Exploring Vana AI Public Blockchain: Reshaping the Data Economy, How to Get Involved Now?

Original Article Title: "An In-Depth Analysis of the AI Public Chain Vana's Value and Participation Method"
Original Article Author: Jesse, Biteye Core Contributor

Over the past two decades, personal data has gradually evolved into the core currency of the Internet economy. Users, while enjoying free services, often unintentionally cede control of their data to platforms. These platforms, through targeted advertising and data transactions, have gained immense economic benefits.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, private data has become a key resource driving the AI-driven world. However, there are two significant contradictions in this ecosystem: data producers—individuals, often cannot reap economic rewards from it; and AI researchers face challenges in obtaining 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, establishing a centralized data economic system.

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 landscape: on one hand, the rapid advancement of AI has exponentially increased the value of personal data; on the other hand, the rise of decentralized technologies has provided individuals with new tools to regain control of data. Vana is committed to leading this transformation, acting 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 that focuses on the management and governance of user sovereign data. Its core goal is to establish a distributed network that allows users to not only own and govern the data they contribute but also directly profit from data monetization.

Vana not only empowers users with control over their data but also provides developers with compliant and high-quality data resources, building a win-win ecosystem.

Using private key permission management, Vana ensures data portability and control, challenging the monopoly of centralized platforms in the Web2 era, building a decentralized data marketplace, eliminating intermediaries, and creating equitable value for all participants.

For Users

· Data Monetization: Vana supports users in extracting data from centralized platforms and aggregating it into decentralized data pools. By participating in decentralized data DAOs, users can receive economic rewards for sharing data.

· Sovereignty and Portability: Users not only control their data but can also unlock diverse value, such as personalized AI services or data insights.

For Developers and Researchers

· High-Quality Data Access: Vana provides users with owned and transparently governed datasets, significantly enhancing the efficiency of the data marketplace.

· AI Model Optimization: Developers can leverage compliant, portable datasets to drive AI innovation.

For the Overall Ecosystem

· Efficient Data Marketplace: By aligning incentives and decentralizing intermediaries, a fair and efficient data ecosystem is established.

· Driving Responsible Innovation: Ensure data contributors receive fair rewards, promoting ethical and responsible data use in the AI economy.

Through Vana's technology and ecosystem design, the value realization of personal data has shifted from passive to proactive. Vana not only challenges the centralization monopoly of the Web2 era and extends the network effects of centralized platforms but also brings a more equitable, 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 exposed, its market value rapidly depreciates. Traditional blockchains, due to their emphasis on public validation, are not suitable for handling sensitive data. Vana, on the other hand, by combining private data custody with a public ownership architecture, successfully addresses this challenge.

Vana maintains a global state network, ensuring transparency of data ownership, quality verification, and revenue distribution. Its core features include:

· Data Ownership Records: Cryptographically prove a user's ownership of data.

· Access Control Management: Define data access conditions and authorization scope.

· Verification Proof: Ensure data quality, authenticity, and metadata integrity.

· On-chain DataDAO Contracts and Token Balances: Enable governance and economic stake distribution.

Data is always encrypted and stored in a secure environment or on users' personal servers. The platform programmatically controls access rights and ensures revenue is fed back to the data creators. Users can export their data, protect it with encryption, and join a collective called DataDAO. Through these collectives, users negotiate the commercial use of data with researchers or developers, ensuring contributors receive a fair return.

Each DataDAO is based on its data type's Customized Proof of Contribution, measuring data value through the following metrics (including but not limited to):

· Financial Data: Transaction accuracy, record integrity, and consistency.

· Social Media Data: User interaction level, account activity time, and content engagement.

· Health Data: Data freshness, measurement frequency, and device accuracy.

Data validation is carried out by the Satya Network, which consists of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) capable of providing data quality verification while protecting privacy. Furthermore, some DataDAOs use zero-knowledge proofs (zk-proofs) to further enhance privacy and security.

