Vana’s Next Phase: Accelerating the AI Data Revolution
Upcoming Mainnet and Token Launch
Today, the newly established Vana Foundation announced the upcoming launch of Vana mainnet, a new network that will usher in a new era for user-owned data. VANA, the native token on the Vana network, will play a central role in facilitating data validation, governance, and access to support the network’s privacy-preserving and permissionless system for user-owned data.
1. Claim Your Stake in the Data Economy
Data is an asset. This is not a metaphor or a catchy slogan, it’s the truth. Your data is sold for hundreds of millions of dollars by corporate platforms, bought by AI companies, and used to train models that are valued in the billions of dollars. Reddit sold user data to Google for $200 million for LLM training. Companies like Meta, Twitter, and more utilize user data to train their own AI models. Even Newscorp brokered a deal with OpenAI, estimated to be worth as much as $250 million, for their journalists’ articles to be included in model training data. And these are just the publicly-reported cases: go to the documentation of major AI companies and they all allude to leveraging third-party data providers for model training.
Training data is valuable. It also exists in walled gardens, where platforms exist as the sole brokers and beneficiaries of its upside. As a salient example, when 23andme was assessing a sale to third-party buyers, it was revealed that all of the genetic data of its 15 million customers would be sold along with the company. In other words, 23andMe could sell users’ data without their consent, and be the sole entity to profit from the sale. This trend needs to and can be stopped. Vana is leading the charge to change this.
Vana breaks down the walled gardens of large tech platforms. We believe users should have the tools to break down these walled gardens and reclaim what’s rightfully theirs. Vana is a network that unlocks data as an asset class, and allows users to own their data. Participants in the Vana network can join DataDAOs, which allow them to export personal, encrypted data and pool that data with other members of the DAO. This data can be valued – and directly monetized – when developers use these decentralized datasets to create AI models and data-intensive applications.
Vana has a distinct advantage over centralized data providers: quality data for AI models is a scarce resource. The training data for GPT-3 is roughly 0.3 trillion words. At scale, aggregated data exports from users of Vana could far surpass this: at 100 million users, with data exports from Instagram, Reddit, Messenger, Google, Twitter, Vana could provide 453 trillion words, leading to data quality and breadth that far surpasses any existing model today.
You have more leverage than you realize.
2. Exercise Your Rights to Data Ownership
Existing privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA already guarantee users' legal ownership of their data. Vana helps users exercise these existing rights to extract their data from platforms. When you export your data to a DataDAO, you contribute it to a Data Liquidity Pool (DLP) where each user controls their own data, and is remunerated for its quality and value via a Proof-of-Contribution mechanism.
Crucially, because DAOs building on the Vana network are decentralized, contributing individual data to them and voting on how the data is used via governance makes users of the Vana protocol holistically compliant with data regulations. Additionally, Vana is a network with an ecosystem of decentralized nodes, making it censorship-resistant and not subject to classification as a data processor.
Vana is the first decentralized network designed to manage ownership of private, personal data. Because DataDAOs built on Vana are decentralized, contributing individual data to them and voting on how the data is used does not violate the terms and conditions of major tech platforms.
Historically, users have had to trust companies with their data, storing it in their centralized databases for use in an application. With Vana, users maintain full control of their data.
DataDAOs: Pooling Data for Power
One user’s data on its own has limited value - but data becomes powerful when combined. Having multiple DataDAOs on the same network creates powerful network effects. When a user contributes their health history data to one DataDAO and their genetic data to another, these datasets can be linked through their shared identity on Vana. This cross-DAO data enrichment makes each dataset more valuable - for instance, combining social media activity with purchase history could provide unprecedented insights into consumer behavior, all while maintaining user privacy and control.
Privacy-Preserving Data Access
Vana is designed to preserve user privacy. To upload personal data to a DataDAO, you can either be paid in token rewards up-front by a DataDAO, which then encrypts your data with a key that is controlled by the DataDAO, and can vote to use the collective’s data to train a model. The other option is to keep your data in your own personal storage, and only decrypt that data when a data buyer pays to access it; they then train their model in a secure environment.
