In-depth analysis of the value and participation methods of the AI public chain Vana

Author: Biteye Core Contributor Jesse
Over the past two decades, personal data has gradually evolved into the core currency of the internet economy. Users, while enjoying free services, often inadvertently transfer data control to platforms. These platforms, through targeted advertising and data trading, have gained enormous economic benefits.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, private data has become a key resource driving the AI-powered world. However, there are two significant contradictions in this ecosystem: data producers—individuals—often cannot receive economic returns; while AI researchers face challenges in acquiring high-quality datasets.
The early vision of the internet was to establish an open ecosystem where users could fully control their own data. However, with the proliferation of cloud infrastructure and the convenience of free services, platforms have gradually monopolized the management of digital identities, constructing a centralized data economy.
This situation clearly deviates from the original design intent of the internet.

1. Data Ownership and Its Importance

Today, two transformative forces are challenging the existing data monopoly: on one hand, the rapid development of AI has led to an exponential increase in the value of personal data; on the other hand, the rise of decentralized technologies provides individuals with new tools to regain control over their data. Vana is committed to leading this transformation, as the first open protocol designed for data sovereignty, ushering in a new era of the data economy.
Vana is an EVM-compatible AI public chain focused on the management and governance of user sovereign data. Its core goal is to establish a distributed network that allows users not only to own and govern the data they contribute but also to profit directly through data assetization.
Vana not only empowers users with control over their data but also provides developers with compliant and high-quality data resources, creating a win-win ecosystem.
Vana utilizes private key permission management to ensure data portability and control, challenging the monopoly of centralized platforms in the Web2 era, building a decentralized data market that eliminates intermediaries and creates fair value for all participants.
For users:

• Data Monetization: Vana supports users in extracting data from centralized platforms and aggregating it into decentralized data collectives. By participating in decentralized data DAOs, users can receive economic returns from data sharing.
• Sovereignty and Portability: Users not only control their data but can also unlock diverse values, such as personalized AI services or data insights.

For developers and researchers:

• High-Quality Data Access: Vana provides datasets that are owned and transparently governed by users, significantly enhancing the efficiency of the data market.
• AI Model Optimization: Developers can utilize compliant, portable datasets to drive AI innovation.

For the overall ecosystem:

• Efficient Data Market: By aligning interests and decentralizing, a fair and efficient data ecosystem is created.
• Promoting Responsible Innovation: Ensuring data contributors receive fair compensation, fostering ethical and responsible data use in the AI economy.

Through Vana's technology and ecological design, the realization of personal data value shifts from passive to active. Vana not only challenges the centralized monopoly of the Web2 era, extending the network effects of centralized platforms but also brings a fairer, more transparent, and efficient future to the data economy.

2. How DataDAO Empowers AI Agents Better

Unlike traditional digital assets, the economic value of data relies on controlled access. Once data is made public, its market value rapidly depreciates. Traditional blockchains, which emphasize public verification, are not suitable for handling private data. Vana successfully addresses this issue by combining private data hosting with public ownership architecture.
Vana maintains a global state network that ensures transparency in data ownership, quality verification, and revenue distribution. Its core functions include:

• Data Ownership Records: Cryptographic proof of user ownership of data.
• Access Permission Management: Defining conditions and authorization scope for data access.
• Verification Proof: Ensuring the quality, authenticity, and integrity of metadata.
• On-chain DataDAO Contracts and Token Balances: Implementing governance and economic rights distribution.

Data is always encrypted and stored in secure environments or users' personal servers, with the platform programmatically controlling access permissions and ensuring that revenue is returned to data creators. Users can export their data, protect it with encryption, and join a data collective called DataDAO. Through these collectives, users negotiate the commercial use of data with researchers or developers, ensuring contributors receive reasonable compensation.
Each DataDAO customizes proof of contribution based on its data type, measuring data value through the following indicators (including but not limited to):

• Financial Data: Transaction accuracy, record completeness, and consistency.
• Social Media Data: User interaction levels, account activity time, and content engagement.
• Health Data: Data freshness, measurement frequency, and device accuracy.