When developers purchase data access rights, contributors receive proportionally allocated compensation through governance tokens. This mechanism ensures that data contributors receive ongoing economic rewards from data usage. Contributors hold decision-making power and participate in the governance of data usage. The data market incentivizes high-quality data contribution, achieves fair pricing, and improves efficiency.

Vana provides decentralized and liquid Data Liquidity Pools (DLPs). Users maintain encrypted control over data while collectively sharing data. Through a smart contract-driven mechanism, DataDAO's non-fungible data is mapped to tradable tokens, enabling the market-driven flow of data. This marks an innovation for Vana in the history of crypto development. Whenever a new tokenized asset appears in the market, market attention and capital quickly follow suit. Looking back at history, NFTs introduced tokenization to art, with projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Art Blocks commanding million-dollar prices and driving investors crazy. Looking at the innovation in this cycle, Pendle's tokenization of yield sparked activity in the DeFi market, becoming the most prominent DeFi protocol of 2024. Pioneers of each asset class can enjoy the highest premium. This new tokenization innovation from Vana stems from the exploration of unstructured data's potential. This may also be a consideration for major exchanges to list Vana as soon as possible.

2025 will undoubtedly be the year of the AI Agent. The AI Agent will be the next external form of dApps. Its transformative significance is similar to our leap from desktop to mobile devices over the past decade, but it will happen faster and on a larger scale. Data is the new oil of the AI era. This also makes Vana's story intriguing because the performance of AI models directly depends on the quality of their training data, not just on computational power or model architecture innovation. This reality is redefining the priorities of AI development: data quality has become the core bottleneck for AI progress.

The AI Agent is currently facing a common challenge: useless input leads to useless output. Without high-quality training data, even the most sophisticated AI agent cannot truly fulfill its purpose. This highlights the importance of building a trustworthy data foundation.

This is where Vana comes in. Vana is not just a regular AI project; it aims to pave the way for user data ownership and high-quality AI data. Through DataDAO, users can stake the $VANA token to support the creation of high-quality datasets. This model incentivizes user participation in shaping AI training data.

For the AI Agent, the significance of this mechanism is self-evident: higher-quality training data directly translates to stronger AI performance. The community-driven curation mechanism also ensures diversity and reliability of data sources, providing assurance for the sustainability of the model.

Today, ai16z is in the spotlight due to the resources backing it from a16z, while Virtual, backed by Base's liquidity, has become a hot AI Agent Launchpool. Vana has raised a total of $25 million in funding from top-tier VCs such as Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, and Polychain, leveraging resources comparable to ai16z and Virtual. The DataDAO built on Vana requires the VANA token for participation, essentially functioning as a Launchpool focused on data. Investors stake Vana in their favored DataDAO to support development and receive staking rewards. In the future, these DataDAOs may airdrop tokens to Vana stakers supporting their development (dFusion AI Protocol has announced a 1:1 token airdrop to Vana stakers). Each DataDAO requires a minimum stake of 10,000 $VANA to be eligible for rewards, further promoting Vana's deflation. The AI Agent is undoubtedly the hottest topic at present, and the most crucial input affecting AI Agent performance will also be discovered by investors as market education progresses, at which point the value discovery of Vana has only just begun.

Through the innovative design of DataDAOs and DLPs, Vana has reshaped the infrastructure of the data economy, while promoting the fair circulation of high-quality data, creating a more responsible ecosystem for AI innovation.

3. Value Analysis of Vana

In addition to the above discussions on the value of Vana in Web3 as a pioneering tokenized data project, providing high-quality data to AI Agents, and the DataDAO Launchpool, we can step outside the Web3 framework to look at Vana's positioning in the broader internet technology ecosystem. a16z partner Justine Moore has released 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 + Compute. Currently, the model track is an oligopoly between OpenAI and Anthropic, the compute track is dominated by NVIDIA, and Hyperbolic is challenging with distributed compute power. The data track is the core and foundation of AI, being the new oil of the AI era. Without data, the AI train cannot start. Yet, currently, no company is in an absolutely leading position in the data track.

