Picture this

Who it is for

A group of 300 Yoruba speakers record phrases. A lab licenses the set; the co-op contract pays each member by their accepted clips.

Two ways to own it

What you get

Base$399

$100 deposit to reserve

Contribution uploader, review queue, license sale page, pro-rata payout contract

You choose: chain
You choose: co-op name and logo
You choose: accent color
You choose: data type

Customfrom $3,000

Built around you

Reshape it entirely: new features, your flows, your brand end to end, integrations you need. We scope it with you.

Everything in Base
Custom features and design
Priority build

Why it is new

What exists today, and what this does differently

Why own your own

A white-label co-op is a packaging of Vana's live DataDAO model, not a new mechanic.

Closest things out there

Vana lets communities launch DataDAOs that pool member data, vote on licensing to AI companies and reward contributors (Reddit Data DAO, DNA DAO).

Checked with web searches in October 2026. A search is not proof that nothing similar exists, and the market moves fast, so we recheck before every build.

What it unlocks

The human in it

Your culture and language earn for the people who carry it.

The Regatta Board

Races it can enter

grant · Gitcoin · upcoming

Gitcoin Grants rounds

quarterly-ish rounds; next round dates unknown

Official page ↗

Public goods; must be open source

Their rule on existing code: Existing open-source projects OK (generally required)

grant · Polygon · rolling

Polygon Community Grants

seasonal; current season unknown

Official page ↗

Existing projects OK

Their rule on existing code: Existing projects OK

What you own

The whole app, not a starter kit.

The complete Data Commons Co-op app: a community records clips in its own language, neighbours review them, members vote on every license, and the contract pays each member by accepted clips, with a paywall and steward agent built in.

Base price · $399

The user app, complete

Every buyer gets the same finished app. Basic branding and copy changes come through a quick form.

Three step onboardingHome

Shown once: your voice your terms, neighbours listen, every fee is shared.

Member status and next actionHome

Accepted clips, co-op size, Saturday streak and one next step.

Saturday prompt recorderRecord

Pick a data type, record a 12 second clip, with a consent receipt.

Peer review queueReview

A clear clip, a noisy clip and a copy, scored by two or three listeners.

Voice print duplicate checkReview

Pitch shifted copies matched to the first speaker. Gated behind Co-op.

The quiltReview

Every accepted clip drawn as a glowing square of the dataset.

License offers and member voteLicenses

Offers checked against co-op rules, then one member one vote.

Pro rata payoutLicenses

USDC paid into the contract and split by accepted clips, with a receipt.

Public license pageLicenses

A page where labs see samples, rules and the fee. Gated behind Co-op.

Monthly licensesMe

Recurring licenses with fresh clips. Gated behind Co-op.

Plans and USDC checkoutMe

Circle, Co-op and Operator tiers through the shared USDC checkout.

Open the full app demo

Add-on

Owner console

Your admin side: revenue, paywall editor, users, rules and the agent log.

Revenue and paywall editorRevenue

Operator fee, plan revenue, incoming USDC, payment methods, tiers and gates.

Co-op rulesRules

Listeners per clip, floor fee, new member hold, blocked terms and equal floor.

Steward agent logSteward

The tonal noise mistake and the copy ring, and how both were fixed.

Roadmap build requestsRoadmap

v2 and v3 scopes with add-on prices.

Top-up

Growth and referrals

Referral and growth mechanics, switched on when you are ready to grow.

License share cardLicenses

Members share the first payout.

New language co-op loopGrowth

Launch a co-op for another community, plus member recruitment loops.

The money path, built in

How it earns for you

The operator takes a fee on each license and co-ops pay a monthly plan; members never pay.

CircleFreeUp to 50 members, recorder, peer review, votes and pro rata payouts

Co-op$99 a monthUnlimited members, voice print check, a license page for buyers, monthly licenses

Operator$499 a monthRun co-ops for many communities from one console

Operator fee of 15% on each license by default; 85% of the rest goes to members, 10% to reviewers, 5% to the treasury.

Prices are yours to set. Illustrative, not a promise of income.

