Data is quite easily the most valuable asset class to come out of the digital age. Estimates suggest that the personal data economy is valued at around $1 trillion, while the amount of data expected to be generated in 2025 is around 329 million terabytes DAILY.

As is often the case, only a few benefit from this data industry, while the rest of us essentially get our data farmed and sold to the highest bidder. Despite the data being generated by us, the users, we have no ownership over it or say in how it’s used.

Let me put it into perspective for you. Reddit earns $200 million from selling user-generated content as data for AI model training. Meta earns roughly $113 billion in revenue, out of which 98% comes from advertisers who essentially get all our data.

The user generates all the value, yet the user gets nothing out of it. In fact, the user could have their data distributed to any company worldwide without their knowledge.

With an asset class as important as data, this status quo needs changing.

Now, I know we slap this slogan on any real-world topic and use it to spin up a vaporware token, but in this case, I think it stands. Blockchains can actually fix this.

Similar to how Ethereum introduced programmability to the traditional blockchain, our topic of today's discourse, Vana, will introduce a programmable layer to data sovereignty.

By data sovereignty, we mean the right to decide who uses your data and how.

By combining the coordination capabilities of blockchains with the personal data privacy of local servers, you get Vana — a true data ownership layer.

Their approach to data ownership will play a massive role in shaking up many instrumental sectors, such as AI, medicine, and personal data. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the beast that is Vana.

What is Vana?

Vana is a network for user-owned data that aims to transform how data is owned, shared, and monetized.

At a high level, the Vana approach is essentially combining:

• The sovereignty of personal servers
• The coordination capabilities of blockchains
• Privacy guarantees of modern cryptography
• The economic incentives of tokenized markets

A key innovation of Vana is enabling collective creation while maintaining individual data sovereignty.

While tech platforms have extracted value from user data, most people don't realize they already legally own their data — just like parking your car in a lot doesn't transfer ownership to the parking company.

Vana provides the tools for users to exercise these existing rights collectively while maintaining individual control.

Given the state of companies and tech giants extracting user data, this solution is extremely important. With AI research and product developments in full swing, the amount of user data that is unknowingly taken from people to train these models is reaching unprecedented heights.

While data centralization may be good for the few companies that can train their AI models, the users themselves have no piece of the pie.

Vana gives users back control by decentralizing the data economy through a novel proof of contribution (PoC) consensus mechanism combined with DataDAOs.

What are DataDAOs?

DataDAOs are the backbone of the Vana network. It’s the coordination mechanism that ultimately allows users to choose how their data is used and monetized.

A DataDAO is basically a liquidity pool for data.

Users can contribute their data to the network after which it is then tokenized and made available for trading in this liquidity pool.

Then, companies or individuals who would like to use the data for training their AI models, for example, can simply buy it from this pool, and the user who tokenized their data gets some monetary benefit from it.

Let’s dive a little deeper.

You can think of DataDAOs as the labor union for data.

Similar to how labor unions aggregate worker bargaining power, DataDAOs aggregate the users' data bargaining power.

Unlike traditional liquidity pools, which are usually for the trading of fungible tokens, DataDAOs only support non-fungible tokens.

Non-fungible tokens provide a better way to store data and also allow the user to maintain cryptographic control over the data while it's being used.

The process is something like this:

1. When a user has data that they want to share and monetize, they can approach a specific DataDAO (e.g., fitness DataDAO, AI LLM training DataDAO, etc.) and opt to tokenize their data.

1. The data preparation process involves encryption, which essentially ensures that users can maintain their data sovereignty.

1. After the preparation process comes the validation process. This is where proof of contribution comes in (more on this later).

1. Once successfully validated, the data is tokenized and added to the pool

1. When this data is used by another entity, the owner of the data is proportionately rewarded in tokens and governance power. The specifics of reward distribution will vary across DataDAOs.

What makes Vana particularly powerful is its ability to create entirely new datasets by combining data across platforms and DataDAOs.

Through integration with Flower AI's federated learning framework, DataDAOs can collaborate to train AI models using their combined datasets — all while maintaining privacy and user control.

