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

The Vana Foundation today announced that expanded staking, introduced as part of the Vega upgrade to the Vana network, is now complete. In conjunction with the rollout, the foundation published a paper titled “VANA: The Asset Behind an Open Data Economy,” which sets out the economics of the VANA token. Under the upgraded model, network fees generated from personal data reads now fund staking rewards, token 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 individual 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. Protocol rules allocate these fees on a fixed split: 60 percent to stakers through staking pools, 20 percent to the purchase and burn of VANA, and 20 percent to ecosystem development. Each buyback and burn is published with its transaction hash. In effect, the model makes the network’s income a direct function of data movement: fee income arrives only when permissioned reads occur, and the same protocol-defined split applies to whatever is collected.

Under expanded staking, staking operates through three staking pools, each charging a 5 percent operator commission. Staking rewards are paid from network fees, accrue to the staked position, and can 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 before midnight UTC October 31, 2026. Principal can be withdrawn at any time, with no deadline. After October 31, any 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 built on the network have produced 2,937,447 verified reads to date, as of September 28, 2026 — a cumulative count of the read activity that, under the fee model, generates the income divided by the 60/20/20 split. Readers tracking how the model performs in practice can follow that figure alongside the fee, buyback, and burn numbers on the token dashboard. Total VANA supply and release schedules remain unchanged, according to the foundation.

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.

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.

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