Growth loops, built in

How it spreads

Members recruit relatives and neighbours for the Saturday prompt
A share card for every paid license
Buyers returning for fresh prompts
Other language communities starting their own co-op

Roadmap · build the next phase with us

Where it goes next

v1 included

The full co-op

Phone sign in with consent
Recorder and encrypted upload
Steward screening and peer review
Rules, votes and USDC payment
Merkle payouts by clips

Included

Buyer portal

Self serve license page
Sample packs and data cards
Monthly licenses
Buyer usage reports

Add-on from $600

Operator network

Operator console
Cross co-op catalogue
Offline recording kiosks
Mobile money payouts

Add-on from $1,500

For investors and grant reviewers

The pitch, ready

The people who carry a language decide who learns from it, and share in every fee.

Problem: Speech datasets for regional languages are scraped or bought cheaply, and speakers have no say and no share.

Solution: A member co-op with consent, peer review, voted licenses with blocked terms, and contract payouts by accepted clips.

Why now: Speech labs need regional language data and stablecoin payouts reach phones anywhere.

Market: Language communities and the labs that license them, run by operators for a fee.

The ask: License the Bodija set to two speech labs and launch a second co-op.

Funding is never guaranteed. Check each program's rules.

For hackathons and demo days

Your 2 minute demo

Home: Mama Adunni and the Saturday prompt.
Record: a 12 second proverb with Tobi.
Review: score a clear clip, a noisy one, and a copy; the voice print check is gated behind Co-op.
Licenses: a clinic lab offer passes the vote; the cloning studio is blocked.
Licenses: payment lands and Adunni is paid by her 412 clips.
Owner Steward: the tonal noise fix and the copy ring.
Owner Revenue: set the operator fee and plan price.
Owner Growth: launch a new language co-op.

Many hackathons require code written at the event. See the Regatta Boardfor each race's rule.

Make it entirely yours

New languages, kiosk recording, buyer portals and mobile money payouts, scoped on a call from $1,000.

Custom from $3,000

BLUEPRINT

Why it matters and how it really works

The need

Speakers of under-served languages, patients, drivers and creators produce exactly the data AI builders want, yet it is usually scraped or bought from a middleman, with no say for the people it came from and no share of the fee.

What exists and what is new

This already exists. Vana lets communities launch DataDAOs that pool member data, vote on licensing to AI companies and reward contributors (for example Reddit Data DAO and DNA DAO). Research verdict: exists, low novelty. This app is a white-label packaging of that model for one community: a contributor uploader, peer listening review, license terms the members fix in advance (such as no voice cloning, no exclusivity), a member vote on each offer and a pro-rata payout contract. The mechanism is not new; the value is a ready, plain co-op a community leader can own and run.

The data it runs on

Member contributions (audio or text) stored encrypted offchain, with transcripts and consent records; peer review scores; a voice or content fingerprint per item for duplicate checks; a Merkle root of accepted contributions per member; license terms hashes, member votes and USDC payment and payout records onchain.

1.The mission

The people who carry a language or a body of knowledge decide who learns from it, and share in every fee it earns.

2.Why people can't resist it

Your square on the quilt Every accepted contribution lights a square. Members see their part of the whole grow week by week.

Nobody sells alone Each license offer goes to a member vote under rules fixed in advance. People who were never asked before now decide.

Saturday sessions A weekly prompt to record ten items and listen to twenty five, with a streak. Buyers' requests shape the prompt.

3.How it works for real

Member wallets: Privy embedded wallets on Base (or Polygon or Celo for low fee regions), phone number sign in, no seed phrase. Each member signs a consent record once.

Contribution store: Clips upload to encrypted object storage (for example S3 with per-co-op keys, or Lit-encrypted IPFS). Only hashes and counts are public.

Steward agent: A screening pipeline: loudness and length checks, Whisper class transcription to compare against the written text, and a voice fingerprint for duplicates. A small model (for example Claude Haiku tier) writes friendly return notes. It flags and sorts; human listeners accept or reject.

Peer review and voting: Two or three member listeners score each clip. License offers go to a vote, with Snapshot style offchain signatures or an onchain governor for the final tally, and rule changes need two thirds.

License and payout contract: A buyer pays USDC into the co-op contract against a license terms hash. A Merkle distributor pays members pro rata to accepted clips (optionally with an equal floor), plus listener and treasury shares.

License page and data room: A public page describing the dataset, terms and price; approved buyers get time-limited, watermarked access to the encrypted set.

4.Cost per use and pricing

Per clip: transcription for a 12 second clip is well under 1 cent on hosted Whisper class APIs, fingerprinting is negligible, and a small model return note is a fraction of a cent. Storage for 32,600 clips of about 200 KB each is about 6.5 GB, a few dollars a month. Onchain, a license payment plus one Merkle root and a claim per member on Base typically costs cents each. Example month for a 300 member co-op adding 6,000 clips: about $15 transcription, $5 storage, $30 hosting and indexing, under $10 gas, roughly $60 total.

