The Vana Vision

Vana is first network for user-owned data, which is the foundation of user-owned AI.

Vana is a layer one blockchain designed for the trustless and secure exchange of user-owned data.

Data is the differentiator when it comes to AI. Data is oil, and the public oil wells (i.e. public internet sources) have been scraped and tapped. The world is in search for new sources of data to make AI better.

Human-Sourced Data (HSD) is any data that captures the human experience, including Web2 social media data, private data, human opinion data, digital outputs of human creativity, and human sensory data such as data from health trackers.

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Human-Sourced Data (HSD) is the new frontier. HSD is any data that captures the human experience. This includes Web2 social media data, private data, human opinion data, digital outputs of human creativity, and human sensory data, such as data from health trackers.

HSD is incredibly valuable for the advancement of AI. It can fill gaps where public data is lacking. It can advance AI towards improving human well-being and longevity. Most importantly, it can offer AI human context and experience, a key to making AGI a reality.

We generate so much valuable HSD every day. Each time we interact with technology—each tap, click, or swipe—we create HSD that can be used to train AI. But we struggle to realize the value of the HSD we create.

Under Common Law and data access regimes like GDPR and CCPA, we are entitled to access and download our data whenever we choose. However, data’s value can only be unlocked when aggregated into datasets. In Web2, only large tech companies and data brokers—centralized actors—have the power to bring data together and generate value. This has allowed them to make millions off user data without users seeing a cent.

This paradigm also traps AI researchers and innovators. Anyone who wants to access HSD must pay a high price to these centralized actors for usage rights. It is a sub-optimal marketplace that allows the power of AI innovation to be gated by a handful of centralized actors.

This stops now.

User-Owned Data: a system whereby individuals can freely aggregate, exchange and apply their data.

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Vana creates a secure, trustless ecosystem for individuals to freely aggregate, exchange and apply their data. We call this User-Owned Data, and we achieve this with three core primitives:

Trustless Validation. Vana allows data to be validated using a secure data ingress, a network of trusted execution nodes that check data against pre-defined criteria while preserving its privacy.
Granular Permissioning. Patented technology that gives a user full control over their data through on-chain permissions at a granular level using private keys.
Data Provenance. A layer one blockchain that is purpose-built to allow users to trace how their data is applied once it is permissioned.

DataDAO is a group of people that aggregate data around a specific topic or theme for the benefit of all group members.

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Together, this allows communities to aggregate data without centralized actors. User can participate in DataDAOs, community-driven projects that leverage the Vana protocol to bring data together. Using Vana, the DAO can check the validity of users’ data contributions in a privacy-preserving manner while maintaining trust that the process is uniform and transparent.

Users can then be awarded DAO tokens, which bestow governance rights over the DAO’s dataset and entitle them to a stream of income. In this way, Vana provides a decentralized trust and incentive layer for data aggregation.

Data Liquidity is the notion that data is a store of capital in an AI economy. Data capital can be made liquid by allowing it to be transacted and financialized onchain.

Data Network Effects is the principle that data becomes increasingly valuable when combined with other data.

DataFi (Data Financialization) is the process of tokenizing and aggregating data to unlock its financial value.

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In turn, DataDAOs create Data Liquidity on Vana. Data Liquidity ****is the notion that data is a store of capital in an AI economy. Data capital can be made liquid by allowing it to be transacted and financialized onchain. This process is called Data-Fi (Data Financialization), the process of tokenizing and aggregating data to create Data Liquidity.