The DATA Foundation launches to solve AI's multi-billion dollar Training Data bottleneck. June 26, 2026 Disclaimer: The below article is sponsored, and the views in it do not represent those of ZyCrypto. Readers should conduct independent research before taking any actions related to the project mentioned in this piece. This article should not be regarded as investment advice. Story has announced a strategic transition to become The DATA Foundation ("DATA"), launching Trace - an on-chain registry for AI training data provenance and licensing - alongside a flagship integration with Kled, the world's largest opt-in human data marketplace. The launch registers 1.5 billion user-contributed records on the DATA Network. Andrea Muttoni becomes CEO of The DATA Foundation, while Kled's founder, Avi Patel, joins as Chief Data Officer in an advisory role. AI's Training Data Has Hit a Bottleneck The shift to DATA reflects where the market is pulling hardest. AI training data has emerged as the most valuable - and least solved - category of intellectual property. Frontier AI labs have hit a multi-billion-dollar data bottleneck: the open internet has been effectively exhausted for scraping. What's left is either expensive and bespoke, or legally undocumented, leaving labs without a reliable way to source data at scale, prove its provenance, or guarantee its quality. The legal stakes are rising too. Frontier labs are building market-defining products on data sourced through opaque networks, often without clear records of consent or jurisdiction. Scraped, undocumented data is no longer a viable option for enterprise-grade AI. "The challenge in AI has shifted from compute and architecture to sourcing and provenance. As the scrapable web fractures, the question for labs now is who is keeping the receipts," said Andrea Muttoni, CEO of The DATA Foundation. "With Kled, we combine full data transparency and auditability with the largest pool of AI training data on the planet." Building the Infrastructure for Trusted AI Data DATA builds on Story's original mission to deliver a data and IP layer for the internet - recognizing that the most critical form of data and IP in this era is AI training data. The DATA Network provides essential infrastructure for AI training, anchored by its flagship Kled integration. Starting today, Kled's licensing rails and contributor receipts run on DATA Network, with added support for stablecoin payouts - registering 1.5 billion user-contributed records with built-in programmatic legal safeguards. "Frontier labs have exhausted the supply of high-quality, human-generated public text available on the open web. Suppliers showing data-sourcing provenance will win the next decade of deals, and that's our bet," said Avi Patel, CEO and founder of Kled and part-time advisory CDO of The DATA Foundation. "Instead of sourcing data blindly, Kled's data marketplace and DATA's auditable chain of custody converge on what labs actually need to license data with confidence and transparency." Trace Launches as the Public Audit Layer for AI Training Data Trace, The DATA Foundation's public audit and search platform, also launches today alongside the Kled integration. Trace generates immutable, confidential receipts for every contribution, allowing labs to verify dataset legitimacy in seconds. For every record uploaded by users worldwide, a receipt is generated on DATA - enabling upstream compensation for contributors' data and intellectual property. This directly addresses an urgent need for a verifiable, compliant AI training data market, which has become a legal and operational minefield in recent years. A Wider Contributor Network DATA's thesis has already been validated by Poseidon, the AI data-processing project incubated by Story, which cleans, normalizes, and scores raw human data for authenticity and quality - ensuring every record that reaches a buyer is model-ready. Poseidon's early traction with frontier labs helped prove out the AI training data opportunity. Backed by a16z and now running entirely on DATA, its contributor app Numo is live today, bringing thousands of contributors into the AI economy in exchange for real-time payouts. "We started Story to build an IP layer for the internet, and the most important IP of this era is the data you can't scrape: how a surgeon's hands move, how a robot grips, how people speak, drive, and work in the real world," said SY Lee, CEO of PIP Labs and strategic adviser to The DATA Foundation. "DATA is where that conviction goes next: an end-to-end network that proves real-world data's origin, licenses it, and pays the people who made it." Token Migration and Ecosystem Continuity The $IP token migrates to $DATA one-to-one, with no action required from existing holders. Migration guidance, exchange timing, and an FAQ are available for those who want details. About The DATA Foundation Data is the biggest bottleneck in frontier AI. The data models need to either sit siloed with people and companies, or don't exist yet - and won't, until incentives are aligned to create it. DATA Network is the world's AI audit rail, built to answer the three questions every lab asks: can you source data at scale, prove where it came from, and guarantee its quality? Contributor apps, including Numo and Kled, supply opt-in human data; Trace gives every record a public, tamper-proof receipt; Poseidon turns it into model-ready datasets - so frontier AI can keep advancing on a foundation it can actually trust. $IP is now $DATA. More information available at datafdn.org.

Kled announces a $5.5M seed round backed by top investors, bringing total financing to $9M.

Kled AI, a Solana-based AI data marketplace, has completed a $5.5 million seed funding round, bringing its total funding to $9 million. The round attracted notable investors including Sebastian Thrun, founder of Waymo, Aglaé (a venture capital fund under Bernard Arnault), K5 Global, and Parable VC. Other participants included Cox Exponential, Daniel Greenberg (founder of MSCHF), Harrison Shih from DoorDash Labs, and Kent Lacob, a shareholder of the Golden State Warriors. The company operates within the Solana ecosystem, focusing on AI data marketplace services.