The DATA Network, the blockchain formerly known as Story, will shut down its own chain and rebuild as a protocol running on Sui, with the Sui Foundation putting $30 million into the network, the two foundations announced on Monday.
The Sui Foundation said in the release that the investment gives it “the largest institutional stake in the network,” with PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation keeping their existing holdings. SY Lee, CEO of PIP Labs, is joining the Sui Foundation as a strategic advisor.
“This is the right home for the network we built,” Lee said in the release.
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What Changes for DATA Holders
$DATA remains the protocol’s token after the switch and converts one-for-one onto Sui. The foundations said holders’ economics and governance rights would be at least equivalent to what they have now, and that locked and vesting tokens would carry over unchanged.
No date has been set. The current chain keeps running until the upgrade is finished, and the foundations said they will publish a detailed timeline and a plan for holders before it happens.
DATA traded near $0.21 as of 08:36 UTC on Monday, up about 8% over 24 hours, with a market cap of roughly $75 million, according to CoinGecko data.
Trace Moves to Walrus
The organization dropped the Story name in June, when it turned from intellectual-property licensing to AI training data and launched Trace. The registry logs where each contributed file came from and what rights attach to it, and pays the person who supplied it. According to the release, Trace has logged more than 250 million contributions since launch and averages over 3 million receipts a day.
Walrus, the storage network built alongside Sui, becomes the default storage layer for DATA Foundation apps. The foundations said Trace will use it to keep an encrypted copy of each contributed file that cannot be altered, so any later processing can be checked against the original.
Mysten Labs co-founder and chief product officer Adeniyi Abiodun, whose company first developed Sui and Walrus, said in the release that Sui and Walrus “were built to be the home where AI data is stored, licensed, and paid for.”
Andrea Muttoni, CEO of the DATA Foundation, said the move lets it offer “more than just an audit trail,” pointing to encrypted file storage and possibly verifiable trusted execution environments (TEEs) for model evaluations and fine-tuning down the line.
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