GoKawiilSui Foundation invests $30M as DATA Network abandons its own blockchain
Sui Foundation announced on October 12, 2026 a $30 million investment in DATA Network, the AI training-data project formerly known as Story Protocol, which will shut down its own Layer 1 and migrate to run natively on Sui. The project's Trace registry, which logs provenance and licensing rights for training data and has logged over 250 million registrations since its June 2026 launch, will move to Sui, with Sui's Walrus storage platform becoming the default storage layer for DATA Foundation applications.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
A DATA Foundation spokesperson said maintaining a dedicated blockchain for a single use case was too costly in validators, security and infrastructure, suggesting the shutdown reflects economics as much as strategy. For Sui, hosting Trace and its datasets could position the network to capture a growing slice of AI training-data infrastructure, a workload the project notes could have gone to any chain, making this partly a bet on where verifiable, consent-based data markets consolidate.
- Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in DATA Network, formerly Story Protocol
- DATA Network will retire its own Layer 1 blockchain and move operations to Sui
- Trace, DATA's data-provenance registry with 250M+ registrations, will use Sui's Walrus storage
Source: techreport.com — Krishi Chowdhary, 2026-10-13
Published there as: “Sui Foundation backs DATA Network’s move off its own chain with $30 million”
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