Sui Invests $30 Million in Data Network, Becomes Largest Holder

Sui is bringing Data Network, an AI training-data provenance project formerly known as Story, into its ecosystem.

The Data Foundation said on Oct. 12 that the Sui Foundation invested $30 million in Data Network, making it the network’s largest holder. The stake exceeds the holdings of early developer PIP Labs and the Data Foundation itself.

The investment will turn Data Network into a native protocol on the Sui blockchain. Its provenance registry, Trace, will also be integrated into the Sui stack.

Sui’s data platform Walrus will become the default storage layer for applications operated by the Data Foundation. That will place a real-time supply of rights-cleared AI training data on Sui infrastructure, according to a foundation official. Trace will record the data’s provenance, while original files will be stored on Walrus with access controls.

The independent blockchain previously operated by Data Network will be discontinued. Its DATA token will migrate on a one-to-one basis to a Sui-based Data Network token, while investors’ economic and governance rights will be preserved.

Lockup and vesting positions that restrict token sales and release them over time will also carry over unchanged. The existing Data Network will continue to operate until the migration to Sui is completed. A detailed timeline and transition plan will be released later, the Data Foundation said.

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer at Mysten Labs, Sui’s developer, said the AI industry has reached the point where it has trained on all publicly available internet data. The next phase of growth will hinge on securing datasets with the consent and provenance records required by regulators. With Data Network and Trace moving onto Sui infrastructure, high-quality data with verified usage rights that is already being supplied to advanced AI labs will flow in at scale.

Andrea Muttoni, chief executive officer of the Data Foundation, said the partnership with Sui will allow the infrastructure to expand beyond AI audit trails to support storage for encrypted reference files. It also opens the door to providing a fully verifiable trusted execution environment, or TEE, for AI model evaluation and fine-tuning.

Lee Seung-yoon, co-founder of Data Network, chief strategy officer at Poseidon and chairman of its board, also serves as a strategic adviser to the Sui Foundation. He said Trace is now joining Sui infrastructure with support from one of the industry’s strongest technical organizations, while also welcoming the Sui Foundation as the network’s largest holder. He added that he expects to help develop Data Network into AI data infrastructure alongside Sui.