Data verification is completed by the Satya network, which consists of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) that can provide data quality verification while protecting privacy. Additionally, some DataDAOs use zero-knowledge proofs (zk-proofs) to further enhance privacy and security.
When developers purchase data access, contributors receive proportional compensation through governance tokens. This mechanism ensures that data contributors can obtain continuous economic returns from data usage. Contributors have decision-making power and participate in the governance of data usage. The data market achieves fair pricing and improved efficiency by incentivizing high-quality data contributions.
Vana provides decentralized and highly liquid Data Liquidity Pools (DLPs). Users maintain encrypted control over their data while collectively sharing it. Through a smart contract-driven mechanism, the non-fungible data of DataDAOs is mapped to tradable tokens, realizing the market liquidity of data, marking an innovation in Vana's history of crypto development. Whenever new tokenized assets emerge in the market, market attention and funds tend to follow. Historically, NFTs introduced tokenization to art, with the million-dollar prices of bored apes, Art Blocks, and other artworks driving investors wild. In this cycle of innovation, Pendle's tokenization of yield has invigorated the DeFi market, becoming the standout DeFi protocol of 2024. Pioneers in each asset class enjoy the most premiums. This new tokenization innovation comes from Vana's exploration of the potential of unstructured data. This may also be a consideration for major exchanges to list Vana at the earliest opportunity.
2025 will undoubtedly be the year of the AI Agent. AI Agents will be the next external form of dApps. The significance of this transformation is akin to our leap from desktops to mobile devices over the past decade. But this will happen faster and on a larger scale. Data is the new oil of the AI era. This makes Vana's story intriguing. Because the performance of AI models directly depends on the quality of their training data, rather than merely on computational power or innovations in model architecture. This reality is redefining the priorities of AI development: data quality has become the core bottleneck for AI advancement.
AI Agents face a common challenge: useless inputs lead to useless outputs. Without high-quality training data, even the most sophisticated AI agents cannot truly function. This highlights the importance of building a trustworthy data foundation.
This is where Vana is significant. Vana is not just a conventional AI project; it seeks to pave the way for user data ownership and high-quality AI data. Through DataDAO, users can stake
$VANA
tokens to support the creation of high-quality datasets. This model incentivizes users to participate in shaping AI training data.
For AI Agents, the importance of this mechanism is self-evident: higher quality training data directly translates into more powerful AI performance. The community-driven curation mechanism also ensures the diversity and reliability of data sources, providing a guarantee for the sustainability of the model.
Today, ai16z stands in the spotlight due to the resource support behind a16z, while Virtual, backed by Base's liquidity, has become a hot AI Agent Launchpool. Vana has secured $25 million in funding from top venture capital firms such as Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, and Polychain, its resources rivaling those of ai16z and Virtual. DataDAOs built on Vana require VANA tokens for participation, essentially resembling a Launchpool focused on the data track. Investors stake Vana in promising DataDAOs, supporting development while also earning staking rewards. In the future, these DataDAOs may airdrop tokens to Vana stakers who support their development (the dFusion AI Protocol has already announced a 1:1 token airdrop to Vana stakers). Each DataDAO requires a minimum stake of 10,000 $VANA to qualify for rewards, further promoting Vana's deflation. AI Agents are undoubtedly the hottest topic currently, and the critical input data affecting AI Agent performance will also be discovered by investors as the market matures, at which point Vana's value discovery will just be beginning.
Through the innovative design of DataDAO and DLPs, Vana is reshaping the infrastructure of the data economy while promoting the fair circulation of high-quality data, creating a more responsible ecological environment for AI innovation.

