DATA Network to retire its own chain and move to Sui, with $30 million from Sui Foundation

DATA Network, formerly known as Story, whose DATA token trades in Korean won on Upbit and Bithumb, will shut down its own blockchain and move onto Sui (SUI). Sui Foundation and The DATA Foundation announced the plan on Oct. 12 in a post on Sui's official blog. Sui Foundation will invest $30 million in the DATA Network, becoming the network's largest institutional holder.

Tokens carry over 1:1, lockups and vesting unchanged

Under the plan, the DATA Network will be upgraded to run as a protocol natively 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, and the foundations said holder economics and governance rights will be at least equivalent to today. Locked tokens and vesting positions carry over unchanged.

No date has been announced yet. The existing chain will keep running until the upgrade is complete, and a detailed timeline and holder transition plan will be published before the upgrade. Upbit had not issued any deposit or withdrawal notice related to the migration as of the afternoon of Oct. 12 KST.

A single-use chain meant carrying validator and infrastructure costs

Moving with the network is Trace, an onchain registry for AI training data that The DATA Foundation launched in June. For each piece of data it records where the data came from and what rights are attached, and it settles payment to the person who contributed it. Sui Foundation said Trace has registered more than 250 million contributions since launch and processes over 3 million receipts a day on average. Applications writing to Trace include Kled, an opt-in human data marketplace, along with Numo and Oto. Kled has more than 1.5 billion records being onboarded to Trace.

The two foundations said the open internet has already been scraped and the next generation of AI models will need data gathered from people with their consent. They said the EU AI Act and litigation over training data have made proof of provenance a procurement requirement for AI labs.

Storage will be handled by Walrus, a decentralized storage platform in the Sui ecosystem. Walrus becomes the default storage layer for applications operated by The DATA Foundation and will keep an encrypted copy of each original file that only licensed buyers can read. According to Cointelegraph, a DATA Foundation spokesperson cited the burden of carrying validator, security and infrastructure costs for a chain dedicated to a single use case as the reason for the move. Asked whether the $30 million investment influenced the decision, the spokesperson said it was a separate part of the partnership.

Andrea Muttoni, CEO of The DATA Foundation, said joining Sui lets the team build beyond an audit trail, with features such as encrypted reference file storage, and potentially run evals and fine-tuning in verifiable trusted execution environments (TEEs) in the future.

Three months after the new name, a new chain

The DATA Network grew out of Story, a project that set out to put intellectual property (IP) licensing on a blockchain. On June 25 (local time), the Story Foundation posted on X that "Today, Story becomes The DATA Foundation," shifting its focus to AI training data, and the IP token became DATA at a 1:1 ratio. Upbit supported the rebrand by halting deposits and withdrawals at 2 p.m. KST on July 7 and reopening trading under the DATA name at 4 p.m. on July 8. Deposits and withdrawals resumed at 7 p.m. that day.

Alongside the investment, SY Lee, CEO of PIP Labs and chairman of Poseidon, joins Sui Foundation as a strategic advisor. PIP Labs and The DATA Foundation keep their existing holdings.

"This is the right home for the network we built."

SY Lee, CEO of PIP Labs

DATA at 282 won on Upbit, about 2% of its high a year ago

DATA traded at 282 won on Upbit at 5:31 p.m. KST on Oct. 12, up 4.4% from the previous close of 270 won, after moving between 265 won and 303 won during the day. It was 279 won on Bithumb at the same time. Upbit trading value since 9 a.m. was about 15.6 billion won, while Bithumb's 24-hour trading value was about 1.9 billion won.

Upbit's 52-week high is 11,590 won, set on Oct. 14 last year when the token still traded as IP, and the current price is more than 97% below that level. The 52-week low is 238 won, set on Aug. 19. Sui (SUI) traded at 1,511 won on Upbit at the same time.