DATA Network joins Sui and Walrus to scale the supply chain for AI training data

Palo Alto, United States, October twelfth, 2026, Chainwire

Trace, the onchain registry for rights-cleared AI training data with greater than 250 million verifiable receipts, brings its training data to Sui and Walrus to energy the subsequent era of AI fashions.

Sui Foundation and The DATA Foundation at present introduced that the DATA Network and its Trace registry are becoming a member of the Sui stack, bringing a stay supply of rights-cleared AI training data onto the infrastructure Sui has constructed for AI workloads. Walrus, the data platform with integrity proofs anchored on Sui, turns into the default storage layer for purposes operated by DATA Foundation. Separately, the DATA Network shall be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui.

The improve offers AI labs a single place to supply real-world training data they’re allowed to use, with its provenance recorded by Trace and the unique file saved and access-controlled on Walrus.

The data AI wants subsequent

The subsequent era of AI fashions is constrained by entry to real-world data. The open web has been scraped, and the data that comes subsequent should be sourced from individuals, with consent and with provenance that regulators and authorized groups will settle for. The EU AI Act and ongoing litigation over training data have made provenance a procurement requirement for labs.

The data these fashions want sits with individuals fairly than on the open internet: a nurse describing a affected person’s night time in her personal phrases, a dashcam recording of a wet commute in Jakarta, a manufacturing facility technician’s arms as they diagnose a fault, or a buyer name carried out in Bengali. It is private and typically regulated, and it belongs to the individuals who generated it.

Trace, launched by DATA Foundation in June as an onchain registry for AI training data, was constructed for precisely this sort of data. It information the origin of every contribution and the rights connected to it, and settles cost to the one that contributed it. It has registered greater than 250 million contributions since launch and now processes over 3M receipts per day on common. Applications writing to Trace embrace Kled, the largest opt-in human data market with over 1.5 billion information being onboarded, together with Numo and Oto, purposes that already license data to frontier AI labs and robotics corporations.

Why Sui and Walrus

Sui represents each asset as a programmable object, permitting datasets and their licenses to be managed onchain like tokens. Independent transactions execute in parallel and settle in underneath a second, making the community able to dealing with tens of millions of every day registrations. Walrus extends this functionality to giant information: it shops huge AI datasets effectively and ensures data is barely readable by licensed patrons. No different community gives storage, entry management, and possession monitoring constructed natively right into a single ecosystem, along with verifiable compute.

Trace now provides a flagship supply of rights-cleared data, with present demand from the AI labs that license it at present. The results of the integration shall be stronger provenance ensures and tamper proof. Today a Trace file proves {that a} file was registered and when, and with Walrus, Trace shall be ready to maintain an encrypted, immutable copy of the contributed file itself as a reference assure. The hash of the file may be regenerated from the data itself fairly than from metadata an utility provided, and any later processing of the file may be checked in opposition to the unique.

The improve is backed by a long-term strategic funding. Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in the DATA Network, establishing the largest institutional stake in the community, alongside the persevering with holdings of PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation. Furthering the alignment, SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, joins Sui Foundation as Strategic Advisor.

The protocol improve

DATA Network shall be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui, and its impartial chain shall be retired. $DATA continues as the token of the DATA protocol on Sui, carried over one-to-one, with holder economics and governance rights at the least equal to at present. Locked and vesting positions carry over unchanged. In parallel, Walrus turns into the default storage layer for DATA Foundation purposes.

Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs, the unique contributor to Sui and Walrus, stated: “The AI business has reached the level the place the open web has been learn, and the subsequent frontier is outlined by entry to datasets with the consent and provenance that regulators require. Sui and Walrus had been constructed to be the residence the place AI data is saved, licensed, and paid for, able to working at the scale these methods demand. The migration of DATA Network and Trace to our stack now brings huge volumes of high-quality, rights-cleared data that’s already serving the world’s frontier AI labs.”

SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, stated: “The subsequent era of AI shall be skilled on data that lives with individuals fairly than on the open internet, and that data wants consent and provenance inbuilt, together with a means to pay the individuals it comes from, and Trace was constructed to be that layer. It now turns into a part of the Sui stack alongside Walrus, backed by certainly one of the strongest engineering organizations in the business and with Sui Foundation as the community’s largest strategic holder. This is the proper residence for the community we constructed, and I’m trying ahead to serving to Sui make it the data layer for AI.”

Andrea Muttoni, CEO of DATA Foundation, stated: “Training data is crucial for repeatedly increasing the frontier, and ensuring it’s traceable, auditable and cleared to use is simply as vital for AI security as it’s a precursor for data high quality. With Trace, now we have been monitoring a whole lot of tens of millions of data belongings. Joining forces with Sui now permits us to construct out extra of the stack, providing extra than simply an audit path, like encrypted reference file storage and doubtlessly totally verifiable TEEs for evals and tremendous tunings in the future.”

The present DATA Network will proceed to function till the improve is full, and an in depth timeline and holder transition plan shall be revealed prior to the improve.

About DATA Foundation

DATA Foundation helps the DATA Network, the protocol for monitoring provenance of the real-world data AI fashions want. Through Trace, every contribution is registered with its provenance receipt and a full audit path. Applications constructing on the community embrace Kled, Numo, Oto, and others. Formerly Story Foundation, the group refocused on AI training data in June 2026. The DATA Network is being upgraded to run as a protocol on Sui.

About Sui

Sui, the place cash strikes as freely as messages, is a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain constructed for onchain finance and agentic infrastructure. Founded by the core workforce behind Meta’s stablecoin initiative and powered by an object-centric mannequin, Sui makes belongings, permissions, and person data programmable and verifiable. Sui’s primitives supply every thing needed to create high-performance finance and AI-native purposes. Learn extra at sui.io.

About Walrus

Walrus is the data platform constructed for the calls for of AI. It lets builders, enterprises, and AI brokers transfer data throughout apps and fashions, shield it with built-in entry guidelines, and make it verifiable by anybody. As AI takes actions with consequence, the data it runs on has to be provable. Created by the cryptographers and distributed methods engineers behind Sui and Meta’s first stablecoin initiative. walrus.xyz

Media contacts

DATA Foundation: datafoundation@150bond.com

Sui Foundation: comms@sui.io