As AI continues to take centre stage, data has become more valuable than ever. It serves as the backbone of AI algorithms, playing a crucial role in delivering personalized services, driving intelligent decisions, and spurring innovation across industries.

Recent reports reveal that social platform Reddit has licensed its data to Google for $60 million annually to train AI models. Similarly, OpenAI entered into a deal with News Corp for $250 million over five years to use its intellectual property for AI training. Yet, individuals who create this data have no say in how it is used and receive no financial benefits from it. The data economy is dominated by major tech companies that control and profit from the value of this data.

Vana aims to disrupt this model by empowering individuals to regain control over their data. It offers a way for users to profit from AI models that are trained using their data, helping to build a truly user-driven AI development ecosystem.

What is Vana?

Simply put, Vana is an EVM-compatible L1 blockchain, the first network designed specifically for user-owned private data.

Source: Vana

Vana is turning data into a new and valuable asset class. By contributing data to a Data Liquidity Pool (DLP), users can earn governance rights and financial rewards while maintaining the privacy and security of their data. Verified data is tokenized, supporting AI model development and powering decentralized applications, fundamentally changing how AI systems are constructed.

Since launching its developer testnet in June, Vana has attracted over 1.3 million users and 300+ DataDAOs, with daily transactions exceeding 1.7 million. According to the Vana Foundation, the mainnet launch is coming soon.

Team Background and Funding

The Vana protocol was developed by Open Data Labs, a research company based in San Francisco, which was born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. The Vana Foundation, which will launch soon, will ensure the long-term sustainability of the Vana ecosystem.

Vana’s co-founders, Anna Kazlauskas and Art Abal, are from the Philippines. Anna Kazlauskas serves as the CEO of Vana, with a background as an engineer at Celo and a policy advisor to the Prime Minister of East Timor. Art Abal, who graduated from Harvard University, previously led data collection innovations at AI training data provider Appen. Other key team members, such as Chief Legal Officer Stephen Boske, have significant industry experience, including serving as Deputy General Counsel and Product Counsel at Coinbase.

Over the past three years, Vana has raised a total of $25 million across three funding rounds:

• A $2 million seed round in 2022, led by Polychain
• An $18 million Series A round in 2022, led by Paradigm
• A $5 million strategic round in 2024, led by Coinbase Ventures

Other investors and angel investors include Casey Caruso, Packy McCormick, Manifold, GSR, Will Price, Jez, SCB 10X, Defiance Capital, Contango, Auros Ventures, MH Ventures, BoxGroup, and Will Manidis.

Vana has stated that the funding will help accelerate project development and the creation of a decentralized AI ecosystem.

Core Technology Architecture

Vana’s goal is to transform the data ownership landscape by converting personal data into tradable tokens, aggregating data liquidity, breaking down traditional data silos, and unlocking the full potential of data. At the same time, it ensures that users retain ownership of the AI models generated from their data, enabling them to benefit financially.

Vana has built an open-source, permissionless decentralized network to achieve this. Its key components include:

• Vana Blockchain

The Vana blockchain has two core layers, the Data Liquidity Layer and the Data Portability Layer, which ensure data ownership, security, and usability.

Source: Vana

1）Data Liquidity Layer

The Data Liquidity Layer is the foundation of Vana, ensuring the secure verification, tagging, and trading of data. This layer introduces the Data Liquidity Pool (DLP), aggregating various types of data from different contributors to create a trustless data marketplace.

Users who contribute data to the DLP are known as data contributors. They are rewarded based on the value of their data, with the data’s authenticity and quality verified through Vana’s Proof of Contribution (PoC) mechanism.

To encourage high-quality data, the top 16 DLPs will be selected through staking and voting by token holders after the mainnet launches. These top DLPs will share 15% of the total FDV over the first two years.

DLPs are entirely community-driven. Each DLP is managed by its own DAO and can issue new tokens to reward data contributors. Currently, over 300 DataDAOs have been created, representing various DLPs. Among the 13 officially recognized DataDAOs, there are projects like Volara, focused on X data from early Bittensor miners, DNA DAO specializing in genetic data, and IoT DataDAO that uses IoT data. The diversity of data types enhances the richness and liquidity of the data pool.

