Ex-Story Protocol DATA shuts its chain and moves to Sui

DATA, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup once known as Story Protocol, is shutting down its own blockchain and moving to Sui after a $30 million investment from the Sui Foundation, CoinDesk reports. It is the second big change of direction this year for a project that raised $140 million to put intellectual property on-chain.

From IP registry to AI data

Story was founded in 2022 in Bellevue, Washington, with a sweeping plan: let owners of everything from music royalties to patents and trademarks register their rights on a blockchain and set licence terms. That proved hard. Many of those industries already had working systems, and big rights holders showed little appetite for permissionless licensing. "We were trying to boil the ocean," CEO Andrea Muttoni told CoinDesk.

In June the project renamed itself DATA Foundation and turned to the market for AI training data. Part of the inspiration came from Poseidon, an AI data company the team had incubated, which found that buyers often could not tell whether a dataset was original, properly licensed or really exclusive. Muttoni said vendors once offered the team its own dataset back.

What Trace does

Trace is now the core product. When someone uploads, say, a voice clip or video through a participating marketplace, Trace issues a record showing when it was submitted, what terms the contributor accepted, and any later licensing or payment events.

• Activity: Kled, a marketplace that pays people for data, adds 3 million to 4 million contributions a day, including older records being moved onto Trace.
• Caveat: those figures measure registrations, not sales. DATA did not disclose how many records have earned licensing revenue, or how much of the original $140 million remains.

Why leave its own blockchain

Running a layer 1 means paying for engineers, validators, audits and infrastructure. Once almost all the work centred on Trace, the team asked whether that still made sense. On Sui it gains two tools: Walrus, decentralised storage that could keep copies of the files Trace registers (today Trace stores only information about a file), and Seal, which can encrypt files and limit access to buyers with the right permissions. For background on how smart-contract networks like this differ, see our guide to proof of work vs proof of stake.

What happens to token holders

According to DATA's press release, existing $DATA tokens move to Sui one-to-one, with holders keeping their rights and vesting schedules. The current chain keeps running until the migration finishes. Sui Foundation, through the $30 million investment, becomes DATA Network's largest institutional holder, though Muttoni said it is taking a hands-off approach to the product. The pivot fits a wider trend of crypto projects chasing AI, which we have also seen in AI agents making x402 payments. Tokens moving between networks carry their own risks; our explainer on crypto bridges covers the basics.