Sui Foundation and the DATA Foundation announced that the DATA Network and its Trace registry are joining the Sui stack, bringing a live supply of rights-cleared AI training data onto Sui’s infrastructure for AI workloads. As part of the move, Walrus, the data platform with integrity proofs anchored on Sui, becomes the default storage layer for applications operated by DATA Foundation, while the DATA Network itself will be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui.
The upgrade gives AI labs a single place to source real-world training data they’re allowed to use—with provenance recorded by Trace and the original file stored and access-controlled on Walrus.
The Data AI Needs Next
The next generation of AI models is constrained by access to real-world data. The open internet has been scraped, and what comes next must come from people—with consent and provenance that regulators and legal teams will accept. The EU AI Act and ongoing litigation over training data have turned provenance into a procurement requirement for labs.
That data sits with people, not on the open web: a nurse describing a patient’s night in her own words, a dashcam recording of a rainy commute in Jakarta, a factory technician’s hands diagnosing a fault, a customer call conducted in Bengali. It’s personal, often regulated, and belongs to the people who generated it.
DATA Foundation launched Trace in June for exactly this. It records each contribution’s origin and attached rights, and settles payment to the person who contributed it. Since launch, it has registered more than 250 million contributions and now processes, on average, over 3 million receipts per day. Applications writing to Trace include Kled — the largest opt-in human data marketplace, with over 1.5 billion records being onboarded — alongside Numo and Oto, which already license data to frontier AI labs and robotics companies.
Why Sui and Walrus
Sui represents every asset as a programmable object, allowing datasets and their licenses to be managed on-chain like tokens. Independent transactions execute in parallel and settle in under a second, enabling the network to handle millions of daily registrations. Walrus extends that to large files—storing massive AI datasets efficiently while ensuring data is readable only by licensed buyers. No other network offers storage, access control, and ownership tracking built natively into a single ecosystem, together with verifiable compute.
Trace now adds a flagship supply of rights-cleared data, with existing demand from the AI labs that license it today. The integration strengthens provenance guarantees and tamper evidence. Today, a Trace record proves that a file was registered and when; with Walrus, Trace will also hold an encrypted, immutable copy of the contributed file itself as a reference guarantee. The record’s hash can be regenerated from the data itself — rather than from metadata an application supplied — and any later processing of the file can be checked against the original.
Backed by Strategic Investment
The upgrade is supported by a long-term strategic investment. Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in the DATA Network, establishing the largest institutional stake in the network, alongside continuing holdings from PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation.
Reinforcing the alignment, SY Lee — Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs — joins Sui Foundation as Strategic Advisor.
The Protocol Upgrade
DATA Network will be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui, and its independent chain will be retired. $DATA continues as the DATA protocol token on Sui, carried over one-to-one, with holder economics and governance rights at least as strong as today. Locked and vesting positions carry over unchanged. In parallel, Walrus becomes the default storage layer for DATA Foundation applications.
Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs, the original contributor to Sui and Walrus, said: “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. Sui and Walrus were built to be the home for storing, licensing, and paying for AI data, capable of operating at the scale these systems demand. 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.”
SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, said: “The next generation of AI will be trained on data that lives with people rather than on the open web, and that data needs consent and provenance built in, along with a way to pay the people it comes from, and Trace was built to be that layer. It now sits within the Sui stack alongside Walrus, backed by one of the industry’s strongest engineering organizations and with Sui Foundation as the network’s largest strategic holder. 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.”
Andrea Muttoni, CEO of DATA Foundation, said: “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. With Trace, we have been tracking hundreds of millions of data assets. 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.”
The existing DATA Network will continue to operate until the upgrade is complete, and a detailed timeline and holder transition plan will be published prior to the upgrade.
About DATA Foundation
DATA Foundation supports the DATA Network, the protocol for tracking provenance of the real-world data AI models need. Through Trace, it registers each contribution with a provenance receipt and a full audit trail. Applications building on the network include Kled, Numo, Oto, and others. Formerly Story Foundation, the organization refocused on AI training data in June 2026. The DATA Network is being upgraded to run as a protocol on Sui.