Community Free to start

Up to 100 members and one license a year. The operator takes 5% of license fees.

Co-op $49 a month

Unlimited members, custom rules and branding, member vote tools and a public license page. 2% of license fees.

Federation From $300 a month

Several co-ops share one data room and can license jointly, with audit exports for buyers.

5.Growth loop

Members recruit relatives and neighbours because the quilt grows faster with more voices and the Saturday prompt is social. Each paid license produces a share card. Buyers who license once come back for new prompts, and other language communities copy the co-op once they see a payout.

6.Risks and guardrails

Consent and voice misuse: Voices are biometric. Explicit consent per member, a hard ban on cloning by default, watermarked buyer access and license terms that can be enforced in court. Comply with the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 and similar laws.

Small payouts disappoint: Most members will earn tens of dollars per license, not a living. The app must say so plainly and never present future licenses as expected income.

Bias in automatic screening: Tonal languages and older voices can be misread as noise. Automatic checks only flag; humans decide, and acceptance rates are tracked by age group.

Fraud and duplicates: Copy rings and pitch-shifted re-uploads. Fingerprinting, first-uploader credit and a hold period for new members, with human review of disputes.

Buyer leaks the set: Once licensed data is copied it cannot be recalled. Watermarking, limited access windows and contract terms reduce but do not remove this risk.

Securities and tax questions: Payouts are licensing income, not an investment. Avoid any tradable share token, and give members plain tax summaries.

7.Build order

Phone sign in with embedded wallet and a consent record
Clip recorder with transcript and encrypted upload
Steward screening plus 2 or 3 listener peer review
Co-op rules page with blocked terms and floor fee
License offer, member vote and USDC payment into the contract
Merkle payout by accepted clips with an optional equal floor

8.Where this is going

Now
One Yoruba co-op of 300 members licenses its proverbs to a clinic speech lab and pays everyone by clips.
Next
Dozens of language and knowledge co-ops, each with its own rules, sharing tools and a common license page.
Later
Co-ops federate to license jointly, and buyers commission new data directly from communities instead of scraping.
The world it builds
AI that speaks every language well, built with the consent of the people who speak them, who keep a say and a share.

Costs and tools are estimates at the time of writing. General information only, not legal or financial advice.

OWNER PLAYBOOK

Own it, then chart your voyage

Nine routes from one vessel. Tap a port to open its chart.

Why own Data Commons Co-op

When a platform collects your community's language, recipes or recordings, the platform sells it and the people who made it get nothing. When you own Data Commons Co-op, the uploader, review queue, license page and payout contract run under your co-op's name and wallet, so every license sale pays members by their accepted contributions. Your culture earns for the people who carry it, and you hold the record of who gave what.

What’s stopping you?

“I can't code. Can I run a data co-op?”

Yes. Members upload through a page, reviewers accept or reject in a queue, and the payout contract splits sales by accepted items. The build arrives deployed; your job is people and quality.

“Will AI labs actually buy our data?”

Some buy niche, consented, well labeled data, especially low resource languages and specialized domains. Many will not. Expect a slow first sale and plan for small licenses first. Nothing here is guaranteed.

“Vana already does DataDAOs. Why own one?”

Honestly, the model is live on Vana. Owning yours means your co-op name, your chain and your own license terms without depending on one network. If your community is happy on Vana, use Vana.

“Is collecting people's data legal?”

You need clear consent, a plain license explaining who can buy it and for what, and a way to remove contributions. Voice and personal data have extra rules in many countries. Get local advice before your first sale.

“What if members fight over the split?”

Set the rules before anyone uploads: pay per accepted item, how reviewers are chosen, the co-op's cut. Put them on the page. Clear rules early prevent most fights.

The million-dollar ladder

The co-op takes a fee on each license sale (for example 15 percent) and the rest pays members. As the owner you also earn setup and operating fees if you run co-ops for other communities. This is a target, not a promise.

$1,500 gross, $225 to the co-op

$15,000 gross, $2,250 to the co-op

$100,000 gross, $15,000 to the co-op

$85,000

First 10 users

1 small license buyer

$1,500 per month license

Repeat buyers

5 buyers

$3,000 per month

Multi co-op operator

20 buyers across 4 co-ops