Story Protocol is now the DATA Foundation as it aims to provide licensable data to AI firms that have “run out of internet to scrape.”
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.
Andrea Muttoni speaking at a conference in Italy in 2024. Source: YouTube
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.
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