Data Chain Says "I Do" to Sui, Walrus, and a $30M Dowry 💍

Palo Alto, United States, October 12th, 2026 — The DATA Network, formerly known as Story, will retire its own blockchain and migrate its AI training data protocol to Sui, backed by a $30 million investment from the Sui Foundation. The Sui Foundation and The DATA Foundation announced on Monday that DATA Network's Trace registry, an onchain system for rights-cleared AI training data with more than 250 million verifiable receipts, will join the Sui stack. Walrus, a decentralized storage platform anchored on Sui, will become the default storage layer for applications operated by DATA Foundation, and the DATA Network will be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui.

The decision to migrate follows the project's June rebrand from Story Foundation to DATA Foundation, a pivot from intellectual property licensing to building infrastructure for AI training data. Trace, launched that same month, has registered more than 250 million contributions and now processes over 3 million receipts per day on average, with the figure reported elsewhere as more than 270 million registrations in about four months. Applications writing to Trace include Kled, the largest opt-in human data marketplace with over 1.5 billion records being onboarded, along with Numo and Oto, applications that already license data to frontier AI labs and robotics companies.

A DATA Foundation spokesperson told Cointelegraph that running a dedicated blockchain for a single use case required carrying the costs of validators, network security and infrastructure. "Building storage and access control at that scale ourselves would have meant rebuilding what Sui already has in Walrus and Seal," the representative said. The spokesperson added that the $30 million investment was a separate part of the partnership. The DATA Network's existing chain will continue operating until the upgrade is complete, and the partners said a detailed timeline and holder transition plan will be published before the migration.

Sui represents every asset as a programmable object, allowing datasets and their licenses to be managed onchain like tokens, with independent transactions executing in parallel and settling in under a second. Walrus extends this capability to large files by storing massive AI datasets efficiently and ensuring data is only readable by licensed buyers. The partners said no other network offers storage, access control, ownership tracking and verifiable compute built natively into a single ecosystem. The integration is intended to give AI labs a single place to source real-world training data they are licensed to use, with provenance recorded by Trace and the original files stored and access-controlled on Walrus.