The Vana Foundation announced on September 29, 2026, from George Town, Cayman Islands, that expanded staking under the Vega upgrade to the Vana network is complete. The foundation also published the paper “VANA: The Asset Behind an Open Data Economy”, detailing the VANA token economics.
Under the network’s updated fee model, an application that reads a person’s data with granted permission pays one cent per scope read. Protocol rules allocate these fees as follows: 60% to stakers through staking pools, 20% to the purchase and burn of VANA, and 20% to ecosystem development. Each buyback and burn is published with its transaction hash, and a public dashboard at token.vana.org reports network reads, fee income, buybacks, burns, and token supply.
Expanded staking runs through three staking pools, each with a 5% operator commission. Staking rewards are paid from network fees, accrue to the staked position, and may be claimed as they accrue. Existing staked positions must be moved into one of the three pools in a single transaction at stake.vana.org by midnight UTC on 31 October 2026; after that date, positions that have not moved will no longer earn rewards. Principal can be withdrawn at any time with no deadline.
Art Abal, Managing Director of the Vana Foundation, said: “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. 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 token economics paper and the whitepaper addendum “The Vega Upgrade: Data Portability and Transformations” are available at token.vana.org.