3. Value Analysis of Vana

In addition to the aforementioned discussions about Vana's pioneering tokenization of data in Web3, providing high-quality data for AI Agents, and the value of the DataDAO Launchpool, we can step outside the Web3 framework to see Vana's positioning in the entire internet technology ecosystem. a16z partner Justine Moore has published a noteworthy list of AI projects, with Vana being the only Web3 AI project (even though a16z has not invested in Vana).
AI = Data + Model + Computing Power. Currently, the model track is dominated by the oligopoly of OpenAI and Anthropic, while the computing power track is monopolized by Nvidia, with Hyperbolic challenging this dominance through distributed computing. The data track is the core and foundation of AI, the new oil of the AI era. Without data, the AI express cannot start. Yet, no single company currently holds an absolute leading position in the data track.
In the internet era, the information revealed by digital footprints is often more than self-awareness: algorithms can analyze subtle clues, such as Facebook likes or GPS records, to predict personality traits, income levels, and even mental health status more accurately than friends and family. Seemingly trivial behaviors, such as the timing of shopping or the tone of social media posts, inadvertently reveal our emotions, preferences, and even deeper truths. Personalized information push based on digital data can more effectively target personality traits, such as significantly improving the savings ability of low-income groups. Therefore, it is crucial to tap into the potential of data.
In Web3 projects, owning your data is no longer an attractive topic. What users care about is how to bring tangible benefits through data value extraction. The profits of Web2 tech companies actually come from data control, such as Google's precise advertising and Ant Group's big data finance. Reddit has earned over $200 million by selling user-generated content data for AI training. Many Web2 tech companies are essentially big data companies. Google's parent company Alphabet is valued at $2.39 trillion, Facebook at $1.15 trillion, Twitter at $55.68 billion, and Reddit at $29.6 billion. On the Vana platform, researchers can not only access Twitter or Reddit data but also obtain high-value sensitive data such as health and finance without infringing on privacy. With the network effects gradually spreading under token incentives, it is foreseeable that Vana will become a central source of high-quality data, with more and more researchers accessing data from here, and AI will no longer be controlled by a few elites. Vana's role in democratizing AI is as transformative as Bitcoin's impact on traditional finance.
On the other hand, Vana views unstructured data as tradable financial assets, building a secondary spot market, lending market, options, and futures contracts around DLP. This opens up a whole new asset class in both traditional finance and DeFi. This is not achievable in Nasdaq and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange because no large Web2 tech company will self-revolutionize and relinquish core data profits. Once data is made public, its value plummets or privacy issues arise. Not to mention the complicated KYC processes of centralized exchanges. Vana can effectively address these pain points, and currently, only Vana can do so. Any new asset typically brings about speculative bubbles, just as the recent narratives of DeSci and AI Agents have triggered FOMO among people. The rising total market value of DLPs will attract new crowds to care about and participate in these DataDAOs. New users will bring fresh insights on how to improve user experience, enhancing the operational mechanisms of DataDAOs, making the entire ecosystem stronger.
The reason Silicon Valley has been able to create so many high-value companies that change the world lies in its bet on a vision of a better life. Compared to internet tech companies, Vana is still small, but its mission is significant. Cryptocurrency has given investors worldwide the opportunity to participate in early potential projects. Currently, Vana's circulating market cap is only $500 million.

4. Vana Ecosystem Flywheel

The VANA token is the cornerstone of this economic system, serving functions including network security, transaction fees, DLP staking, data access currency, and protocol governance.
When AI companies access data, they use VANA tokens to purchase and burn DLP-specific tokens. This burning mechanism establishes a direct economic link between network usage and token value, ensuring value flows back to data contributors and the broader network ecosystem.
Additionally, the incentive structure further promotes protocol adoption, such as by rewarding outstanding DataDAOs to enhance ecosystem activity. To date, the Vana Foundation has supported 12 active DataDAOs and received over 300 accelerator applications. These DAOs cover a diverse range of application scenarios from Twitter data, synthetic data to genetic data and browser data, showcasing the broad potential of the Vana protocol.
Vana values community power, allocating 44% of tokens to the community, with 20.3% already released at TGE, making it one of the few projects in 2024 that offers substantial short-term benefits to participants. Tokens allocated to investors will not unlock in the first year, and will be unlocked over three years, further demonstrating investors' confidence in its technology and model. The team has received 18.81% of the tokens, locked for the first year and then unlocked over four years. This distribution method ensures that the team is motivated to continue building Vana, providing assurance for the long-term development of the ecosystem.

Figure 1: Token Distribution Institutions

Figure 2: Token Unlocking Process

5. Current Participation Methods

Vana is implementing a DataDAO reward system aimed at ensuring fair value distribution and incentivizing high-quality data contributions. This reward system operates on a 21-day cycle, rewarding the top 16 performing DataDAOs. The distribution of rewards is proportional to each DataDAO participant's shares and multipliers, ensuring that only the most valuable and trusted datasets can receive rewards, thus promoting the continuous optimization and innovation of the ecosystem.
Vana has allocated 15% of the total supply of $VANA tokens for the DataDAO reward program, which will be gradually released over three years. The specific allocation structure is as follows:

• 50% to support $VANA stakers of the top 16 DataDAOs.
• 50% to the DataDAO treasury for funding operations, incentivizing data contributions, and increasing staking rewards.

