Today, Story becomes The DATA Foundation.
$IP is now $DATA. The Story Network is now DATA Network, tracking 1B+ data records with a singular mission: to become the trust layer for all AI training data.
Welcome to The DATA Foundation.
What NVIDIA is to compute and OpenAI is to models, Story and Poseidon will be to IP and data.
A lot is changing in the world right now. AI is fast-moving from chatbots to physical-world agents. Web-scraped data has plateaued and models are starving for high-integrity data. But the big one is that the bottleneck of AI progress has completely shifted to data and rights.
So four months ago, we launched our first and only incubated project Poseidon with a $15M round led by a16z crypto, bringing together experts at the intersection of data, AI, and crypto to fill the void, and I personally joined as sole board member and President of Poseidon because I believe that building the data layer for AI models is one of the most important missions of the entire IP infrastructure for the AI age.
Data is one of the most valuable, least structured forms of IP. And importantly, Poseidon is focused on the long tail of data. Not scraped web data, but POV video, biometric audio, multilingual speech, sensor-rich logs from robots and edge devices.
This is the data that will power physical AI. And Story’s architecture is uniquely suited to bring it on-chain, with transparent provenance, programmable rights, and native licensing rails. Poseidon is a natural extension of the Story blockchain and a foundational piece of our Chapter 2 vision. Together, Story and Poseidon are an unstoppable force.
In fact, Story registered ~300K data shard IPs daily for the last few days of Poseidon season 1 audio/speech data crowdsourcing campaign. Such massive IP influx of data IP registrations bumped our L1 daily tx to > 500K. Poseidon DePIN data IP is already becoming the central vertical of IP on Story Network.
In just four months, the Poseidon team has executed at velocity I’ve rarely seen:
- launched a massively successful audio-collection app driven by crypto incentives - https://t.co/oIDmtmKCUF
- shipped one of the largest non-English audio/speech datasets in the world in a matter of two weeks that surpass exponentially in size those of Meta and Alphabet
- built the first version of a “training-data marketplace,” an Amazon for AI data
- developed the v1 architecture of our data subnet
- advanced cutting-edge research in audio deepfake detection and low-resource language fine-tuning
- released our litepaper on our subnet design https://t.co/kPsAQSVcMj
- and already begun data licensing contractual process with frontier AI labs
At this speed, I see Story and Poseidon becoming the NVIDIA for IP and data in the AI era.
For example, In 2 weeks, Poseidon was able to secure:
▸ Over 34k hours of audio data
▸ From 405k contributors worldwide
The Poseidon's initial audio dataset is much larger than the best AI speech/audio datasets for "low-resource" languages by Meta (VoxPopuli and MLS) and Alphabet (Fluers). Crypto does work outside speculation. It is especially great at global labor coordination with seamless and instant incentive payout. Also, launching our first app on @worldcoin 's app store made sure the data was being generated by humans, not bots.
Audio/speech will serve as the UX of humanoids that you will be interacting with and is becoming more and more important for physical AI models.
Anyway, so much more to come. Stay tuned :)
▶︎ IP is an $80T asset class ready to be made liquid, tradable, and yield-bearing. Just as we did with commodities, currencies, and data.
▶︎ Story is building the rails.
▶︎ IP Strategy is the bridge to public markets.
We’re breaking it all down at IPST Investor Day.
▹ Register here → https://t.co/32cirjzVrg
Very excited to share the big news today: Heritage Distilling has officially rebranded as IP Strategy (Nasdaq: IPST) - the first public company dedicated to building a treasury of $IP.
This is something we have been building toward for a long time. With this change, the company’s identity now reflects its mission to position IP as the foundational asset class of the AI era.
Why it matters:
✅ New name & ticker (Nasdaq: IPST effective at today’s market open)
✅ Balance sheet reset (all senior secured debt eliminated)
✅ >53M $IP tokens added on balance sheet (~$731M value as of Sep 21, 2025)
✅ Shareholders gave approval of all proposals related to the financing transaction, setting IP Strategy up for a new growth mandate
For Story, this is a milestone. IP Strategy represents our primary presence in the U.S. public markets and a key vehicle through which investors can gain exposure to $IP. The Foundation is a significant stakeholder in this vehicle, and plans to use it to bridge crypto and public investors at scale. With the rebrand complete, the market can now see this company for what it is: the first Nasdaq‑listed vehicle for $IP.
Now is the right time for us to lean in heavily from the Foundation side. The market has yet to recognize the true value here: today IPST trades well below its mNAV (at 0.32 mNAV as of 21 Sep), despite holding over 53M $IP tokens on its balance sheet (~$731M as of 21 Sep). We believe the stock is grossly mispriced relative to the quality of its assets and strategy. For anyone who sees $IP as the programmable asset for the AI era, IPST represents one of the most asymmetric trades in the market.
To show our own conviction and demonstrate our commitment, Story Foundation will be buying IPST shares on the open market. This is both strategic and opportunistic - deepening alignment with IP Strategy and signaling our confidence in its long‑term role in the ecosystem.
From Bitcoin → Ethereum → now $IP
This is just the beginning. LFG.
📣 IP Strategy is officially trading under a new ticker Nasdaq: IPST (effective at today’s market open) — becoming the first publicly listed vehicle to implement a treasury reserve strategy built around $IP, the native token of the Story Network, powering the $80T intellectual property economy.
With this milestone, the company’s identity now fully reflects its mission to position $IP as the foundational asset class of the AI era.
🗒️ At our Special Meeting of Stockholders on Sept 18, 2025:
All proposals related to the previously announced private placement financing transaction were approved, with 66% of all eligible shares being voted, and the measures winning the overwhelming support of 79% of those 10.1 million shares voted, strengthening the capital structure and endorsing a new growth mandate, highlighted by the following:
✔️ $223.8M private placement financing approved in accordance with Nasdaq requirements
✔️ $19.3M debt eliminated
✔️ 53.2M $IP tokens (valued at ~$731M as of Sep 21, 2025) added to treasury
✔️ Authorized shares of common stock increased by 500 million
✔️ Authorization for a potential reverse stock split
This is a pivotal step in the company’s evolution that underscores strong stockholder confidence in IP Strategy’s vision and direction.
Introducing IP Strategy: the first publicly listed treasury vehicle centered on @storyprotocol’s $IP token.
Heritage Distilling’s (Nasdaq: CASK) IP Strategy offers the first regulated path for public market investors to participate in the $80 trillion intellectual property economy without needing to hold crypto directly.
Through $IP, investors gain exposure to a growing ecosystem already working with globally recognized IP and creators like Justin Bieber, BLACKPINK, Madonna, Adidas, and Stability AI, while positioning ahead of the next frontier: tokenized real-world data for AI.
As AI’s bottleneck shifts from compute to rights-cleared data, $IP offers access to the programmable IP infrastructure driving the next phase of AI growth.
🔗Learn more: https://t.co/tHinO8dh4f
I think we reached the limit where AI stops understanding large code bases so you can't vibe code anymore
And you have to do targeted AI edits like CMD+K in Cursor
That makes it not vibey after the first prototype and you get stuck
Then the codebase is worse than if you wrote it manually
So we need AI to get better so we can continue vibe coding more which I think will happen any moment seeing how fast progress goes with AI
Actually insane that a career grifter managed to surprise a whole industry of grifters who were expecting him to grift, with unprecedented levels of grifting
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