DATA Network to Retire Its Own Chain and Move to Sui With $30 Million Backing

DATA Network, formerly known as Story, will retire its own blockchain and move its AI training data protocol to Sui. The move is backed by a $30 million investment from the Sui Foundation.

The Trace registry, launched in June, collected more than 270 million registrations in about four months. That growth, the project says, is what made a separate chain for a single use case hard to justify.

What exactly moves to Sui

The Trace registry will join the Sui ecosystem, and the decentralized storage platform Walrus will become the default storage layer for applications run by DATA Foundation and its partners. The partners announced it on Monday.

The current chain will keep running until the upgrade is complete. A detailed timeline and a transition plan for token holders are promised before the migration starts.

The division of roles is straightforward. Walrus takes over data storage, while Seal, as the project's representative described it, handles access control. Both already run on Sui, so the team does not have to build equivalents from scratch.

From IP licensing to AI data

The decision follows a pivot the project made over the summer. In June, Story Foundation rebranded to DATA Foundation and moved away from intellectual property licensing toward a "full stack for AI training data".

Trace became the first product of the new direction. It tracks the origin and usage rights of training data, which answers where a dataset came from and who allowed it to be used.

The pace in the registry is high. More than 270 million records in four months works out to over 2 million registrations a day on average, and the load on a standalone network at that volume would only grow.

Why a separate chain became a burden

A DATA Foundation spokesperson told Cointelegraph that running a dedicated blockchain for one use case means paying for validators, network security and infrastructure. For a project that is essentially a registry plus storage, that is an extra layer.

"Building storage and access control at that scale ourselves would have meant rebuilding what Sui already has in Walrus and Seal."

- DATA Foundation spokesperson, in a comment to Cointelegraph

The logic is plain. Validators, security and storage can be taken off the shelf, and the team can focus on the registry itself and the rules for accessing data.

The downside is just as obvious. The project becomes dependent on someone else's infrastructure, its fees and its technical decisions. A chain of its own gave control, and renting a ready-made network gives some of it away, which is a sensible trade only while Sui keeps running reliably.

Money and partnership are separate

Asked how much the investment influenced the decision, the spokesperson said the $30 million is a separate part of the partnership. By that account the move is driven by engineering and the cost of running a network, not by the check.

That can only be tested by the outcome. If infrastructure costs really fall after the migration and Trace keeps its registration pace, the explanation will look convincing.

What token holders still do not know

ZetaChain took a similar step earlier: its holders approved shutting down its own L1 and moving the token to Solana, which we covered in our piece on the ZetaChain L1 shutdown. For the market this is becoming a pattern, with smaller chains handing the base layer to bigger networks.

• Terms for swapping or moving the holders' token are not announced yet.
• The project has not named a date for finishing the upgrade.
• The transition plan will appear before the migration, not after it.

Until those details are out, judging the impact on holders is premature.

Bottom line

DATA Network is swapping its own chain for ready-made Sui infrastructure, backed by $30 million and 270 million Trace registrations. What to watch next is the transition timeline and the terms for token holders.