(PRESS RELEASE – Palo Alto, United States, October 12, 2026)
Trace, the on-chain ledger for permissioned AI training data with over 250 million verifiable receipts, brings its training data to Sui and Walrus to power the next generation of AI models.
Sui Foundation and The DATA Foundation announced today that the DATA network and its Trace The registries join the Sui stack, bringing a live delivery of permissioned AI training data to the infrastructure that Sui has built for AI workloads. Walrusthe data platform with integrity proofs anchored on Sui, becomes the default storage layer for applications operated by DATA Foundation. Additionally, the DATA network will be upgraded to work as a native protocol on Sui.
The upgrade gives AI labs a single place to find real-world training data that they are authorized to use, with its provenance recorded by Trace and the original file stored and access controlled on Walrus.
The data AI needs next
The next generation of AI models is limited by access to real-world data. The open internet has been done away with, and the data that follows must come from people, with consent and provenance that regulators and legal teams will accept. European AI law and ongoing litigation over training data have made provenance a sourcing requirement for labs.
The data these models need is in people rather than on the open web: a nurse describing a patient’s night in her own words, a dashcam recording of a rainy commute in Jakarta, the hands of a factory technician as he diagnoses a fault, or a customer call made in Bengali. It is personal and often regulated, and it belongs to the people who generated it.
Trace, launched by the DATA Foundation in June as an on-chain ledger for AI training data, was designed for exactly this type of data. He notes the origin of each contribution and the rights attached to it and settles payment to the person who made it. It has recorded more than 250 million contributions since its launch and now processes more than 3 million receipts per day on average. Applications written on Trace include Kled, the largest opt-in human data marketplace with over 1.5 billion integrated records, as well as Numo and Oto, applications that already license data to pioneering AI labs and robotics companies.
Why Sui and Walrus
Sui represents each asset as a programmable object, allowing datasets and their on-chain licenses to be managed like tokens. Independent transactions run in parallel and settle in less than a second, making the network capable of handling millions of daily records. Walrus extends this functionality to large files: it efficiently stores massive AI datasets and ensures that the data is only readable by approved buyers. No other network offers natively integrated storage, access control, and ownership tracking in a single ecosystem, along with verifiable compute.
Trace now adds a flagship royalty-free data offering, with existing demand from AI labs licensing it today. The result of the integration will be stronger provenance guarantees and tamper proofs. Today, a Trace record proves that a file was recorded and when, and with Walrus, Trace itself will be able to hold an encrypted and immutable copy of the file provided as a reference guarantee. The hash of the record can be regenerated from the data itself rather than from metadata provided by an application, and any further processing of the file can be compared to the original.
The upgrade is based on a long-term strategic investment. The Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in the DATA Network, establishing the largest institutional stake in the network, alongside continued stakes from PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation. Continuing this alignment, SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, joins the Sui Foundation as a strategic advisor.
Protocol upgrade
DATA Network will be upgraded to work as a native protocol on Sui, and its independent chain will be retired. $DATA continues to be the symbol of the DATA protocol on Sui, transferred one by one, with economic and governance rights for holders at least equivalent to those of today. Locked and acquired positions remain unchanged. At the same time, Walrus becomes the default storage layer for DATA Foundation applications.
Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer at Mysten Labs, the original contributor to Sui and Walrus, said: “The AI industry has reached the point where the open Internet has been read, and the next frontier is defined by access to data sets with the consent and provenance required by regulators. Sui and Walrus were built to be the home where AI data is stored, licensed and paid for, capable of operating at the scale demanded by these systems. The migration of DATA Network and Trace to our stack now brings massive volumes of high-quality, permissioned data that are already serving the most advanced AI laboratories in the world.
SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, said: “The next generation of AI will be trained on data that lives with people rather than the open web, and that data needs to have consent and provenance built in, as well as a way to pay the people it came from, and Trace was designed to be that layer. It’s now part of the Sui stack alongside Walrus, backed by one of the strongest engineering organizations in the industry and with the Sui Foundation as the network’s largest strategic holder. It’s the perfect home for the network we have built, and I look forward to helping Sui make it the data layer for AI.
Andrea Muttoni, CEO of DATA Foundation, said: “Training data is critical to continually expanding boundaries, and ensuring it is traceable, auditable, and authorized for use is just as important to AI security as a precursor to data quality. With Trace, we have tracked hundreds of millions of data assets. Joining forces with Sui now allows us to further develop the stack, offering more than just an audit trail, such as storing encrypted reference files and potentially fully auditable TEEs for evaluations and fine-tuning in the future.”
The existing DATA network will continue to operate until the upgrade is complete, and a detailed schedule and incumbent transition plan will be released prior to the upgrade.
About the DATA Foundation
DATA Foundation supports the DATA network, the protocol for tracking the provenance of real-world data that AI models need. Through Traceeach contribution is recorded with its receipt of origin and a complete audit trail. Applications built on the network include Kled, Numo, Oto and others. Formerly Story Foundation, the organization refocused on AI training data in June 2026. The DATA network is being upgraded to work as a protocol on Sui.
About Sui
Suiwhere money flows as freely as messages, is a next-generation layer 1 blockchain designed for on-chain finance and agentic infrastructure. Founded by the core team behind Meta’s stablecoin initiative and powered by an object-centric model, Sui makes assets, permissions, and user data programmable and verifiable. Sui primitives provide everything needed to build high-performance native AI and financial applications. Learn more about sui.io.
About Morse code
Walrus is the data platform designed for AI requirements. It allows manufacturers, enterprises and AI agents to move data between applications and models, protect it with built-in access rules and make it verifiable by everyone. As AI takes high-consequence actions, the data it runs on must be provable. Created by the cryptographers and distributed systems engineers behind Sui and Meta’s first stablecoin initiative. morse.xyz
Media contacts
DATA Foundation: datafoundation@150bond.com
Sui Foundation: comms@sui.io
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