Data Network Tokenomics Overview
Full Data Network tokenomics breakdown: DATA token allocation, vesting schedule, supply distribution, unlock dates, and investor terms.
Produced by Tokenomics.com in collaboration with BlackTokenomics.
Full Data Network tokenomics breakdown: DATA token allocation, vesting schedule, supply distribution, unlock dates, and investor terms.
Key questions and answers about Data Network tokenomics.
Data Network token distribution allocates 1,000,000,000 DATA across 4 primary stakeholder groups:
DATA uses variable cliffs and vesting schedules that change depending on the allocation:
25% of the total supply (250,000,000 DATA) is unlocked at TGE, with the tokens split between Community and Foundation.
Data Network has a total supply of 1,000,000,000 DATA, of which 356,644,038 DATA (35.7% of total) is currently circulating.
Total length of the full Data Network emission schedule is 6 years, with 36.51% released in Year 1, while the remaining 63.49% is released over the following 5 years.
48.4% of the Data Network supply is allocated to community focused pools such as Ecosystem & Community and Initial Incentives.
The DATA Foundation is a blockchain project building infrastructure for sourcing, verifying, licensing, and paying for the data used to train AI models. Formerly known as Story Protocol, the project rebranded in June 2026 and migrated its $IP token to $DATA on a 1:1 basis, with no action required from holders. The Story Network was renamed the DATA Network; validator set and existing integrations remained unchanged. The project has raised approximately $140 million in cumulative venture funding led by a16z crypto, and is led by CEO Andrea Muttoni. The pivot followed a structural problem with the original thesis. Story launched in February 2025 as an IP layer for the internet, aiming to bring music, gaming, and entertainment rights onchain. Rights holders proved unwilling to expose valuable assets to permissionless licensing, preferring tight control. Leadership redirected toward what it identified as the least-solved category of IP: AI training data, where labs face both data exhaustion from scraping the public web and mounting legal pressure to prove datasets were collected with consent. The core product is Trace, a public audit and search layer that generates immutable, confidential receipts for individual data contributions. Trace lets AI labs and enterprises verify provenance, consent terms, licensing, and chain of custody at scale without exposing the underlying asset — the data itself stays inside the marketplace and requires a licensed transaction to access. Receipts also enable upstream compensation flowing back to contributors. Around Trace sits an integrated stack. Kled, an opt-in human data marketplace, is the flagship contributor app, registering roughly 1.5 billion user-contributed records on the network; its licensing rails, contributor receipts, and stablecoin payouts run on DATA Network. Poseidon, an AI data processing project incubated by Story and backed by a16z, cleans, normalizes, and scores raw data for authenticity and quality to produce model-ready datasets. Poseidon's contributor app Numo pays users in stablecoins in real time for authenticated submissions, with fiat payout rails running alongside. The DATA Foundation's thesis is that the bottleneck in frontier AI has shifted from compute and architecture to sourcing and provenance — that the most valuable data is what cannot be scraped, and that it will only be created if incentives to produce it are aligned onchain. Development is currently focused on fraud detection to verify that licensed data is verifiably human, original, and legally compliant.
