The DATA Network is moving its rights-cleared AI training data registry onto Sui, the layer-1 blockchain built by Mysten Labs. The migration brings the Trace registry — which has amassed more than 250 million verifiable receipts since its June launch — into the Sui stack. Sui Foundation is putting $30 million into the DATA Network, making it the largest institutional holder of the project.
What Trace actually does
Trace is an onchain registry for AI training data that has been cleared for rights. It's not a marketplace or a model trainer. It's the paper trail. Since launching in June, it has registered over 250 million contributions and now processes roughly 3 million receipts per day. Applications already writing to Trace include Kled, an opt-in human data marketplace onboarding more than 1.5 billion records, plus Numo and Oto, which license data to frontier AI labs and robotics companies.
The timing isn't accidental. The EU AI Act and ongoing litigation over how AI models are trained have turned provenance from a nice-to-have into a procurement requirement. AI labs buying data now need to show where it came from and that the people who produced it agreed to its use.
Sui's parallel execution as the backbone
Sui represents every asset as a programmable object. That means datasets and their licenses can be managed onchain the way tokens are — bought, sold, restricted, revoked. Independent transactions execute in parallel and settle in under a second, which matters when you're handling millions of daily registrations.
Walrus, Sui's decentralized storage layer, becomes the default for applications operated by DATA Foundation. It stores large AI datasets and ensures only licensed buyers can read them. Integrity proofs are anchored on Sui.
With the integration, Trace will be able to hold an encrypted, immutable copy of the contributed file itself as a reference guarantee. The hash of the record can be regenerated from the data itself rather than from metadata an application supplied. In plain terms: the proof of what was contributed no longer depends on trusting the app that submitted it.
What happens to $DATA and the old chain
The DATA Network will be upgraded to run natively as a protocol on Sui, and its independent chain will be retired. $DATA continues as the token of the DATA protocol on Sui, carried over one-to-one. Holder economics and governance rights are at least equivalent to today, and locked and vesting positions carry over unchanged.
Alongside the $30 million investment, Sui Foundation continues to hold positions from PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation. SY Lee, chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, joins Sui Foundation as a strategic advisor.
Why provenance became a product
Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer at Mysten Labs, commented on the AI industry's need for datasets with consent and provenance, and on the migration of DATA Network and Trace to Sui and Walrus. The subtext is that the market for AI training data has a trust problem, and blockchains — with their immutable records and programmable licenses — are being pitched as part of the fix.
Whether that pitch holds depends on adoption. Kled's 1.5 billion records are being onboarded, but the registry's value grows only if AI labs keep treating provenance as a requirement rather than a checkbox. The DATA Network's old chain retires as the protocol goes live on Sui. No date has been given for that cutover.
