Data Network

Story launched mainnet in February 2025 around programmable intellectual property. Its system paired an EVM-compatible Layer 1 with registries, licensing and royalty modules. The Foundation's later account says entertainment, creator and gaming experiments produced some adoption but also a stubborn obstacle: large rights holders valued control more than permissionless licensing.

By 25 June 2026, the organization had renamed itself The DATA Foundation and the network DATA Network. Its stated wedge became AI-training data that could arrive with provenance, consent, license and payment receipts. Trace exposes those receipts for audit while source data can remain confidential. This is the Foundation's product thesis, not independent proof that every advertised record or payment is legally correct.

The token transition was deliberately uneventful. Native IP balances became DATA one-to-one, staking positions stayed in place and holders were told not to migrate manually. Data Network still uses chain ID 1514, and its native coin has no contract address. That identity excludes unrelated tokens merely called STORY, IP or DATA.

Wrappers occupy a different layer. Official FAQs list WDATA at 0xD18a56346227f25D1410F98f78234305660bB877 and WDATAIP on BNB Chain at 0xA37EDed373c5cdF88644db7C6b89f222e756aFB2. A wrapped address can represent native value in a contract, but it does not turn the underlying DATA coin into an ERC-20 or create a second CoinGecko story-2 asset.

Genesis allocated 1,000,000,000 units: 38.4% to Ecosystem and Community, 10% to Initial Incentives, 10% to the Foundation, 21.6% to Early Backers and 20% to Core Contributors. Twenty-five percent was initially unlocked. Early Backers and Core Contributors were placed on 48-month releases, making time as important to supply as the opening pie chart.

The calendar then moved twice. In February 2026 the board delayed all previously locked team, investor and insider releases from 13 February to 13 August without changing allocations, vesting terms or legal ownership. Four months later the rebrand announcement said the team and lead investors extended lockups by 18 months, but did not state the new dates. A current circulating figure therefore cannot be reconstructed from the original chart alone.

Supply also expands and contracts at protocol level. Documentation currently sets annual inflationary issuance at 20,000,000 tokens and sends it to block rewards and a community pool; governance or hard forks may change the parameters. EIP-1559 burns execution base fees. One billion is the genesis quantity, while future net supply depends on emissions, burns, lockups and holder behavior.

Staking secures the validator set. Locked flexible stake earns half the reward weight of unlocked flexible stake, while unlocked 90-, 360- and 540-day commitments receive multipliers of 1.1, 1.5 and 2. Unbonding takes 14 days and stake remains exposed to slashing. Equal per-token consensus voting power for locked and unlocked stake should not be confused with the DAO Constitution's separate voting weights and proposal rules.

The Constitution gives holders a bounded menu: amendments, certain Security Council and supervisor choices, budget vetoes, signals and limited grants. Holders cannot vote out Foundation directors or dissolve the Foundation. In operation, upgrades, pauses, whitelists, royalty settings and treasury parameters pass through an AccessManager, a Timelock and Gnosis Safe multisigs; the Security Council can cancel scheduled actions with three of six signatures. The Constitution enumerates these powers; it does not establish that a public token-voting process is operational. The Foundation's 26 January 2026 security account said broader token voting was still being explored. That dated account does not establish the status of any later implementation.

The Foundation also manages treasury activity and can determine use of a community pool that may receive up to 20% of emissions. Its disclaimer permits proprietary DATA purchases and sales at its sole discretion and says those trades are not conducted for holders. Token governance, company stewardship, validator consensus and market operations are related, but none is a synonym for the others.

The linked MiCA paper still uses the former names. It identifies Story Foundation, a Cayman Islands foundation registered on 19 April 2024, as offeror; current End User Terms use The Data Foundation, while PIP Labs is described as the core development team. The rebrand establishes continuity of project identity, but these entities perform different legal and operational jobs.

DATA pays gas, can be staked and supports limited governance and ecosystem settlement. The paper expressly denies equity, profit participation, ownership in the Foundation or affiliates, stable-value protection, redemption and reimbursement. Nor does holding DATA itself convey ownership of registered songs, images or datasets: IP Asset Tokens and licensing tokens are separate instruments whose rights depend on their own legal and smart-contract terms.