GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands, September 29, 2026 (Chainwire) — The Vana Foundation announced today that expanded staking, introduced as part of the Vega upgrade to the Vana network, is now complete. Alongside the announcement, the foundation published “VANA: The Asset Behind an Open Data Economy,” a paper that sets out the economics of the VANA token. 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. Network fees from personal data reads now fund staking rewards, buybacks and ecosystem development under a fixed protocol split.

Vana is a network for moving personal data under the permission of the person it belongs to. Its standard, the Personal Data Portability Protocol, was contributed to Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust as a Community Specification, and the Vana Foundation is a of that organization. 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 percent to stakers through staking pools, 20 percent to the purchase and burn of VANA, and 20 percent to ecosystem development. Because the split applies to every fee collected, the amounts reaching stakers, buybacks and ecosystem development move with the volume of data reads across the network. The split is fixed at the protocol level, the foundation noted, and each buyback and burn is published with its transaction hash.

With expanded staking now live, staking runs through three staking pools, each carrying a 5 percent operator commission. Staking rewards are paid from network fees, accrue to the staked position and may be claimed as they accrue. Existing staked positions can be moved into one of the three pools in a single transaction at stake.vana.org by midnight UTC on October 31, 2026. Principal can be withdrawn at any time, with no deadline. After October 31, a position that has not been moved no longer earns rewards. The migration date is therefore the milestone for current stakers to watch: it affects reward accrual on unmoved positions, while withdrawal of principal stays open-ended.

“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 September 28, 2026, according to figures published by the foundation. Total VANA supply and release schedules remain unchanged. Those reads are the activity the fee model is priced against, and the dashboard pairs each resulting figure — fee income, buybacks, burns — with its on-chain record.

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

About Vana

Vana is an open network for personal data portability. Its standard, the Personal Data Portability Protocol, was contributed to Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust as a Community Specification. vana.org

About the Vana Foundation

The Vana Foundation is a non-profit foundation that supports the development and adoption of the Vana network and is a member of Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust.

About OpenDataLabs

OpenDataLabs builds and operates the products that governments and industry run on the Vana network. www.opendatalabs.com

This release is for information only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any token or security.

Press contact: Arthur Abal, Managing Director, Vana Foundation — press@vanafoundation.org

Source: Metaverse Post