Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Nan Zhi

After the decentralized AI data protocol Vana announced a $5 million financing led by Coinbase, its Telegram game Data Hero received extensive promotion on the X platform, with the community promoting it as the "only AI project invested by Paradigm." What is the actual core business of Vana? Can interaction for airdrops be conducted at present? Odaily will interpret this in this article.

Project Background

Project Business Interpretation

Vana is a distributed network designed for user-owned private data. It consists of an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, where users own and manage their contributed data and AI models through an organization called "Data DAO" and profit from them.

The core component of Vana is called the "data liquidity network," which allows users' data to be used flexibly and modularly like financial assets. Vana achieves this through two mechanisms:

• Proof of Contribution mechanism, which verifies the value of private data while protecting privacy.
• Non-custodial data mechanism, ensuring that data is only used for approved operations.

The "data liquidity network" of Vana creates a trustless environment where data can be safely tokenized, traded, and used for AI training without compromising user privacy or control.

The main features and operation process of Vana include:

• Users aggregate and upload data through Data DAO, and the basic model DAO evaluates the value of each person's data contribution and rewards them with tokens specific to the model.
• Contributors can own the AI models they help create.
• Flexible incentive mechanisms, introducing various tokens such as data set-specific tokens, AI model-specific tokens, etc.
• The top 16 Data DAOs will receive token incentives.

The business of Vana can be summarized as follows: users upload their private data from platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit to the Vana protocol. Vana ensures that these data are kept private and used for AI training through mechanism design, and users are rewarded based on the content they upload.

Financing Situation

Vana has completed a total of $25 million in financing, including:

• Completed a $5 million strategic financing in September 2024, led by Coinbase, with no other participating companies disclosed.
• Completed an $18 million financing in December 2022, led by Paradigm, with participation from former Paradigm partner Casey Caruso, Polychain Capital, and others. This round of financing was not publicly disclosed until April 2024.
• An additional $2 million financing by Vana with undisclosed details.

Project Progress

There are already a number of mature data DAOs in the Vana ecosystem, such as the Reddit Data DAO, which currently has 140,000 Reddit users participating and has trained the first user-owned AI model. There is also the Twitter Data DAO Volara created by Bittensor miners, and the VC-supported LinkedIn Data DAO, among others.

GPT Data DAO Example

Users can choose to submit data to different DAOs, using GPT Data DAO as an example here. It should be noted that this is currently in the test network stage, and the official statement is "points obtained on the test network have no value and do not represent future airdrops." Users need to judge whether to interact in batches on their own.

• Link to the GPT Data DAO website and enter your wallet address in ChatGPT.

• Export the chat records with ChatGPT through Settings - Data Management - Export.

• ChatGPT will send your chat records to your registered email. Download and upload them on the upload page.

Other Projects

In addition to data DAOs, Vana launched the Telegram game Vana Data Hero on July 30, where the gameplay involves continuously clicking on the screen to earn points. After today's announcement of the financing led by Coinbase, this link has been widely circulated on the X platform. The official referred to this game as "DataDAO Pre-Mine," but the specific value of participation is not yet clear.

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