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

Over the past two decades, personal data has gradually evolved into the core currency of the Internet economy. As users enjoy free services, they often unintentionally cede control of their data to the platform. These platforms, through targeted advertising and data trading, have gained huge 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 obtain economic returns 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 popularization of cloud infrastructure and the convenience of free services, platforms have gradually monopolized the management of digital identity, establishing a centralized data economy.

This situation clearly deviates from the Internet's original design intention.

1. Data Ownership and Its Importance

Today, two transformative forces are challenging the existing data monopoly pattern: on the one hand, the rapid development of AI has exponentially increased the value of personal data, and 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 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 objective 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.

Vana utilizes private key management to ensure data portability and control, challenging the monopoly of centralized platforms in the Web2 era, establishing a decentralized data market, 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 data sharing.

· Sovereignty and Portability: Users not only control their data but can also unlock diversified 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: Through alignment of incentives and disintermediation, it builds a fair and efficient data ecosystem.

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

Through Vana's technological and ecosystem design, the value realization of personal data undergoes a transformation from passive to proactive. Vana not only challenges the centralization monopoly of the Web2 era, extending 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

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, due to their emphasis on public verification, are unsuitable for handling sensitive data. Vana, through the integration of private data custody and 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 the data.

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

· Validation Proofs: Ensure data quality, integrity, and metadata integrity.

· On-chain DataDAO Contracts and Token Balances: Achieve governance and economic rights distribution.

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

Each DataDAO is designed around its data type's 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 performed by the Satya Network, which consists of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) capable of privacy-preserving data quality validation. Additionally, some DataDAOs utilize zero-knowledge proofs (zk-proofs) to further enhance privacy and security.

When developers purchase data access rights, contributors receive proportionally allocated compensation in 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 marketplace incentivizes high-quality data contribution, achieves fair pricing, and enhances 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, the non-fungible data of DataDAOs is mapped to tradable tokens, enabling the market flow of data. This is an innovation for Vana in the history of crypto development. Whenever a new tokenized asset emerges in the market, market attention and capital swiftly follow. Looking back at history, NFTs tokenized art, with artworks like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Art Blocks commanding million-dollar prices, driving investors crazy. In terms of this cycle’s innovation, Pendle's tokenization of yields sparked DeFi's market activity, making it the most prominent DeFi protocol in 2024. Pioneers in each asset class can enjoy the highest premiums. This new wave of tokenization innovation comes from Vana's exploration of unstructured data's potential. This may also be a consideration for major exchanges to list Vana as quickly as possible.

Undoubtedly, 2025 will be the year of the AI Agent. The AI Agent will be the next external form of dApps. Its transformative significance is akin to our leap from desktop to mobile devices over the past decade. However, this transformation will be 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 to AI progress.

The AI Agent is facing a common challenge: useless input leads to useless output. Without high-quality training data, even the most sophisticated AI agent cannot truly be effective. This highlights the importance of building a trusted 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 importance 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, safeguarding the sustainability of the model.

Today, ai16z is in the spotlight due to the resource support from a16z, while Virtual, backed by Base's liquidity, has become a hot AI Agent Launchpool. Vana has raised a total of $25 million from top-tier VCs such as Coinbase Venture, Paradigm, and Polychain, matching the resources of 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 a promising DataDAO to support its 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 receive rewards, further promoting Vana's deflation. The AI Agent is undoubtedly the hottest topic currently, and the most critical input data affecting AI Agent performance will also be discovered by investors as market education progresses, at which point the value discovery of Vana has just begun.

Through the innovative design of DataDAOs and DLPs, Vana is reshaping the infrastructure of the data economy, promoting fair circulation of high-quality data, and 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, providing high-quality data to AI Agents, and the DataDAO Launchpool, one can step out of the Web3 framework to see Vana's positioning in the entire 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 Open AI and Anthropic, the compute track is dominated by NVIDIA, and Hyperbolic is challenging with distributed compute. The data track is the core and foundation of AI, acting as the new oil in the AI era. Without data, the AI express cannot start. Currently, no company is in an absolute leading position in the data track.

In the internet era, 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, unintentionally reveal our emotions, preferences, and even deeper truths. Personalized information delivery based on digital data can more effectively take action based on personality traits, such as helping low-income groups significantly improve their savings capacity. Therefore, unlocking data potential is crucial.

