Sui Foundation and The DATA Foundation announced that the DATA Network and its Trace registry are joining the Sui stack. The move brings a working supply of rights-cleared AI training data onto infrastructure Sui has built for AI workloads, and puts Walrus, the data platform with integrity proofs anchored on Sui, in place as the default storage layer for DATA Foundation applications. The DATA Network itself will be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui, retiring its independent chain.
Trace launched in June 2026 as an onchain registry that records where each AI training data contribution came from and what rights attach to it, then settles payment to the person who contributed it. Since launch it has registered more than 250 million contributions and now processes over 3 million receipts a day on average. Applications writing to Trace include Kled, described as the largest opt-in human data marketplace with 1.5 billion records onboarding, along with Numo and Oto, which license data directly to frontier AI labs and robotics companies.
The next generation of AI needs real-world data from people, with consent and provenance built in.@datafdn’s DATA Network and Trace, a registry with 250M+ receipts, are joining Sui and @WalrusProtocol to scale rights-cleared AI training data.
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) October 12, 2026
Learn more:https://t.co/p1H3BAQCAH
Why provenance became a procurement requirement
The data AI labs need next does not sit on the open web anymore. It comes from people: a nurse's notes on a patient's night, dashcam footage from a rainy commute in Jakarta, a factory technician's hands while fixing a fault, a customer service call in Bengali. That data is personal, often regulated, and owned by the people who created it.
This shift tracks with real regulatory pressure. The EU AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, requires providers of general-purpose AI models to document and disclose a summary of the content used to train their systems, with the heaviest transparency obligations phasing in through August 2026. Separately, lawsuits including The New York Times against OpenAI and Getty Images against Stability AI have put courts in the position of deciding whether scraped web content can be used for training without consent, which is part of why labs now treat documented provenance as a baseline procurement requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
What Sui and Walrus add to the stack
On Sui, every dataset and its license become programmable objects that can be managed onchain like tokens, and independent transactions execute in parallel and settle in under a second. Walrus extends that to large files, storing massive AI datasets so they stay readable only to licensed buyers. Together the two networks let Trace hold an encrypted, immutable copy of a contributed file as a reference guarantee, so a hash can be regenerated from the data itself instead of from metadata supplied by an application, and later processing of the file can be checked against the original.
Sui was built by Mysten Labs, a team that includes several former engineers from Meta's Diem blockchain project, and reached mainnet in May 2023. Walrus came out of the same lab and launched its mainnet in 2025 as a decentralized storage network built specifically for large unstructured data such as AI datasets, rather than the small transactional data most blockchains are designed to hold.
Money and governance behind the migration
Sui Foundation is investing 30 million dollars in the DATA Network, which it says establishes the largest institutional stake in the network, alongside continuing holdings from PIP Labs and DATA Foundation. SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, joins Sui Foundation as Strategic Advisor as part of the arrangement.
PIP Labs is the team behind Story Protocol, a separate blockchain built for registering and licensing intellectual property, which gives SY Lee a parallel track record in building onchain rights infrastructure before this move into AI training data.
$DATA continues as the token of the DATA protocol on Sui, carried over one to one, with holder economics and governance rights at least equivalent to current terms, and locked or vesting positions carry over unchanged. Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs, said
"Sui and Walrus were built to be the home where AI data is stored, licensed, and paid for, capable of operating at the scale these systems demand."
Andrea Muttoni, CEO of DATA Foundation, said the registry has been "tracking hundreds of millions of data assets" and that joining Sui "allows us to build out more of the stack." A detailed timeline for the upgrade and holder transition plan will be published before migration begins.
Gunel Ismayilova
Disclosure: This article is based on a joint press release issued by Sui Foundation and The DATA Foundation, along with a companion announcement posted on X by the Sui Network account. No direct interview was conducted with Sui Foundation, DATA Foundation, PIP Labs, or Mysten Labs representatives for this piece; all quotes are drawn verbatim from the published release. The publisher has no financial, advertising, equity, or partnership relationship with Sui Foundation, DATA Foundation, PIP Labs, Mysten Labs, or any affiliated entity named in this article. Readers should treat all figures tied to token economics, investment size, and data volume as claims made by the announcing parties, not as independently verified by this publication.
