Original author: Bingwa
Reprinted by: Luke, Mars Finance
Preface
Vana: Derived from the word "Nirvana", dedicated to breaking free from the chains of giants!
In today's era where data is a "gold mine", personal data is being grabbed and commercialized free of charge by technology giants.
This unfairness prompted the birth of Vana, our protagonist today. Its goal is to break the existing data economic model, allowing users to regain ownership and control of their own data, and then use this data to train an AI model, allowing users to directly benefit from their own data and become the masters of their own data.
This article will deeply analyze the technical architecture, innovation mechanism and development status of the Vana project.
1. Project Background: The Beginning of Data Democratization
Data Monopoly Status
In the Web2 era, platform companies achieve commercialization by collecting user data for free. For example, Toutiao, owned by ByteDance, can generate tens of billions of RMB in advertising revenue a year. Even if content creators receive a certain share of the platform, the core interests are still firmly controlled by the company.
In the Web3 era, this phenomenon has intensified. Reddit earned $203 million in 2024 alone through data licensing agreements with AI companies, but users who contributed content to the platform received almost no benefits. This imbalance prompted the birth of Vana.
Vana's Vision
Vana's goal is to break the existing data economic model, allowing users to regain ownership and control of their own data, train AI models with data, gain direct benefits from it, and become the masters of their own data.
2. Founding Team: Pioneer Force of MIT
Vana was co-founded by two Filipino entrepreneurs, Anna Kazlauskas and Art Abal:
Anna Kazlauskas: With a background in computer science and economics, she participated in Ethereum mining in the early days and has conducted data research at international financial institutions. She also served as a policy advisor to the Prime Minister of East Timor and designed a legal system that ensures equality for all.
Art Abal: Master of Public Policy from Harvard University, previously led innovative data collection methods at Appen, an AI training data provider.
The two had worked together on the TOCA project, which provided low-income people in the Philippines with the opportunity to be paid for contributing their data, laying the foundation for the development of Vana.
3. Vana’s core innovation and technical architecture
1. Data democratization solutions
Vana's proposal includes:
Data autonomy: Users have full control over their personal data and can choose not to upload their data to the chain, retaining the right to final use.
Value redistribution: Users gain economic rewards by contributing data, and the token mechanism enables value flow, creating a user-centered data economic model.
2. Data Liquidity Pool (DLP)
DLP is Vana’s core technological innovation and can be understood as a “digital warehouse” that securely stores user data. Its key features include:
Data ownership belongs to users, and supports the issuance of governance tokens.
Contributors are rewarded with tokens based on data quality, realizing the "data mining" model.
Vana has developed 300 data DAOs, processing 1.7 million transactions per day and attracting more than 1.3 million users. For example, the Reddit Data DAO attracted 140,000 users within a week of its launch.
3. Contribution Proof Mechanism and Data Storage Solution
To ensure data quality, Vana introduces a multi-dimensional contribution proof mechanism and adopts an encrypted storage solution:
The user's original data will not be uploaded to the chain, but can be stored in a personal cloud, with only encrypted links and hash values submitted.
Verification nodes access data through authorization and perform multi-node weighted assessment of data quality.
4. Nagoya Consensus
Drawing on Bittensor's Yuma consensus, the Nagoya consensus improves the fairness of the system by validating the mutual scoring of nodes. Its core features include:
Multi-node evaluation of data quality;
Periodic scoring is done every 3 hours (1800 blocks).
4. Financing: Favored by top institutions
Vana has received the favor of well-known capital and has raised $25 million so far:
Seed round: Polychain led the investment with $2 million;
Strategic round: Coinbase Ventures led the investment with $5 million;
Round A: Paradigm led the investment with $18 million.
The investment lineup includes Coinbase Ventures, Casey Caruso, Packy McCormick, etc. Former partners of Paradigm also participated in the investment, reflecting the industry's high recognition of Vana's model.
5. Development Status: The Dawn of the Data Economy
Vana has completed a three-phase development plan:
Initial technical architecture construction;
The rapid growth of Data DAO, with the number of users exceeding one million;
The mainnet and tokens will be launched soon, and the foundation was established yesterday.
Dataset construction
Vana is committed to creating an unprecedented AI dataset with data breadth and quality far exceeding GPT-3, laying a solid foundation for future large-scale AI applications.
Media coverage and community influence
As the first Filipino-led project to go beyond the internet, Vana has received widespread media attention and, through a series of innovative practices, has provided a new perspective for individuals to regain control of their data.
VI. Conclusion: Redefining the value of data
Regardless of whether Vana can ultimately fully realize its vision, its concept of "data democratization" will surely bring profound inspiration to the industry. By giving users data autonomy, Vana has fired the first shot in challenging technology giants and also provided us with an important opportunity to re-examine the fairness of the data economy.
In the new data-driven world, the ownership and value distribution of personal data may be ushering in a real revolution.