Data Marketplaces & Intermediaries

The DATA Foundation launches "Trace," onboards Kled's 1.5B user-contributed records

Source: Swace News · Jun 25, 2026

The training-data provenance problem is simple to state and hard to solve: as frontier labs exhaust what's scrapable from the open internet, they need to prove, not just assert, where a dataset came from, whether its contributors consented, and whether they were paid. The DATA Foundation — a rebrand of the project formerly known as Story — is positioning itself as the audit layer for exactly that problem, and its first flagship integration gives a sense of the scale it's aiming for.

The centerpiece of the launch is "Trace," a public search and audit platform that generates immutable, confidential receipts for every data contribution that flows through the network. In practice, that means an AI lab evaluating a dataset can verify its legitimacy — who contributed it, under what terms, and whether compensation was actually paid — without needing to trust the marketplace's word for it. For contributors, the same receipt system is supposed to guarantee they get paid and have a durable, checkable compliance record tied to their data.

The integration doing the heavy lifting here is Kled, described as the world's largest opt-in human data marketplace. Kled's licensing infrastructure now plugs directly into DATA's audit rails, and the numbers are large: roughly 1.5 billion user-contributed records have been registered on the network as part of this integration. Payouts to contributors now run through stablecoin rails, which the companies frame as faster and more transparent than traditional payment processing at this volume.

On the leadership side, Andrea Muttoni has been appointed CEO of The DATA Foundation, with Kled founder Avi Patel joining in an advisory capacity as Chief Data Officer. There's also a token migration underway — the existing $IP token converts one-to-one into $DATA, with no action required from holders. A companion project, Poseidon, which was incubated by Story for AI data processing, also now runs on the DATA network, and a contributor-facing app called Numo is live, giving individual data contributors real-time payouts.

Key Points

• Story Protocol rebranded as The DATA Foundation to tackle AI's training-data bottleneck
• "Trace" is a public audit/search layer generating immutable, confidential receipts for every data contribution
• Kled — described as the largest opt-in human data marketplace — is the flagship integration, bringing 1.5B user-contributed records onto the network
• Contributor payouts now settle in stablecoin
• Andrea Muttoni appointed CEO; Kled founder Avi Patel joins as Chief Data Officer advisor