Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Nan Zhi (@Assassin_Malvo)

Today, after the decentralized AI data protocol Vana announced that it had received $5 million in financing led by Coinbase, its Telegram game Data Hero was widely promoted on the X platform, and the community promoted it as "the only AI project invested by Paradigm". What is Vana's actual core business? Can it be interacted with to obtain airdrops at present? Odaily will explain in this article.

Project Background

Project business interpretation

Vana is a distributed network designed for user-owned private data. It consists of an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain where users own, manage and profit from the data and AI models they contribute through an organization called "Data DAO".

Vana’s core component is called the “data liquidity network”, which enables users’ data to be used like a financial asset in a flexible and modular way. Vana achieves this through two mechanisms:

  • The proof of contribution mechanism can verify the value of private data while protecting privacy.

  • A non-custodial data mechanism ensures that data is only used for approved operations.

Vana’s Data Liquidity Network creates a trustless environment where data can be securely tokenized, traded, and used for AI training without compromising user privacy or control.

Vana's key features and operational processes include:

  • Users upload data through the Data DAO, and the underlying model DAO will assess the value of each person’s data contribution and reward them with model-specific tokens;

  • Contributors are able to take ownership of the AI ​​models they helped create;

  • It has a flexible incentive mechanism and launches a variety of tokens such as dataset-specific tokens and AI model-specific tokens;

  • The top 16 data DAOs will receive token incentives;

Vana's business can be simply summarized as follows: users upload their private data such as Facebook, Instagram and Reddit to the Vana protocol. Vana ensures that this data is kept private through mechanism design and is used for AI training, and users receive incentives based on the uploaded content.

Financing

Vana has raised a total of $25 million, including:

In September 2024, it completed a strategic financing of US$5 million, led by Coinbase, and other participating companies were not disclosed.

In December 2022, it completed a financing of US$18 million, led by Paradigm, with participation from former Paradigm partner Casey Caruso and Polychain Capital. This round of financing was not announced to the public until April 2024.

Vana has also raised $2 million in funding, but has not disclosed details.

Project Progress

There are already a number of mature data DAOs in the Vana ecosystem, such as the Reddit Data DAO, which currently has 140,000 Reddit users joined and has trained the first user-owned AI model. There is also the Twitter data DAO Volara created by Bittensor miners, and the VC-backed LinkedIn Data DAO.

GPT Data DAO Example

Users can choose to submit data to different DAOs. Here we choose GPT Data DAO as an example. Please note that this is the testnet stage. The official said that "points obtained on the testnet have no value and do not represent future airdrops." Whether to conduct batch interaction depends on the user's own judgment.

  • Link to the GPT Data DAO website and enter the wallet address you linked to once into ChatGPT

  • Export the chat history with ChatGPT through ChatGPT's Settings-Data Management-Export.

  • ChatGPT will send your chat history to your registered email address. After downloading, upload it on the upload page.

Other Projects

In addition to Data DAO, Vana launched the Telegram game Vana Data Hero on July 30. The only way to play is to keep clicking on the screen to get points. After the announcement of the financing led by Coinbase today, the link was widely circulated on the X platform. The official called this game "DataDAO Pre-Mine", but the specific participation value is not yet clear.