Story Protocol Is Now DATA Network: What Changes for Your RPC Setup

If you searched for Story Protocol docs recently and hit a 404, you're not alone. In late June 2026, the Story Foundation announced it was becoming the DATA Foundation, renaming its Layer 1 to the DATA Network, and migrating the native $IP token to $DATA at a 1:1 ratio. The project's focus shifted from permissionless IP licensing to infrastructure for sourcing, verifying, and licensing AI training data — including Trace, an on-chain provenance registry for training datasets.

If you run infrastructure, an indexer, or a dApp against this chain, the practical question is simple: what breaks? We went through it endpoint by endpoint. Short answer: on-chain, essentially nothing. Off-chain, several things quietly moved, and those are what will bite you.

What did NOT change

The chain itself. Chain ID is still 1514 (0x5ea). We verified this against both the legacy and the new official RPC domains the day this post was written:

curl -X POST https://mainnet.datarpc.io \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_chainId","params":[]}'
# {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"0x5ea"}   <- same result on mainnet.storyrpc.io

The execution layer. It's the same Cosmos SDK / CometBFT chain with the same EVM execution layer. Standard eth_* methods, ~2.5-second blocks, single-block BFT finality — all as before.

The contracts. The Proof-of-Creativity stack keeps operating. The IPAssetRegistry at 0x77319B4031e6eF1250907aa00018B8B1c67a244b is still emitting IPRegistered events — we captured live registrations this week while writing our guide to indexing the IP graph. Deployed contracts, ABIs, event signatures, addresses: untouched. A rebrand happens in announcements; state lives on-chain.

Your signed transactions. Chain ID 1514 is what goes into EIP-155 signatures, so existing signing configs, hardware-wallet entries, and chainId checks keep working. (Contrast this with an actual chain migration like Fantom → Sonic, where the chain ID changed and old configs broke.)

What DID change

The token ticker. $IP becomes $DATA, migrating 1:1 with no holder action required. If your app displays the native currency symbol, hard-coded "IP" is now stale. Update token lists, price-feed mappings, and UI labels — and remember it's still 18 decimals.

The docs. docs.story.foundation is gone (it 404s); the documentation now lives at docs.datafdn.org. Update bookmarks and any deep links in your runbooks — old links don't redirect.

The official RPC domain. The foundation's endpoint is now https://mainnet.datarpc.io. The legacy mainnet.storyrpc.io still answers today with the same chain, but treat it as living on borrowed time: legacy domains from rebrands have a habit of disappearing after a grace period. If you hard-coded the old official URL, migrate it now rather than during an outage.

The explorers. The official BlockScout instance is at datanetscan.io, and the IP-specific explorer (licensing and minting actions) at explorer.datafdn.org. Community explorers still run under Story-era domains, which is exactly the kind of mixed-brand period that confuses on-call debugging at 3am.

The roadmap emphasis. The foundation's stated reason for the pivot: large rights holders wouldn't put valuable IP into permissionless licensing, so the project is refocusing on AI training-data provenance — where the same registration/licensing primitives apply to datasets. For developers, that means new activity on the chain will skew toward data-registry workloads; the read patterns (event sweeps, per-asset eth_call enrichment) stay the same as we described in the indexing guide.

A checklist for your codebase

1. grep for storyrpc.io — replace with mainnet.datarpc.io (or a provider URL that doesn't move when brands do).
2. grep for the "IP" currency symbol in UI/token metadata — display "DATA".
3. Update explorer links: datanetscan.io for transactions, explorer.datafdn.org for IP/licensing actions.
4. Leave chain ID, contract addresses, ABIs, and signing config exactly as they are.
5. If you index events, nothing changes — same registry, same topics, same finality behavior.

The provider angle

This rebrand is a small case study in why hard-coding a chain's official RPC domain is fragile: the chain didn't change at all, and yet the "correct" URL did. A provider URL absorbs that churn — our endpoint is the same as it was in January:

https://rpc.swiftnodes.io/rpc/story?key=YOUR_API_KEY
wss://rpc.swiftnodes.io/ws/story?key=YOUR_API_KEY

Behind it we route across multiple healthy upstreams — including the DATA Foundation's new official RPC, which we added to the pool the day we confirmed the migration. The slug stays story; your connection strings don't care what the chain is called this quarter.

Full chain details, endpoints, and the rebrand FAQ are on our Story / DATA Network RPC page. The free tier takes about 30 seconds — no card, no KYC.