In the internet age, digital footprints reveal more information than self-awareness: algorithms can predict personality traits, income levels, and even mental health conditions more accurately than friends and family by analyzing subtle clues such as Facebook likes or GPS records. Seemingly trivial behaviors, such as the timing of shopping choices 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 take action based on personality traits, such as helping low-income groups significantly improve their savings. Therefore, tapping into the potential of data is crucial.

In Web3 projects, owning your data is no longer a compelling topic. What users care about is how to bring tangible benefits to them by mining the value of data. The profits of Web2 tech companies actually come from controlling data, such as Google's precise ad targeting and Ant Group's big data finance. Reddit has generated over $2 billion in revenue by selling user-generated content data for AI training. Many Web2 tech companies are essentially big data companies. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has a market value of $2.39 trillion, Facebook $1.15 trillion, Twitter $556.8 billion, Reddit $29.6 billion. On Vana's platform, researchers can not only access Twitter or Reddit data but can also obtain sensitive, high-value data in areas like health and finance without compromising privacy. With the gradually expanding network effect driven by token incentives, it is foreseeable that Vana will become a central source of high-quality data, with an increasing number of researchers accessing data here, and AI will no longer be controlled by a few elites. Vana, which drives the democratization of AI, is as transformative to AI as Bitcoin's impact on traditional finance.

On the other hand, Vana considers unstructured data as a tradable financial asset, 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 unattainable in Nasdaq and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. No large Web2 tech company would undergo a self-revolution and give up core data profits. Once data is made public, its value plummets drastically or raises privacy concerns. Not to mention the cumbersome KYC processes of centralized exchanges. These pain points can be effectively addressed by Vana, and currently, only Vana can do so. Any new asset typically brings about a speculative bubble, as seen with recent narratives like DeSci and AI Agent sparking FOMO. The increasing total market value of DLP will attract new audiences and involve them in these DataDAOs. New users will bring fresh perspectives on improving user experience, refining the operation of DataDAOs, making the entire ecosystem stronger.

Silicon Valley's ability to create so many high-value world-changing companies lies in its bet on a vision of a better life. Compared to Internet tech companies, Vana is still relatively small but with a grand mission. Cryptocurrency has allowed investors worldwide to participate in early-stage 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, with functions including network security, transaction fees, DLP staking, data access token, 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.

Furthermore, the incentive structure further drives protocol adoption, such as rewarding standout DataDAOs to promote ecosystem activity. To date, the Vana Foundation has supported 12 active DataDAOs and received over 300 accelerator applications. These DAOs cover diverse application scenarios from Twitter data, synthetic data to genetic data, and browser data, demonstrating 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 a rare project that has greatly benefited participants in a short period by 2024. Investor tokens are not unlocked in the first year but are gradually unlocked over three years, further showcasing investors' confidence in its technology and model. The team has received 18.81% of the tokens, with the tokens locked in the first year and then gradually unlocked over four years. This distribution ensures the team is motivated to continually build Vana and provides security for the ecosystem's long-term development.

Figure 1: Token Distribution Mechanism

Figure 2: Token Unlocking Process

5. Current Participation Method

Vana is currently implementing the DataDAO Reward System, aiming to ensure fair value distribution and incentivize high-quality data contributions. This reward system operates in 21-day cycles, rewarding the top 16 performing DataDAOs. The reward distribution is proportional to the stake and multiplier of each DataDAO participant, ensuring that only the most valuable and trusted datasets receive rewards, thereby driving continuous optimization and innovation in the ecosystem.

Vana has allocated 15% of the total $VANA token supply for the DataDAO Reward Plan, which will be gradually released over three years. The specific allocation structure is as follows:

· 50% allocated to support the top 16 $VANA stakers of DataDAO.

· 50% allocated to the DataDAO Treasury to fund operations, incentivize data contributions, and enhance staking rewards.

