Story Protocol Rebrands as DATA Foundation, Pivots to AI for IP Licensing

Story Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain built around intellectual property licensing, is pivoting to artificial intelligence as it rebrands as the DATA Foundation.

The company said Thursday that it will focus on building “essential infrastructure for training AI,” which it called “the most valuable and least solved category of IP.”

“Frontier AI labs have hit a multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck, where the internet has been effectively exhausted for scraping,” the company said. “The remaining supply is either expensive and bespoke or legally undocumented, leaving labs without a way to source data at scale, prove its provenance, or guarantee its quality.”

Story is the latest crypto project to turn to AI as funding and hype for the technology accelerate. Multiple crypto miners have also shifted to running the high-performance computers needed for AI, giving a major boost to their revenue in a crypto bear market.

The company said it is also launching an on-chain registry for AI training data provenance and licensing, called Trace, and is integrating with Kled, a company that provides licensable data sets for AI training.

Story president and product chief Andrea Muttoni will become CEO of the DATA Foundation, and Kled founder Avi Patel will join as chief data officer and adviser.

Muttoni said that a year ago, Story had “set out to build the IP layer for the internet,” but the companies behind the “most valuable music, games, and brands guard their most valuable IPs jealously, and the open nature of permissionless licensing clashed with the very control the companies want to keep.”

He added that Story found an AI data-processing project it incubated, called Poseidon, had shown “immediate traction” with major AI firms and raised a $15 million seed round in July 2025.

Muttoni said that as AI companies “effectively run out of internet to scrape,” those that can supply them with “clean, verified, licensed data at scale are going to become some of the most valuable businesses ever built.”

He added that Poseidon will be “the processing layer of the protocol,” while Trace, the on-chain registry, will allow AI companies to verify entire data sets and allow contributors to enforce their terms.

Muttoni said that Kled, which pays people for tasks such as taking videos of their surroundings or capturing ambient audio to train AI, will also become the “flagship app” on DATA.

“The most important IP of this era is the data you can't scrape: how a surgeon’s hands move, how a robot grips, how people speak, drive, and work in the real world,” said Story founder Seung-yoon Lee, who will serve as an adviser to DATA.

“DATA is where that conviction goes next: an end-to-end network that proves real-world data's origin, licenses it, and pays the people who made it,” he added.

Story’s pivot comes as other major crypto platforms are retooling for AI.

Forbes reported Monday that Web3 gaming powerhouse Immutable is pivoting from gaming to launch an AI marketing platform aimed at game publishers.

Crypto exchange Coinbase announced earlier this month that it is launching a tool that will allow consumer AI models to connect with a user’s exchange account and make trades or execute strategies as it seeks to expand beyond being a platform to buy and sell crypto.