This enables training on previously impossible combinations of data — like unifying a user's social media, health, and financial data — to create richer, more valuable datasets than any single platform could provide

Here’s a simple example to help you visualize what this would look like in practice.

You spent multiple months grinding shitcoins in your mom's basement through the bull market. You didn’t sell your coins and lost it all, but you’re also now in poor physical shape after living on a diet of chips and Monsters.

You get on the health grind and start tracking your data. Little do you know, tracking your health data is your path to make it all back.

The next step is going to the Vana Data Hub dashboard. At this data hub, you can explore different DataDAOs and even stake with them.

Once you find the relevant DataDAO, in this case, health data, you collect all your data and then contribute it directly to the DataDAO.

On the other side of this equation is a company building life-saving medical models using AI. For them, literally, any piece of health or lifestyle data holds value. You tokenize your data in the specific DataDAO and get rewarded accordingly.

Now, you can take your proceeds and try to make it all back in one trade.

What is proof of contribution (PoC)?

PoC is another crucial element of Vana.

When dealing with data, some important things to keep note of is that it should be high quality, unique, and authentic, while preserving users' privacy. PoC enables exactly this.

When a contributor submits their encrypted data to a DataDAO, the metadata is on-chain while the actual data is stored off-chain. This is where the validators come in.

Some of you may be familiar with the term trusted execution environment (TEE). For those who don’t know, a TEE is a secure and isolated area in a processor where data can be stored and code can be executed with the highest level of security.

Validators on Vana use this TEE to check for the data’s quality, authenticity, ownership, and uniqueness. Once all of this is verified and the data is validated, the proof is submitted on-chain by validators.

This proof is the proof of contribution, verifying that the user contributed their data. Depending on the quality of their data, which is determined by each DataDAO as part of its unique data evaluation criteria, the contributor is then rewarded in VANA tokens.

It’s a pretty neat setup. You maintain privacy while ensuring high-quality data contributions.

Data structure

The way the data is structured within these DataDAOs is what ultimately ties everything together from a user experience perspective.

You see, the type of customer wanting to access the data within these DataDAOs will vary greatly. Some may wish to train general AI models, while others may specifically want to track sleep data or a user’s browsing history.

Each DataDAO has a standardized data structure and metadata schema requirements, which are taken care of during the validation process. Through this standardization, the user can maintain cryptographic control of their data at all times, and the data can be used across a variety of platforms and applications.

It’s a fully portable, fully interoperable, fully programmable data layer.

So, a user’s browser history, eating habits, social media history, and healthcare records can all be standardized under one unified account for that specific user.

This data can then be used across multiple DataDAOs, making it easy for companies and researchers to access larger datasets.

While this system is sleek and potentially revolutionary, it is meaningless without correct security models in place.

Vana’s security model

Since Vana is a blockchain dealing with data, there are two broad security risks to consider:

1. Blockchain security
2. Data privacy

Regarding blockchain security — Vana uses proof of stake at the consensus layer. A minimum of 35,000 VANA tokens must be staked to become a validator, introducing a slashing penalty that prevents validators from acting maliciously.

To ensure data privacy, all data is encrypted, with users in control of the keys that hold their private data. To further ensure data privacy, computations on the data are done in TEEs.

With the security model in place, there is one more element left to discuss — the thing that ties everything together.

VANA token

There are multiple participants/stakeholders in the Vana network.

There are DataDAO creators, validators, contributors, stakers, and community members. The VANA token is designed to align the economic incentives across all these participants.

For starters, VANA will be the native token of the Vana network. This means it will be used for gas fees, and validators will have to stake VANA to run a validator node.

But beyond this, the VANA token will also be the data trading pair token. So, when interacting with a DataDAO, those buying data from the liquidity pool will pay in VANA tokens, and those getting rewarded will also get paid in VANA.

It’s the trading pair for all DataDAOs.

VANA can also be staked in DataDAOs to earn emissions and increase governance power for holders.

So, if you really think about valuing VANA, you aren’t only thinking of it in terms of layer-1 [L1] blockchain valuations; it also has the potential to provide de facto exposure to programmable and tradable data.