In Web3 projects, owning your data is no longer an attractive topic. What they care about is how to bring real benefits to users by mining the value of data. The profit of Web2 tech companies actually comes from controlling data, such as Google's targeted advertising, 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. Google's parent company Alphabet is valued at $2.39 trillion, Facebook at $1.15 trillion, Twitter at $556.8 billion, and Reddit at $29.6 billion. On Vana's platform, researchers can not only access Twitter or Reddit data but also obtain high-value sensitive data in areas like health and finance without privacy infringement. 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 is driving the democratization of AI, is just 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 and other derivative products. This opens up a completely new asset class, whether in traditional finance or DeFi. And this is not achievable in Nasdaq and the Chicago Commodity Market. Because no Web2 large tech company would undergo a self-revolution and relinquish core data profits. Once data is made public, its value will plummet or raise privacy concerns. Not to mention the complex KYC processes of centralized exchanges. However, Vana can effectively solve these pain points, and currently only Vana can do so. Any new asset usually brings about hype and bubbles, just like the recent new narratives DeSci and AI Agent triggering FOMO. The rising total market cap of DLP will attract new audiences to pay attention to and participate in these DataDAOs. New users will bring new ideas on how to improve user experience, improve the operation mechanism of DataDAOs, and make the entire ecosystem more robust.

The reason why Silicon Valley has been able to create so many world-changing high-value companies lies in the bet on a vision of a better life. Compared to Internet tech companies, Vana is still small but has a big mission. Cryptocurrency has given investors worldwide the opportunity to participate in early-stage potential projects. Currently, Vana's circulating market cap is only 500 million US dollars.

4. Vana Ecosystem Flywheel

The VANA token is the cornerstone of this economy, with 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 that value flows back to data contributors and the broader network ecosystem.

Furthermore, the incentive structure further drives protocol adoption, such as by rewarding outstanding 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 strength, allocating 44% of tokens to the community, with 20.3% released at TGE, making it one of the few projects to greatly benefit participants in the short term by 2024. Tokens allocated to investors are locked for the first year, then unlocked over three years, further highlighting 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 allocation ensures the team is motivated to continue building Vana, providing assurance for the long-term development of the ecosystem.

Figure 1: Token Distribution Mechanism

Figure 2: Token Unlocking Process

5. Current Participation Method

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

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

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

· 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 consistent support and rewards, driving the overall health of the ecosystem.

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

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 enter, understand, and interact with the Vana ecosystem. Here, you can view the provided datasets, learn about contributors and their validation mechanisms, compare the performance and rankings of different DataDAOs.

Step 2: Stake $VANA Token

After selecting DataDAO, stake $VANA tokens to show support. If the DataDAO ranks in the top 16, stakers will receive rewards. Each DataDAO needs to 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 through a dashboard.

Step 4: Earn and Reinvest

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

Currently, the Annual Percentage Yield (APY) for staking VANA is as high as 273.58%. For users with a low-risk preference, they can engage in yield farming while hedging their contracts to earn additional funding rates. In the future, Vana stakers may receive airdrops from DataDAO sub-projects.

Vana's DataDAO ecosystem already has several exciting innovative projects. Users can earn Vana tokens 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 turning 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 aims to turn users' Twitter data into valuable assets, providing data owners with more opportunities for utilization.

4. @sixgpt

SixGPT supports synthetic data generation for training AI models and is advancing through utilizing

5. @vChars_AI

vChars AI is able to transform Telegram data into personalized AI characters, allowing users to create custom virtual characters to interact with.

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 dataset.

7. Auto DLP

Auto DLP is a DataDAO launched by @DLPLabs, enabling 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 graph 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 dataset on Vana, driving a community-powered revolution in health science. Users can contribute genetic data.

11. @Finquarium

Traders can contribute exchange transaction data to earn rewards.

In addition to DataDAOs, Vana has also introduced a Uniswap V3 fork for data trading — Data DEX, enabling users to buy and sell VANA tokens and DLP tokens. Traders and liquidity providers can leverage powerful analytics tools to help them 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 big tech's data monopoly, reclaim data control, and reshape the AI economy. Through decentralized collective data sharing, individuals can provide datasets on a scale and quality that rivals or even surpasses those of centralized platforms.

Vana's vision is not just about economic compensation but also about redefining data ownership, sharing, and monetization. In this new paradigm, data flows freely, sovereignty always belongs to the individual, and AI models are trained on user-owned data — contributors directly benefit from it.

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

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