GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands, September 29, 2026, Chainwire

The Vana Foundation today announced that expanded staking, a component of the Vega upgrade to the Vana network, is complete. Alongside the milestone, the foundation published the paper "VANA: The Asset Behind an Open Data Economy," which sets out the economics of the VANA token. Network fees generated by personal data reads now fund staking rewards, buybacks and ecosystem development under a fixed protocol split.

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 fee model, an application that reads a person's data with a granted permission pays one cent per scope read. Protocol rules allocate the proceeds with 60 percent flowing to stakers through staking pools, 20 percent to the purchase and burn of VANA, and 20 percent to ecosystem development. Every buyback and burn is published with its transaction hash. Because staking rewards are paid from fee income, staker payouts track data-reading activity rather than new token issuance.

With expanded staking in place, staking operates 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 Principal can be withdrawn at any time, with no deadline.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 that date, a position that has not been moved will no longer earn 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 September 28, 2026 — the reading activity from which the protocol's fee split now draws. 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. With the pool migration window open until October 31, 2026, those dashboard figures give observers a running public record of the fixed split in operation.

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, an open initiative under the Linux Foundation for decentralized technologies, as a Community Specification — a framework for developing standards in the open under neutral governance. Additional information is available at 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. Additional information is available at 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.