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DATA Network to Retire Chain, Move to Sui With $30 Million Investment
Trace, Walrus and token migration reshape the project’s infrastructure
TL;DR
- DATA Network will retire its independent blockchain and run natively on Sui under a partnership backed by a $30 million Sui Foundation investment.
- The DATA token will migrate to Sui on a one-to-one basis, while Walrus becomes the default storage layer for DATA Foundation applications.
- DATA Foundation tied the move to the cost of maintaining a dedicated chain as Trace usage expanded rapidly.
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DATA Network plans to retire its independent blockchain and upgrade the AI training data protocol to run natively on Sui, with Sui Foundation investing $30 million as part of the partnership. The existing network will remain operational until the transition is complete, while the DATA token will move to Sui on a one-to-one basis.
DATA Foundation, which supports DATA Network, said Sui Foundation will become the network’s largest institutional holder alongside existing stakeholders PIP Labs and DATA Foundation. The foundation said it will publish a detailed migration timeline before the upgrade, while a separate holder transition plan will also be released before the move is completed.
Why DATA Network is retiring its chain
DATA Foundation said maintaining a dedicated blockchain for a single use case required it to carry validator, network security and infrastructure costs. A DATA Foundation spokesperson told Cointelegraph that increasing activity on Trace made continuing to operate a separate blockchain less practical.
“Building storage and access control at that scale ourselves would have meant rebuilding what Sui already has in Walrus and Seal,” the spokesperson said. The representative also said Sui Foundation’s investment was a separate part of the partnership rather than the reason for the infrastructure decision.
The shift follows Story Foundation’s rebrand to DATA Foundation in June, when the organization moved its focus from intellectual property licensing and broader intellectual property infrastructure toward what it called a “full stack for AI training data.” Trace also launched that month to track the origin and licensing or usage rights of training data.
Trace also settles payment to people who contribute training data. DATA Foundation said moving the protocol to Sui would give AI labs a place to source real-world training data they are allowed to use. Walrus, an onchain decentralized storage platform in the Sui ecosystem, will become the default storage layer for applications operated by DATA Foundation.
Trace shifts into Sui’s data stack
Adeniyi Abiodun, co-Founder and chief product officer at Mysten Labs, the original contributor to Sui and Walrus, said demand for permissioned training data was becoming more important as AI development progressed.
“The AI industry has reached the point where the open internet has been read, and the next frontier is defined by access to datasets with the consent and provenance that regulators require,” Abiodun said.
“The migration of DATA Network and Trace to our stack now brings massive volumes of high-quality, rights-cleared data that is already serving the world's frontier AI labs,” he added.
DATA Network’s existing chain will continue running until the upgrade is finished. Trace will then operate within the Sui ecosystem, with Walrus handling default storage for DATA Foundation applications rather than DATA Foundation rebuilding comparable storage and access-control infrastructure itself.
This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.
