (zk-proofs) to further enhance privacy and security.
When developers purchase data access rights, contributors receive proportional compensation through governance tokens. This mechanism ensures that data contributors receive continuous economic returns from data usage. Contributors have decision-making power and participate in the governance of data usage. The data market achieves fair pricing and improves efficiency by incentivizing high-quality data contributions.
Vana provides decentralized and highly liquid Data Liquidity Pools (DLPs). Users maintain encrypted control over data while collectively sharing it. Mapping DataDAO's non-homogeneous data into tradable tokens through a smart contract-driven mechanism to achieve market-oriented data flow is an innovation of Vana in the history of crypto development. Whenever new tokenized assets appear in the market, market attention and funds will simply follow. From a long-term historical perspective, NFT introduced tokenization into art, and the unit price of millions of dollars for artworks such as Bored Ape and Art Blocks drove investors crazy. From the perspective of innovation in this cycle, Pendle's tokenization of yields has stimulated the activity of the DeFi market and has become the most dazzling DeFi protocol in 2024. Pioneers in each asset class can enjoy the most premium. This time, the new tokenization innovation comes from Vana's exploration of the potential of unstructured data. This may also be a consideration for major exchanges to launch Vana at the first time.
2025 will undoubtedly be the year of AI Agent. AI Agent will be the next external form of dApp. The significance of its transformation is similar to our jump from desktop to mobile devices in the past decade. But it will happen faster and on a larger scale. Data is the new oil in the AI era. This also makes Vana's story interesting. Because the performance of AI models directly depends on the quality of their training data, not just the innovation of computing power or model architecture. This reality is redefining the priority of AI development: data quality has become the core bottleneck of AI progress.
AI agents are facing a common challenge: useless input leads to useless output. Without high-quality training data, even the most sophisticated AI agents cannot really work. This shows us the importance of building a trusted data foundation.
This is exactly what makes Vana so important. Vana is not just a regular AI project, it is trying to pave the way for user data ownership and high-quality AI data. Through DataDAO, users can stake $VANA tokens to support the creation of high-quality datasets. This model incentivizes users to participate in the shaping of AI training data.
For AI Agent, the importance of this mechanism is self-evident: higher quality training data directly translates into stronger AI performance. The community-driven curation mechanism also ensures the diversity and reliability of data sources, providing a guarantee for the sustainability of the model.
Today, ai16z is in the spotlight because of the resources a16z has behind it, while Virtual has become a hot AI Agent Launchpool with the liquidity of Base. Vana has received a total of $25 million in financing from top venture capital firms such as Coinbase Venture, Paradigm, and Polychain, and its resources are not inferior to ai16z and Virtual. DataDAO built on Vana requires VANA tokens to participate, which is essentially similar to a Launchpool focusing on the data track. Investors stake Vana to the DataDAO they are optimistic about, and can receive staking rewards while supporting its development. In the future, these DataDAOs may airdrop to Vana stakers who support their development (dFusion AI Protocol has announced a 1:1 token airdrop to Vana stakers). Each DataDAO needs to have a minimum of $10,000 of $VANA staked to receive rewards, further promoting Vana's deflation. AI Agent is undoubtedly the hottest topic at the moment, and the most critical input data that affects the performance of AI Agent will also be discovered by investors as the market becomes more educated. At that time, Vana's value discovery will just begin.
Through the innovative design of DataDAO and DLPs, Vana reshapes the infrastructure of the data economy while promoting the fair circulation of high-quality data and creating a more responsible ecosystem for AI innovation.
3. Value Analysis of Vana
In addition to the above discussion about Vana's pioneering tokenized data in Web3, providing high-quality data for AI Agents, and the value of DataDAO Launchpool, we can also jump out of the Web3 framework and look at Vana's position in the entire Internet technology ecosystem. Justine Moore, a16z partner, has published a list of AI projects worth paying attention to, and Vana is the only Web3 AI project among them (even though a16z did not invest in Vana).
AI = data + model + computing power. Currently, the model track is an oligopoly competition between Open AI and Anthropic, and the computing power track is a monopoly of Nvidia. Hyperbolic uses distributed computing power to challenge. The data track is the core and foundation of AI and is the new oil in the AI era. Without data, the express train of AI cannot start. At present, no company has an absolute leading position in the data track.
