DATA Foundation, the startup formerly known as Story Protocol and backed by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto, is retiring its own blockchain and moving its operations to Sui after receiving a $30 million investment from the Sui Foundation. The company is narrowing its business to tracking the origins, consent terms and licensing history of data used to train artificial-intelligence models.
The decision marks a major change for a company that raised $140 million to put intellectual property rights onchain. According to CoinDesk, DATA Chief Executive Andrea Muttoni said the startup concluded that trying to transform licensing across many industries was too broad a task, particularly because established markets already had systems and large rights holders were not generally seeking permissionless licensing.
From broad intellectual property plans to AI data
Founded in 2022 in Bellevue, Washington, the company originally aimed to support a wide range of intellectual property, including music royalties, patents and trademarks. Its proposed system would allow owners to register their rights on a blockchain and specify the conditions under which others could use them.
The strategy was later reconsidered. DATA rebranded from Story Protocol to DATA Foundation in June and began concentrating on AI training data. The company is now focusing more narrowly on verifying where such data came from and what rights apply to its use.
Muttoni said the original approach had spread the company across too many forms of intellectual property. The startup’s experience with Poseidon, an AI data company incubated by the Story team, helped reveal a more specific market problem: buyers could have difficulty determining whether datasets were original, properly licensed or exclusive. In one instance, Poseidon was offered a dataset described as exclusive even though it was already available from other sellers.
DATA’s central product is Trace, a registry designed to create a record for each file submitted through a participating data marketplace. The record can include when the file was contributed, the terms accepted by the contributor, and subsequent licensing or payment events.
Kled, a marketplace that pays people to contribute data, is responsible for much of the activity being recorded. Muttoni said Kled is adding between 3 million and 4 million contributions each day, including older records being transferred to Trace. That figure measures registrations, not necessarily completed sales, and DATA has not disclosed how many records have produced licensing revenue.
For now, the company says its role is to provide infrastructure for auditability and provenance rather than compete directly with data marketplaces. Muttoni has not ruled out DATA eventually running a marketplace, but gave no further details.
Why DATA is moving to Sui
Maintaining a blockchain requires engineering staff, validators, audits and infrastructure providers. As DATA’s activity became increasingly centered on Trace, the company questioned whether it still needed to operate an entire layer-1 network of its own.
Moving to Sui allows DATA to concentrate its resources on the protocol and product while using services that fit its plans for Trace. One is Walrus, a decentralized storage platform that could hold copies of the original files associated with Trace records. Another is Seal, which can encrypt those files and limit access to buyers with the required permissions.
At present, Trace records information about a file rather than storing the file itself. Adding storage would allow buyers to compare received material with the original submission and make changes easier to identify.
The Sui Foundation will become DATA Network’s largest institutional holder through the $30 million investment. Financial terms beyond the investment amount were not disclosed, and Muttoni said the foundation is taking a hands-off approach to DATA’s product plans.
DATA also plans to migrate its existing token to Sui on a one-to-one basis. The current blockchain will remain operational until the migration is completed. According to the company’s release, holders will retain their rights and existing vesting schedules will not change.
Moneyiar market picture
Moneyiar market data at 2026-10-22 23:09 +03:30 showed the following prices and performance:
- DATA: $0.1492626469, down 4.92% over 24 hours and 21.63% over seven days.
- SUI: $0.9723959479, down 5.46% over 24 hours and 5.98% over seven days.
- Ethereum: $2,382.1547672812, down 3.9% over 24 hours and 2.54% over seven days.
- RAIN: $0.0085627863, down 5.83% over 24 hours and 9.87% over seven days.
The move leaves DATA focused on a narrower use case than the one behind its original blockchain: establishing a verifiable record for AI training data and the rights attached to it. Muttoni described the shift as a continuation of the company’s rebranding rather than a wholly separate direction, arguing that the strongest demand identified by the team came from data provenance and licensing verification.
