Trace brings 250 million receipts to Sui and Walrus for AI data

Key takeaways
Trace, the onchain registry for rights-cleared AI training data with more than 250 million verifiable receipts, is moving to Sui and Walrus. Sui Foundation and The DATA Foundation announced the integration in a press release issued from Palo Alto, United States, on October 12th, 2026. DATA Network will run natively on Sui, and Walrus, a data platform with integrity proofs anchored on Sui, becomes the default storage layer for DATA Foundation applications. Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in DATA Network, the largest institutional stake in the network.

What happened
The integration creates one sourcing path for AI labs: Trace records origin and rights, while Walrus stores files with access controls for licensed buyers. Trace was launched by DATA Foundation in June, has registered more than 250 million contributions, and processes over 3 million receipts per day on average. Applications include Kled, the largest opt-in human data marketplace with over 1.5 billion records being onboarded, and Numo and Oto, which license data to frontier AI labs and robotics companies.

DATA Network's independent chain will be retired. The $DATA token continues as the token of the DATA protocol on Sui one-to-one, with holder economics and governance rights at least equivalent to today. Locked and vesting positions carry over unchanged. The existing DATA Network will continue until the upgrade is complete, and a detailed timeline and holder transition plan will be published before the upgrade.

Market context
The release frames the move around constrained access to real-world data. It says the open internet has been scraped and future data must come from people, with consent and provenance that regulators and legal teams will accept. It cites the EU AI Act and ongoing litigation over training data as reasons provenance has become a procurement requirement for labs. Examples include a nurse describing a patient's night in her own words, a dashcam recording a rainy commute in Jakarta, a factory technician's hands diagnosing a fault, and a customer call in Bengali. This data is personal, often regulated, and belongs to the people who generated it.

Sui represents every asset as a programmable object, allowing datasets and licenses to be managed onchain like tokens. Independent transactions execute in parallel and settle in under a second, presented as able to handle millions of daily registrations. Walrus stores large AI datasets efficiently and restricts readability to licensed buyers. It also lets builders, enterprises, and AI agents move data across apps and models, protect it with built-in access rules, and make it verifiable. The source describes Sui as a next-generation layer 1 blockchain founded by the core team behind Meta's stablecoin initiative and powered by an object-centric model. It also describes Walrus as created by the cryptographers and distributed systems engineers behind Sui and Meta's first stablecoin initiative. Sui's primitives are described as offering everything necessary for high-performance finance and AI-native applications.

Why it matters
For AI labs, the stated value is not just provenance metadata but a stronger evidence chain. A Trace record proves a file was registered and when. With Walrus, Trace will hold an encrypted, immutable copy of the contributed file as a reference guarantee. The hash can be regenerated from the data rather than application-supplied metadata, and later processing can be checked against the original.

The announcement also adds institutional alignment. Sui Foundation's $30 million investment becomes the largest institutional stake in DATA Network, alongside continuing holdings of PIP Labs and DATA Foundation. SY Lee, Chairman of Poseidon and CEO of PIP Labs, joins Sui Foundation as Strategic Advisor. DATA Foundation, formerly Story Foundation, refocused on AI training data in June 2026.

Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs, the original contributor to Sui and Walrus, said the open internet has been read and the next frontier requires datasets with consent and provenance regulators demand. SY Lee said the next generation of AI will use data that lives with people, and Trace was built to record consent, provenance, and payment. Andrea Muttoni, CEO of DATA Foundation, said Trace has been tracking hundreds of millions of data assets and that joining Sui lets the foundation build encrypted reference file storage and potentially fully verifiable trusted execution environments for evaluations and fine-tuning.

What to watch
The transition is the immediate practical question. DATA Network will be upgraded to run natively on Sui and its independent chain will be retired, but the detailed timeline and holder transition plan are to be published before the upgrade. Readers should watch how the existing DATA Network operates during that period, how one-to-one token migration and locked positions are handled, and whether Walrus becomes the default storage layer as described.

The stated scale is the baseline: over 3 million receipts per day and more than 250 million contributions. The longer-term claim is that Sui and Walrus combine storage, access control, ownership tracking, and verifiable compute in one ecosystem. The release does not provide post-upgrade performance data, so the result remains to be observed.