In the age of the internet, digital footprints reveal more than self-knowledge: Algorithms analyze subtle clues such as Facebook likes or GPS records to predict personality traits, income levels and even mental health more accurately than friends and relatives. Seemingly trivial actions, such as the choice of time to shop or the tone of a social media post, can unintentionally reveal our emotions, preferences, and even deeper truths. Personalized information push based on digital data can more effectively target personality traits, such as helping low-income groups significantly improve their savings ability. Therefore, it is important to tap into the potential of data.
In Web3 projects, owning your data is no longer an attractive topic. What they care about is how to bring real benefits to users by mining the value of data. The profits of Web2 technology companies actually come from the control of data, such as Google's precision advertising and Ant CNC's big data finance. Reddit has earned more than 200 million US dollars by selling data of user-generated content to AI training. Many Web2 technology companies are essentially big data companies. Google's parent company Alphabet has a market value of 2.39 trillion, Facebook 1.15 trillion, Twitter 55.68 billion, and Reddit 29.6 billion. On Vana's platform, researchers can not only obtain data from Twitter or Reddit, but also obtain high-value sensitive data such as health and finance without violating privacy. With the network effect gradually spreading under the incentive of tokens, it is foreseeable that Vana will become a source center for high-quality data, and more and more researchers will access data from here, and AI will no longer be controlled by a few elites. Vana, which promotes the democratization of AI, has a revolutionary significance for AI that is no less than the impact of Bitcoin on traditional finance.
On the other hand, Vana treats unstructured data as tradable financial assets, and builds secondary spot markets, lending markets, options, and futures contracts around DLP. This has opened up a whole new asset class, both in traditional finance and DeFi. This is not possible in Nasdaq and the Chicago Mercantile Market. Because there are no Web2 large technology companies that will revolutionize themselves and give up core data profits. Once the data is made public, the value will drop sharply or cause privacy issues. Not to mention the complicated KYC process of centralized exchanges. And these pain points can be solved well by Vana, and only Vana can do it at present. Any new asset usually brings hype bubbles, just as the recent new narratives DeSci and AI Agent have caused people's FOMO. The rise in the total market value of DLP will attract new people to care about and participate in these DataDAOs. New users will bring new opinions on how to improve the user experience, improve the operating mechanism of DataDAOs, and make the entire ecosystem stronger.
The reason why Silicon Valley has been able to create so many high-value companies that change the world is that it is betting on the vision of a better life. Compared with Internet technology companies, Vana is still small, but its mission is big. Cryptocurrency gives investors around the world the opportunity to participate in early potential projects. At present, Vana's circulating market value is only 500 million US dollars.
4. Vana Eco Flywheel
The VANA token is the cornerstone of this economic system, with functions including network security, transaction fees, DLP staking, data access currency, and protocol governance.
When AI companies access data, they use VANA tokens to purchase and burn DLP-specific tokens. This burn mechanism creates a direct economic link between network usage and token value, ensuring value flows back to data contributors and the broader network ecosystem.
In addition, the incentive structure further drives adoption of the protocol, such as promoting ecosystem activity by rewarding outstanding DataDAOs. To date, the Vana Foundation has supported 12 active DataDAOs and received more than 300 accelerator applications. These DAOs cover a variety of application scenarios from Twitter data, synthetic data to genetic data and browser data, demonstrating the broad potential of the Vana protocol.
Vana values community power and has allocated 44% of its tokens to the community, of which 20.3% have been released at TGE. It is one of the few projects in 2024 that has benefited participants in a short period of time. The tokens allocated to investors will not be unlocked in the first year, and will be unlocked in three years, further demonstrating investors' confidence in its technology and model. The team received 18.81% of the tokens, which will be locked in the first year and then unlocked in four years. This distribution method ensures that the team has the motivation to continue building Vana and provide guarantees for the long-term development of the ecosystem.
Figure 1: Token distribution mechanism
Figure 2: Token unlocking process
5. Current participation methods
Vana is implementing a DataDAO reward system designed to ensure fair value distribution and incentivize high-quality data contributions. The reward system rewards the top 16 best-performing DataDAOs on a 21-day cycle. Rewards are distributed proportionally to each DataDAO participant's stake and multipliers, ensuring that only the most valuable and trusted datasets are rewarded, driving continued optimization and innovation in the ecosystem.
Vana has allocated 15% of the total $VANA token supply for the DataDAO rewards program, which will be released gradually over three years. The specific allocation structure is as follows:
50% to support the top 16 DataDAO $VANA stakers.
50% goes into the DataDAO treasury to fund operations, incentivize data contributions, and increase staking rewards.
This reward structure ensures that the most valuable and contributing DataDAOs receive continued support and rewards while promoting the healthy development of the entire ecosystem.
