September 29th, 2026 – GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands

The Vana Foundation today announced that expanded staking as part of the Vega upgrade to the Vana network is complete and published the paper “VANA: The Asset Behind an Open Data Economy”, which sets out the VANA token economics. A public dashboard at token.vana.org reports network reads, fee income, buybacks, burns and token supply, with the on-chain record behind each figure.

Vana is a network for moving personal data under the permission of the person it belongs to. Under the network’s fee model, an application that reads a person’s data with a granted permission pays one cent per scope read. Fees are allocated by protocol rule: 60 per cent to stakers through staking pools, 20 per cent to the purchase and burn of VANA, and 20 per cent to ecosystem development. Each buyback and burn is published with its transaction hash.

With expanded staking, staking runs through three staking pools, each with a 5 per cent operator commission. Staking rewards are paid from network fees, accrue to the staked position and may be claimed as they accrue. Existing staked positions may be moved into one of the three pools in a single transaction at stake.vana.org by midnight UTC on 31 October 2026. Principal can be withdrawn at any time, with no deadline. After 31 October, a position that has not moved no longer earns rewards.

“Every read of a person’s data on the network is a paid transaction, and the fees pay the node operators and stakers who make that movement possible,” said Art Abal, Managing Director of the Vana Foundation. “The split is written into the protocol, and every figure is published on chain.”

Applications on the network have produced 2,937,447 verified reads to date, as of 28 September 2026.

Total VANA supply and release schedules remain unchanged.

The paper “VANA: The Asset Behind an Open Data Economy” and the whitepaper addendum “The Vega Upgrade: Data Portability and Transformations” are available at token.vana.org .