Privacy isn't just about user preference - it's fundamental to the economics of Vana. If companies could copy pooled data, they could resell it, undermining its value. This is why Vana enables "data renting" - allowing AI developers to train models on valuable datasets within secure environments, without the data ever leaving DataDAO control. The Vana network serves as the decentralized record of these permissions and access rights, incentivizing adoption while preserving data sovereignty.
3. Early Adoption: Vana’s thriving DataDAO Ecosystem
DataDAOs can evolve around any data source. We’ve already seen a variety of ecosystems form. Since launching its developer testnet three months ago, Vana has gained remarkable traction: 1.3 million users, over 300 DataDAOs, and 1.7 million daily transactions. The ecosystem is rapidly expanding, with sixteen DataDAOs currently incubating projects across health, social media, and prediction markets, while 130+ applicants compete for spots in Cohort 2.
What kind of DataDAOs are we seeing? The Reddit DataDAO stands as a flagship example, uniting 140,000 Reddit users to build the first user-owned AI model. Other notable communities include the DNA DataDAO, which is revolutionizing how individuals control their genetic data, as well as emerging DataDAOs like Volara for Twitter data and DLP Labs for LinkedIn data. These early adopters are demonstrating the real-world impact of user-owned data infrastructure.
This is just the beginning. What if members of a DataDAO could aggregate health data from wearable devices and sleep trackers, to create data sources for model trainers looking to build an AI for personalized health advice? Or a DataDAO around Spotify or Netflix consumption behavior, which could serve superior recommendation algorithms compared with more profit-motivated platforms. Virtually any closed data ecosystem: from Amazon, to Steam, to Instagram, to Notion, could serve as fertile grounds for a DataDAO.
Global Data Contributors
The community of users joining the DataDAOs spans across Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and Spain, with particularly strong adoption throughout Asia. This diverse user base includes both crypto and cypherpunk pioneers alongside those new to web3. By focusing on familiar data types - social media posts, health records, professional profiles - DataDAOs create natural onramps for mainstream users to experience web3's benefits firsthand.
4. Accelerating Growth: Launching Vana Mainnet
The launch of Vana mainnet represents a pivotal moment for decentralized data infrastructure. At its core is the VANA token, which serves as the native currency of the world's first network designed specifically for private, user-owned data. It is used to pay transaction fees on the network and ultimately govern the overall data treasury that exists on the network, enabling true data sovereignty.
Enabling True Data Sovereignty
Vana's mainnet launch empowers DataDAOs with critical capabilities:
- Active Data Collection: DataDAOs can now gather and verify data directly from their communities
- User Governance: Token holders participate in managing their collective datasets
- Building Data Treasuries: Communities can establish and grow valuable data repositories
These advancements transform how communities create value through collective data ownership. DataDAOs can now fully leverage their pooled data - whether for training AI models, conducting research, or generating insights - while maintaining complete control over their data assets.
5. Stewarding the Next Phase: Vana Foundation and Open Data Labs
The Vana Foundation has been established to accelerate the adoption of user-owned data infrastructure and guide the protocol's development, ensuring it remains true to its core principles of user sovereignty and decentralization.
Open Data Labs, the research company that invented the Vana protocol, drives technical innovation while providing ongoing services to the Vana Foundation. Through collaborations with leading AI research organizations, they focus on unlocking data as a new asset class and pushing user-owned data forward. Their core research spans user-owned data tools, Vana network nodes, and data governance systems - all in service of an ambitious goal: enabling a new paradigm for user-owned data, in which users own the products that their data creates.
Join the Open Data Economy
As we look ahead, the goal is to fundamentally shift who owns and controls data. Vana’s model for a collectively owned data treasury ensures that the benefits generated by AI and data innovation belong to the users who contribute their data. With a foundation and infrastructure in place, DataDAOs are primed to start growing, and Vana’s user-owned foundation model is prepared to support millions on this journey.
At Vana, we believe that data ownership is the original promise of crypto, and we’re here to bring it to life. Join us in building a future where data isn’t locked away—it’s part of an open garden for everyone to tend and thrive within.
Become a part of the open data economy by contributing to Vana’s DataDAO ecosystem in the Vana Testnet App, joining the Vana community in Discord, and following Vana on X.