Story Protocol is no more. The decentralized intellectual property network is now the Data Network, pivoting hard into AI training data — and its IP token has cratered 98% from its all-time high.
The newly renamed Data Foundation launched Trace, an on-chain registry for AI training data, plus an integration with Kled, a human data marketplace. The native IP token migrates 1:1 to DATA.
CEO Andrea Muttoni didn’t sugarcoat the shift. “The answer became unambiguous: the form of IP pulling hardest was AI training data,” he said. AI labs have, effectively, run out of internet to scrape. What’s left is either expensive and bespoke, or legally risky and undocumented.
The pivot follows a signal from Poseidon, an AI data processing project Story worked on that raised $15 million from a16z. That was the clearest sign that training data, not IP tokenization, was where real demand sat.
DATA, which once traded as high as $14.78 as IP, recently changed hands at $0.349 — down nearly 98% from its September peak, though it’s rebounded 25% from an all-time low of $0.275 earlier this month.
“2025 wasn’t wasted,” Muttoni posted on X. “It gave us lots of signals and learnings.” The Data Network now tracks over a billion data records, aiming to become the trust layer for all AI training data.
