Solidus Pod vs Vana: custody or monetization, you probably want one, not both

The two models, and why they pull apart

Their model is monetization. People contribute personal data into pools, collectively governed, so it can be licensed, to model builders, among others, and contributors are rewarded.

A pod's model is custody. Your data stays in storage you control and applications read what you permit. There is no pool, no market and no payment.

These pull in opposite directions and it is worth being blunt about it. Monetization gets its value from data being aggregated and used. Custody gets its value from data being minimised and withheld. Someone who wants to be paid for their data is asking for their data to be used: that is not a contradiction, but it is the trade, and a page that let you believe you could have both in full would be lying to you.

Where they are ahead, stated without softening

They have raised roughly twenty-five million dollars across three rounds from well-known investors, shipped a live mechanism people actually joined, and in mid-2026 acquired a team and launched a personal-server product of their own.

And their personal-server move narrows the distinction this page is built on. If the monetization side adds custody, "they pool, we custody" stops being a clean line. We are naming that rather than pretending our category is safe.

What this page will not claim, and what our own brief got wrong

One: a chain-anchored data-sale layer. The brief that fed this page said that differentiates us. We searched the repository and it is not there, only incidental matches in unrelated files, against a control that matches hundreds of files for something genuinely implemented. Scope: the repository. It is not a differentiator; it is not a thing.

Two: a consent-receipt product on this surface. A grant is not a consent record, and the consent ledger that does exist belongs to another Solidus product. Pod does not call it.

Three: an unmeasured claim about somebody else, and an unearned claim about ourselves. Two failures in one sentence.

Four: a token or an earning story. The claim that people who operate pods are rewarded with a token is on our own list of things this surface may never claim.

Five and six: an acquisition-target line and an internal scoring table. Commercial strategy. Not a customer's business, and not this page's.

And a figure our own brief carried did not survive checking. It quoted a user count we could not corroborate, and public reporting supports a smaller number, for a single pool rather than the platform. So this page prints no user figure at all, theirs or ours. A number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number.

Choosing between them, honestly

• If you want to be paid for your data, the pooling model is the one built for that, and we do not compete for that job.
• If you want your data not to be pooled, custody is the model, and you can run it yourself today without us, which remains the strongest recommendation on this surface.
• If you want both, understand that you are asking for aggregation and minimisation simultaneously. Somebody will sell you that sentence. It does not survive contact with the trade-off.