Source: Vana

The most prominent DataDAO is r/datadao, which is the only fully operational project with its governance token $RDAT listed for circulation. Launched in April 2024 as a response to Reddit’s unauthorized sale of user data, r/datadao has attracted 140,000 users in just one week.

Source: r/datadao

2）Data Portability Layer

The Data Portability Layer supports cross-platform and cross-application access and sharing, ensuring interoperability and security. Developers can access datasets to build AI models and DApps, while data contributors can participate in governance and decision-making through DLP tokens.

• Proof of Contribution Mechanism

Anyone can submit data, but only high-quality, authentic data can be added to the DLP and rewarded with $VANA tokens. This process is verified through Vana’s Proof of Contribution (PoC) mechanism.

Since different DLPs may prioritize different data types, the PoC mechanism is adaptable to various needs. For example, a financial data DLP may prioritize accuracy, while a social media data DLP may focus on activity levels.

• User-Self-Hosted Data

Vana ensures data security and privacy by using an encrypted storage solution. All raw user data is stored off-chain, and users can store their data in personal cloud services or other secure methods. When users contribute data to a DLP, they are essentially providing a link to their encrypted data, with an optional content integrity hash. This information is recorded in the Vana data registration contract, and the data is decrypted only when validators or buyers pay to access it.

Vana also incorporates zero-knowledge proofs, enabling validators to confirm data validity without accessing the original information, ensuring maintaining privacy.

How Can Users Contribute to Building the Ecosystem?

In June of this year, Vana launched its public chain testnet, Satori Testnet. The first phase is focused on testing the data contribution proof mechanism. So far, over 201,000 wallet addresses have registered on the Satori testnet, with around 3.5 million transactions completed.

Source: satori.vanascan.io/stats

The $VANA token, the native currency of the Vana network, will play a central role in transaction fee payments and promote data verification, governance, and access. However, the team has yet to release more detailed information on its core functionality.

So, how can users interact with and contribute to the Vana ecosystem before the mainnet goes live?

1）Data Mining

Vana offers 13 different DLPs, covering areas such as social media, finance, careers, and more. Users can participate in pre-mining by selecting the DLPs that interest them. However, for DLPs like Volara and SixGPT, users must follow the provided Github documentation for setup, such as downloading Docker, creating necessary files, and running mining programs using their CPU.

Source: Volara

2）Join the Telegram Mini App

To encourage users to engage with various DataDAOs and secure early bird mining qualifications, Vana has launched a Telegram Mini App @Vana Data Hero bot. Users can complete tasks like interacting on social media, adding wallets, inviting friends, or playing AI guessing games to earn $VANA reward points.

Source: @VanaDataHeroBot

Over 290,000 users have participated so far. Additionally, the app has incorporated a weekly lottery game tied to the TON ecosystem. Users can collect points, and the top 50 participants receive TON tokens as rewards.

3）Create Your Own DataDAO

Developers can create their own DataDAOs using Vana’s comprehensive development documentation and APIs.

To attract high-quality DataDAOs, Vana has introduced the Vana Cohort Welfare Program, which provides targeted support in areas like technology, funding, marketing, compliance, and project collaborations. Furthermore, the team actively hosts both online and offline events to foster better communication and collaboration between developers and the community.

4）Become a Validator

Beyond the options listed above, once Vana’s mainnet is live, users can apply to become validators to earn $VANA token rewards. Validators are crucial in the Vana ecosystem and take on two primary roles: L1 Validators and Satya Validators, each with a different reward structure.

L1 Validators maintain the security and consensus of the Vana blockchain using Proof of Stake (PoS). Satya Validators focus on verifying DLP data contributions within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). To become a validator, users must meet certain hardware and staking requirements. For example, L1 validators must have an 8-core CPU, 32 GB of RAM, 1.2 TB SSD, and x86-64 architecture, along with staking a specified amount of $VANA tokens.

Conclusion

In the AI era, data has become a resource as valuable as gold, especially when aggregated, making it even more valuable. By democratizing and monetizing data, Vana aims to redefine personal data ownership and the way its value is distributed, creating a truly user-driven AI development ecosystem that allows users to benefit financially.

So far, Vana has made notable progress in data collection, technical architecture development, and community building. It has also put forward solutions to enhance data privacy and security. However, with the upcoming launch of the mainnet and token, Vana will face challenges in technology, community, and market, and the team will need to be adaptable and responsive to these evolving circumstances.