Story Protocol rebrands as DATA Foundation to target AI training market

The shift follows internal challenges with major rights holders who were hesitant to expose proprietary assets to permissionless licensing. Andrea Muttoni, who transitions from product chief to CEO, noted that large music and gaming firms preferred tighter control over their intellectual property. The new foundation will instead focus on data that cannot be harvested via web scraping, such as physical movement, speech patterns, and real-world workplace activity.

To support this, the project is launching Trace, an on-chain registry designed to track data provenance and enforce licensing terms. The ecosystem now integrates Kled, an app that compensates contributors for real-world tasks like recording ambient audio or video, and Poseidon, an AI data-processing layer that previously secured $15 million in seed funding. Market response remained bullish despite broader economic headwinds; the newly renamed DATA token jumped 16.7% to $0.35, bucking a wider crypto market decline triggered by U.S. inflation data.