This reward structure ensures that the most valuable and contributive DataDAOs can receive ongoing support and rewards, while also promoting the healthy development of the entire ecosystem.
To encourage long-term commitment, Vana has introduced a staking multiplier mechanism. The longer participants stake, the higher the multiplier they receive, ultimately reaching the maximum multiplier after 63 consecutive days of staking. This mechanism increases the weight of shares in reward calculations, aligning the incentives of stakers with those of DataDAOs, further promoting the sustainable development of the system.
How to participate in the DataDAO ecosystem?
Step 1: Explore the Data Hub by visiting:
datahub.vana.com
to view all registered DataDAOs eligible for rewards. The Data Hub is the portal to enter, understand, and interact with the Vana ecosystem. Here, you can view the datasets offered, learn about contributors and their verification mechanisms, and compare the performance and rankings of different DataDAOs.
Step 2: Stake $VANA tokens. After selecting a DataDAO, staking $VANA tokens indicates support. If the DataDAO ranks in the top 16, stakers will receive rewards. Each DataDAO requires a minimum stake of 10,000 $VANA to qualify for rewards.
Step 3: Track and Optimize. Use the dashboard to monitor staked amounts, multiplier growth, and the performance of supported DataDAOs.
Step 4: Earn and Reinvest. As DataDAOs receive rewards, users will earn shares based on their staked amounts and multipliers. Users can reinvest their earnings to increase their influence and returns in future cycles or moderately cash out based on financial needs.
Currently, the annualized yield (APY) for staking VANA is as high as 273.58%. For users with a low-risk preference, they can earn contract yields while hedging contracts to earn additional funding rates. In the future, Vana stakers may receive token airdrops from Data DAO subprojects.

Vana's DataDAO ecosystem already has several interesting innovative projects. Users can earn Vana token incentives by participating in these DataDAOs.
Featured Project Introductions:

1. @VanaTensor
   Supported by Vana, @VanaTensor provides users with high-quality synthetic data, rewarding contributors for sharing verified, valuable datasets.
2. @datapiggy
   DataPig is an AI platform focused on transforming trading data into meaningful insights. Through its DataDAO ecosystem, users can turn their trading data into valuable assets and participate in a growing on-chain economy.
3. @Volaraxyz
   Volara is dedicated to transforming users' Twitter data into valuable assets, providing data owners with more utilization opportunities.
4. @sixgpt
   SixGPT supports synthetic data generation to train AI models and is enhancing its data generation capabilities by utilizing real human chat data provided by @flur_protocol , further improving the intelligence of its platform.
5. @vChars_AI
   vChars AI can transform Telegram data into personalized AI characters, allowing users to create customized virtual characters that interact with them.
6. @OpenyourMindDAO
   MindDAO is the first decentralized autonomous organization exploring how Web3 affects emotions, aiming to create the world's largest user-owned mental health data collection.
7. @DLPAuto
   DLP Auto is a DataDAO launched by @DLPLabs that allows drivers to connect their @DIMO_Network accounts to earn rewards through secure data sharing and promoting AI innovations related to cars.
8. @dFusionAI
   dFusion's knowledge base allows users to profit from chat data securely while maintaining complete ownership and control.
9. @primedatadao
   Helps users contribute and earn $VANA from Amazon shopping data.
10. @NakaMining
    The first genetic data collection on Vana, revolutionizing health science through community-driven breakthroughs. Users can contribute genetic data.
11. @Finquarium
    Traders can contribute trading data from exchanges to earn rewards.
    In addition to DataDAOs, Vana has launched a Uniswap V3 fork for data trading—Data DEX, facilitating users to buy and sell VANA tokens and DLP tokens. Traders and liquidity providers can utilize powerful analytical tools to help them make informed decisions and optimize strategies.
    As an AI public chain focused on the data economy, Vana will see more ecological protocols built around DLP in the future.

6. Looking Ahead

The launch of the Vana mainnet marks an important turning point. Users have the opportunity to challenge the data monopoly of tech giants for the first time, reclaim data control, and reshape the AI economy. By decentralizing collective data sharing, individuals can provide datasets that match or even exceed the scale and quality of centralized platforms.
Vana's vision is not only economic compensation but also to redefine the ways of data ownership, sharing, and monetization. In this new paradigm, data flows freely, sovereignty always belongs to individuals, and AI models are trained based on user-owned data—contributors directly benefit from it.
Vana lays the foundation for a self-sovereign internet and an open, fair data economy. New targets in new tracks often receive market premiums. After the New Year, funds are expected to return to the market, and as AI gains momentum again, Vana may take off once more.