The DATA Network and its Trace registry are moving onto Sui. The DATA Foundation announced that its independent chain will be retired and the network upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui's infrastructure, with Walrus — a data platform whose integrity proofs are anchored on Sui — becoming the default storage layer for applications operated by the foundation.
At the center of the deal is a narrow problem: AI labs need training data they're actually allowed to use, and they need to know where it came from. Trace records each contribution's origin and attached rights, and settles payment to contributors. Walrus stores the underlying file and controls who can read it.
What Trace does, and how much is flowing through it
DATA Foundation launched Trace in June. Since then, the registry has logged more than 250 million contributions and now processes an average of over 3 million receipts per day. That's a lot of provenance records for a system that's only been live since the summer.
Applications writing to Trace include Kled, described as the largest opt-in human data marketplace, with over 1.5 billion records being onboarded. Numo and Oto also write to the registry; both license data to frontier AI labs and robotics companies. In other words, there's already demand on the other side of the supply.
Why Sui and Walrus are the destination
Sui represents every asset as a programmable object. That means datasets and their licenses can be managed on-chain like tokens, and independent transactions execute in parallel and settle in under a second. For a data marketplace, the license is the product — being able to move and enforce it on-chain is the point.
Walrus handles the storage side. It's built to hold massive AI datasets efficiently while ensuring the data is readable only by licensed buyers. With Walrus, Trace will 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 — a detail that matters when the question is whether a file is the one that was actually licensed.
The money and the people behind the move
Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in the DATA Network, establishing the largest institutional stake in the network. PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation continue to hold positions as well.
SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, is joining Sui Foundation as Strategic Advisor. Lee framed the migration around a shift in where AI training data comes from. He 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.
Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs, said the migration brings massive volumes of high-quality, rights-cleared data that is already serving the world's frontier AI labs.
What happens to $DATA
$DATA continues as the DATA protocol token on Sui, carried over one-to-one. The foundation says holder economics and governance rights will be at least as strong as they are today, and locked and vesting positions carry over unchanged. The independent chain goes away; the token doesn't.
The migration is the operational step still in progress. The DATA Network has to complete its upgrade to a native Sui protocol, and existing Trace applications — Kled with its 1.5 billion records, plus Numo and Oto — have to keep writing to the registry as the underlying infrastructure changes. No timeline for the full cutover was provided.
