Sui Foundation invests $30M as DATA Network retires its chain for Sui

The Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in DATA Network as the AI training-data protocol retires its independent chain and rebuilds natively on Sui. The investment makes the foundation the network's largest institutional holder, alongside continuing holdings of PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation, according to the joint announcement dated Oct. 12.

DATA Network is the renamed Story Protocol. The project launched in February 2025 as an EVM-compatible chain for programmable intellectual property, then rebranded to the DATA Foundation on June 25, 2026, migrating IP tokens to DATA at one to one, Crypto Briefing reported. The joint post describes the refocus the same way, tracing the current registry, called Trace, to a June launch as an on-chain record for AI training data.

The migration terms keep holder economics intact. DATA continues as the protocol token on Sui, carried over one to one, with economics and governance rights at least equivalent to today, and locked and vesting positions carry over unchanged. Walrus becomes the default storage layer for applications the DATA Foundation operates. The existing chain keeps running until the upgrade completes, with a detailed timeline and holder transition plan due before the cutover, the announcement says.

Scale and personnel

Trace has logged more than 250 million contributions since launch and now processes over 3 million receipts per day on average, the announcement says. Apps writing to the registry include Kled, Numo and Oto. Kled is described as the largest opt-in human data marketplace with over 1.5 billion records being onboarded. A Chainwire copy of the release carried the same figures on Oct. 12, in the Yellow mirror.

ChosunBiz put the won figure near 40 billion and called the foundation the largest holder, in its Oct. 12 report. Its machine-translated text says 30 million items a day, ten times the 3 million in the primary, so this report uses the primary's number. The same outlet adds that the foundation acquired holdings including those owned by the Data Foundation, a transfer shape the primary does not confirm, and this report leaves it as the outlet's claim.

SY Lee, chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, joins the Sui Foundation as a strategic advisor. "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," Mysten Labs co-founder and chief product officer Adeniyi Abiodun said in the announcement. Lee answered: "This is the right home for the network we built, and I am looking forward to helping Sui make it the data layer for AI."

"Training data is critical for continuously expanding the frontier, and making sure it is traceable, auditable and cleared to use is just as important for AI safety as it is a precursor for data quality," DATA Foundation CEO Andrea Muttoni said in the announcement. "Joining forces with Sui now allows us to build out more of the stack, offering more than just an audit trail, like encrypted reference file storage and potentially fully verifiable TEEs for evals and fine tunings in the future." ChosunBiz describes Walrus as the default storage layer responsible for integrity proofs and encrypted storage, in its Oct. 12 report.

One open question travels with the move. Rebuilding an EVM-compatible chain's applications as a native Sui protocol raises a programming-model jump, and the path for Kled and Numo under the new stack is not yet spelled out. Crypto Briefing flags that developer concern as unresolved, in its Oct. 11 piece.

What the announcement does not specify: the form of the $30 million, whether equity, tokens or grant, with no price, vesting or disbursement schedule. No completion date for the migration appears either. The earliest coverage timestamp, The Block's Oct. 11 evening slot, could not be opened directly, so this report rests on the Sui primary, Crypto Briefing and ChosunBiz, all read in full.