To encourage long-term commitment, Vana introduced a staking multiplier mechanism. The longer participants stake, the higher the multiplier they receive, and eventually the multiplier will reach its maximum value after 63 consecutive days of staking. This mechanism increases the weight of shares in the reward calculation, making the incentives of stakers more aligned with those of DataDAO, and further promoting the sustainable development of the system.
How to participate in the DataDAO ecosystem?
Step 1: Explore the data center
Visit datahub.vana.com to view all registered DataDAOs eligible for rewards. Data Hub is the gateway to enter, understand, and interact with the Vana ecosystem. Here you can view the provided datasets, learn about the contributors and their verification mechanisms, and compare the performance and ranking of different DataDAOs.
Step 2: Stake $VANA Tokens
After selecting a DataDAO, stake $VANA tokens to show your support. If the DataDAO ranks in the top 16, stakers will receive rewards. Each DataDAO needs to reach a minimum staked threshold of 10,000 $VANA to receive rewards.
Step 3: Track and optimize
Use the dashboard to monitor staked amounts, multiplier growth, and the performance of supported DataDAOs.
Step 4: Earn and reinvest
As DataDAO earns rewards, users will receive shares based on the staked amount and multiplier. Users will reinvest their income to increase their influence and returns in future cycles or cash out appropriately based on financial needs.
Currently, the annualized rate of return (APY) for staking VANA is as high as 273.58%. For users with low risk preferences, they can earn contract income while performing contract hedging to earn additional funding rates. In the future, Vana stakers may receive token airdrops from Data DAO sub-projects.
Vana's DataDAO ecosystem already has many interesting innovative projects. Users can obtain Vana's token incentives by participating in these DataDAOs.
Featured Project Introduction
1.@VanaTensor
Powered by Vana, @VanaTensor provides users with high-quality synthetic data and rewards contributors for sharing verified, valuable datasets.
2.@datapiggy
DataPig is an AI platform focused on transforming transaction data into meaningful insights. Through its DataDAO ecosystem, users can transform their transaction data into valuable assets and participate in a growing on-chain economy.
3.@Volaraxyz
Volara is committed to transforming users' Twitter data into valuable assets, providing data owners with more opportunities for utilization.
4.@sixgpt
SixGPT supports synthetic data generation for training AI models and is working on improving data generation capabilities by leveraging real human chat data provided by @flur_protocol to further enhance the intelligence of its platform.
5.@vChars_AI
vChars AI is able to convert Telegram data into personalized AI characters, allowing users to create customized virtual characters that interact with themselves.
6.@OpenyourMindDAO
MindDAO is the first decentralized autonomous organization exploring how Web3 influences emotions, with the goal of creating the world's largest collection of user-owned mental health data.
7.Auto DLP
Auto DLP is a DataDAO by @DLPLabs that allows drivers to connect their @DIMO_Network accounts to earn rewards by securely sharing data and driving automotive-related AI innovation.
8.@dFusionAI
How dFusion’s knowledge base allows users to securely monetize chat data while maintaining full ownership and control.
9.@primedatadao
How to help users contribute and earn $VANA from Amazon shopping data
10.@NakaMining
The first genetic data collection on Vana is revolutionizing health sciences through community-driven breakthroughs. Users can contribute genetic data.
11.@Finquarium
Traders can contribute trading data to the exchange and receive rewards.
In addition to DataDAO, Vana has also launched a Uniswap V3 fork for data trading, Data DEX, which allows users to buy and sell VANA tokens and DLP tokens. Traders and liquidity providers can use powerful analytical tools to help them make informed decisions and optimize strategies.
As an AI public chain focusing on data economy, Vana will have more ecological protocols built around DLP in the future.
6. Looking to the future
The launch of the Vana mainnet marks an important turning point. For the first time, users have the opportunity to challenge the data monopoly of tech giants, take back control of their data, and reshape the AI economy. By decentralizing and collectively sharing data, individuals can provide datasets that are comparable in scale and quality to or even exceed those of centralized platforms.
Vana's vision is not just about financial compensation, but about redefining how data is owned, shared, and monetized. In this new paradigm, data flows freely, sovereignty always belongs to individuals, and AI models are trained on user-owned data - and contributors benefit directly from it.
Vana is building a self-sovereign Internet and laying the foundation for an open and fair data economy. New targets in new tracks can often obtain market premiums. After the New Year, funds are expected to return to the market. When AI is on the rise again, Vana may take advantage of the opportunity to take off again.
