FAQ

Existing crypto infrastructure has enabled digital ownership for assets like art and collectibles, but private data poses unique challenges:

• Data is non-excludable and can be copied once made public (the "data double spend problem").
• Data is non-fungible but must be aggregated to be valuable as AI training data.

Vana addresses these challenges through:

• Non-custodial data allows users to use data in an application or to train an AI model while keeping it in their full control
• Proof-of-contribution allows groups of users to pool their data while ensuring everyone is rewarded fairly. This enables data liquidity.

Previous data ownership projects have taken too ideological an approach and remained academic or esoteric. Vana believes in a pragmatic, full-stack approach to building infrastructure that gets real adoption. We started with a data portability API, helped build viral user-owned data apps that onboarded over 1M users, and created the infrastructure for the world's first Data DAO was created, attracting over 140k participants in under a week.

Yes, they're the same. But DLP is more technical term focuses on the data liqudity, while DataDAO emhpatihizes community participation and governance.

Earning a slot on Vana's mainnet for DataDAOs is designed to be competitive. Factors affecting competitiveness include data quality, community support, and testnet performance metrics. DataDAOs are elected by native token holders on mainnet.

Yes, you can develop and test your DataDAO on the testnet without a live token before moving to token integration and mainnet deployment.

Vana is an L1 to ensure users maintain data privacy and control. Existing L2 sequencer approaches are too centralized and would be subject to data regulations that would not be possible to fulfill in a blockchain context.

Vana is the first decentralized network designed for private data. Data is encrypted with user-controlled keys, and access is granted to run operations in a secure environment, including from the user's device.