Imagine having a token that is the trading pair for digital oil. That’s pretty wild.

Tokenomics

Total supply: 120,000,000 VANA

This is what the distribution looks like:

This is what the emissions schedule looks like:

Keep in mind that the emission schedule is structured to align with key developments on the project’s roadmap, so the team is essentially committing to not falter on their roadmap deadlines.

Vana as the backbone for decentralized AI

So, where does Vana fit in the best? Data is a vast field, but off the bat, I think AI is the sector where Vana will hit the ground running hard.

Currently, AI is by far the most important narrative in crypto, and rightfully so. The amalgamation of crypto and AI simply makes sense.

Vana will be the foundation of decentralized AI because

1. Data is the lifeblood of AI
2. It is ushering in a new era of what we like to call user-owned AI

Let’s look at centralized AI.

Centralized AI obtains data from existing companies without the users' knowledge, and it uses all this data to train its AI models in the ways it wants. Eventually, it launches the product, collects even more data, and uses it as it pleases.

A recent issue is that these companies are hitting a ceiling w.r.t. data. With so much data available, they are finding it hard to track down truly high-quality data, which ultimately hampers their product development.

Now, under Vana, users have a choice over where their data goes. This is, of course, a good thing in terms of data sovereignty, as individuals can be rewarded for the data they provide. It also means there’s a greater guarantee of more high-quality data.

Beyond just monetizing existing data, Vana enables entirely new categories of AI models trained on unprecedented combinations of private user data.

Rather than relying solely on public internet data, AI developers can now access high-quality private datasets contributed directly by users who maintain sovereignty over their data.

This creates the potential for user-owned foundation models that are more capable than their centralized counterparts, with the benefits flowing back to the data contributors rather than platform shareholders.

A great example of where Vana will fit in perfectly is the AI agent meta that’s currently on everyone’s radar.

AI agents have been the most popular application in crypto. They can automate on-chain tasks, conduct research, and aggregate information, among other things.

By choosing which type of agent uses their data, users can help make those agents better with higher-quality data.

The off-shoot benefit is that while getting a superior product, the user who contributed their data will also benefit from the product usage in the form of contributor rewards.

Data is everything in AI, and with Vana truly decentralizing the flow of data, an age of user-owned AI will be ushered in, allowing crypto-native AI projects to effectively compete with their centralized counterparts.

If we broaden the horizons of AI beyond the AI agent meta that is currently popular, Vana’s role will remain extremely important.

Healthcare is a great example.

AI models are being used in the healthcare industry to create different types of life-saving models and discover ways to further research about diseases for which there is still no cure.

For these models to be more effective, they need more data.

Through Vana, users can choose to share all their medical and healthcare-related data to help improve these models. Beyond earning a reward, the data contributors are also fostering the development of AI models that are a major net positive for society.

Another interesting area is financial modeling.

AI will play a huge role in financial forecasting, and given the intricacies of the financial world, data can be extracted from all sorts of places.

Individuals' financial decisions are a major part of the required data, and through Vana, AI researchers can get easier access to this.

In essence, the AI sector is massive and will only grow further.

Vana is providing the infrastructure for the fuel that keeps the AI economy going — data. By allowing users to own and monetize their data while ensuring researchers get the highest-quality data, Vana stands to be a major benefactor of the AI boom.

Concluding thoughts

The generation and consumption of data is all set to keep rising with time.

Whether it’s because of AI or just the general use of technology, the importance of data ain’t going to be reduced. However, almost nobody is looking at shifting the status quo in this trillion-dollar industry.

Vana is coming to the market with a very sleek and simple solution — preserving user privacy while allowing data to be used by other entities, ensuring everyone benefits from the data equally.

While everyone is focusing on AI agents, Vana presents itself as a very interesting infrastructure play within the AI narrative. Data is the lifeblood of AI, and the VANA token is the financial vehicle for trading this data.

I think it’s a very interesting project and these guys have a stacked team of gigabrains to help execute this vision effectively.

I would keep a close eye on this one, anon. It doesn’t seem like one you would want to fade.