This reward structure ensures that the most valuable and contributing DataDAOs receive ongoing support and rewards, driving the healthy development of the entire ecosystem.

To encourage long-term commitment, Vana has introduced a staking multiplier mechanism. The longer the participant stakes, the higher the multiplier they receive, ultimately reaching the maximum value after staking continuously for 63 days. This mechanism increases the stake's weight in reward calculations, aligning stakers' incentives with the DataDAO and further promoting the system's sustainability.

How to Participate in the DataDAO Ecosystem?

Step 1: Explore the Data Hub

Visit the website: datahub.vana.com, to view all registered DataDAOs eligible for rewards. The Data Hub is the gateway to access, understand, and interact with the Vana ecosystem. Here, you can view the provided datasets, learn about contributors and their verification mechanisms, compare the performance and rankings of different DataDAOs.

Step 2: Stake $VANA Token

After selecting DataDAO, staking $VANA tokens represents your support. If the DataDAO ranks in the top 16, stakers will receive rewards. Each DataDAO must reach a minimum stake of 10,000 $VANA to be eligible for rewards.

Step 3: Track and Optimize

Monitor your staked amount, multiplier growth, and the performance of the supported DataDAO using the dashboard.

Step 4: Earn and Reinvest

As the DataDAO earns rewards, users will receive a share based on their stake and multiplier. Users can reinvest their earnings to increase their impact and returns in future cycles or partially cash out based on financial needs.

Currently, the staking APY for VANA is as high as 273.58%. For users with a low-risk preference, they can hedge their contracts while earning contract yield and additionally earn funding rates. In the future, Vana stakers may receive airdrops from Data DAO sub-projects.

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 who share validated and valuable datasets.

2. @datapiggy

DataPig is an AI platform focused on transforming transaction data into meaningful insights. Through its DataDAO ecosystem, users can transform their transaction data into valuable assets and participate in a growing on-chain economy.

3. @Volaraxyz

Volara is dedicated to turning users' Twitter data into valuable assets, providing data owners with more opportunities for utilization.

4. @sixgpt

SixGPT supports synthetic data generation to train AI models and is currently leveraging

5. @vChars_AI

vChars AI is able to 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 impacts emotions, aiming to create the world's largest user-owned mental health data set.

7. Auto DLP

Auto DLP is a DataDAO launched by @DLPLabs, allowing drivers to connect their @DIMO_Network accounts to earn rewards through securely sharing data and driving AI innovation related to automobiles.

8. @dFusionAI

How dFusion's knowledge base enables users to securely profit from chat data while maintaining full ownership and control.

9. @primedatadao

Helping users contribute to and earn $VANA from Amazon shopping data.

10. @NakaMining

The first genetic data collection on Vana, poised to revolutionize health science through community-driven breakthroughs. Users can contribute genetic data.

11. @Finquarium

Traders can contribute exchange trading data to earn rewards.

In addition to DataDAOs, Vana has also launched a Uniswap V3 fork focused on data trading—Data DEX, enabling users to buy and sell VANA and DLP tokens. Traders and liquidity providers can leverage powerful analytics tools to make informed decisions and optimize strategies.

As an AI public chain focused on the data economy, Vana will see more ecosystem protocols built around DLP in the future.

6. Future Outlook

The launch of the Vana mainnet marks a significant turning point. Users now have the opportunity to challenge the data monopolies of tech giants, reclaim data control, and reshape the AI economy. Through decentralized collective data sharing, individuals can offer datasets that rival or even surpass those of centralized platforms in scale and quality.

Vana's vision is not only about economic compensation but also about redefining ownership, sharing, and monetization of data. In this new paradigm, data flows freely, sovereignty remains with the individual, and AI models are trained on data owned by users—contributors directly benefit from this.

Vana is working together to build a self-sovereign internet, laying the foundation for an open, fair data economy. Assets in new tracks often receive a market premium. With funds expected to return to the market after the new year and AI poised for another uptrend, Vana may take advantage and soar once again.

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