DATA Foundation Pivots to Sui and Abandons Proprietary Blockchain

DATA Foundation, the crypto startup formerly known as Story Protocol and backed by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto, is shutting down its proprietary Layer 1 blockchain and migrating its infrastructure to Sui ¹. The pivot follows a $30 million investment from the Sui Foundation, announced on Oct. 21, 2026, and marks an operational shift away from managing validator networks and low-level protocol overhead to focus entirely on application development ¹.

Founded in Bellevue, Washington in 2022, the company initially raised $140 million to bring broad intellectual property categories—including music royalties, patents, and trademarks—onto a dedicated blockchain ¹. However, CEO Andrea Muttoni stated that entrenched legacy licensing systems and reluctant rights holders prompted the project to reconsider its scope ¹. In June 2026, the company rebranded to DATA Foundation to focus on artificial intelligence datasets, before electing four months later to decommission its independent chain entirely to avoid the running costs of engineers, validators, audits, and infrastructure providers ¹. At the time of writing, Sui's native token ($SUI) traded at $1.05.

Refocusing on AI Dataset Provenance

The project's current operational priority is Trace, a registry that logs provenance, contributor consent terms, and licensing histories for AI training data ¹. The tool originated partly from insights gathered via Poseidon, an internal data incubation initiative that encountered difficulties verifying whether commercially offered datasets were original or properly licensed ¹.

Trace generates an onchain receipt whenever contributors submit media such as voice or video recordings via partner platforms ¹. The system currently processes high transaction volumes via partner marketplace Kled, which contributes between 3 million and 4 million data records to Trace per day ¹. Muttoni did not disclose how much of DATA's original $140 million treasury remains or how many of the registered records have produced licensing revenue, though existing backers including a16z crypto remain involved ¹.