Building the world's AI data network. CEO @datafdn
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Joined March 2017
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Andrea retweeted
soon you'll see more and more AI use cases landing on @WalrusProtocol
THIS IS JUST A START
100%. This is why what we are doing with Trace is so important.
and you can all now see why we are teaming up with Sui and Walrus.
One of the defining questions of the AI era is going to be “How do you know?”
How do you know what is real when anything can be generated? How do you know what really happened versus what you were told happened? How do you know where a piece of data came from? How do you know it has not been changed? How do you know what an agent actually did on your behalf?
I think about this all the time
Verifiability is going to matter as much as intelligence
One of the main reasons Sui stood out is they already built a lot of the components needed for Trace to grow as the data layer end to end:
- storage (walrus),
- dynamic access control (seal),
- verifiable (but off chain) compute like inference in TEEs (nautilus).
Sourcing, access control, processing and inference can now be all on the same stack, and Trace’s audit layer can formally prove and verify every single step giving more depth and weight to the metadata it stores in turn becoming a source of truth for AI data.
This is the master plan for Trace.
Andrea retweeted
Trace registers over 3M data receipts EVERY DAY
Currently, we are able to surface tons of metadata related to a receipt's provenance:
- Did the contributor sign ToS/PP?
- Where did the data come from?
- When was it captured/uploaded? By what device?
This is the 1st major step in making the data that apps like @useKled collect SELLABLE to AI labs
But the next step is actually verifying ourselves that this information is true:
- Scanning the file itself to discover its metadata
- Verifying the data wasn't tampered with
- Keeping the original copy
By storing files on @WalrusProtocol, we can verify that every data receipt is what is says it is
And give frontier AI labs the complete confidence needed to purchase data in bulk
Trace turns any company into a data company
Walrus is becoming the default storage layer for @datafdn and Trace, the onchain registry for rights-cleared AI training data.
Trace records where AI training data came from and who owns it.
Walrus stores the original file, keeping it tamper-proof and accessible only to licensed buyers.
Trace has already registered more than 250M contributions and adds over 3M receipts a day, from apps that license data to frontier AI labs.
The next generation of AI will be trained on data from people, making provenance a procurement requirement. Walrus and @SuiNetwork make that provenance verifiable.
Read the announcement: sui.io/blog/data-network-joi…
This is a big step forward for DATA with a $30M investment from Sui. This makes Sui Foundation the largest holder of DATA, above DATA Foundation and PIP Labs.
Our founder SY Lee is also joining Sui as a strategic adviser on AI and training data.
Most importantly, bringing Trace and the 275M+ data receipts onto the Sui stack gives us the infrastructure to go beyond provenance alone, with reference data storage, access control, and stronger verification for the real-world data AI increasingly depends on.
Excited for what we will build together.
DATA is coming to @SuiNetwork.
The DATA Network and Trace are joining the Sui stack, bringing a live supply of rights-cleared AI training data to infrastructure built for AI workloads.
With 250M+ receipts already recorded by Trace, AI labs will be able to source real-world data with verifiable provenance, while @WalrusProtocol provides the underlying storage layer.
Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in the DATA Network, establishing the largest institutional stake in the network, alongside the continuing holdings of PIP Labs and the DATA Foundation. Furthering the alignment, SY Lee, founder of the DATA Network and CEO of PIP Labs, joins Sui Foundation as Strategic Advisor.
In the coming months:
▸ The DATA Network will be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui
▸ Walrus becomes the default storage layer for DATA Foundation apps
▸ $DATA remains the token of the DATA protocol
The next chapter of DATA starts here.
Big day today 👀
CEO @devrelius has been busy at:
▸ @WeAreDevs
▸ @kbwofficial
▸ @token2049
Next stop: Sui Basecamp @SuiNetwork.
watching frontier traders compete is fun but did u know there’s a ultra high concentration of Nobel prize winners discussing AI and data rn in Singapore?
Sir Konstantin Novoselov - Nobel Prize in Physics 2010
Prof. Benjamin List - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021
Fred Ramsdell - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025
Sir Christopher Pissarides - Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2010
Prof. Omar M. Yaghi - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025
Expert data is the bottleneck
Paradigm GP @danrobinson says even 10,000 Ilyas in a data center wouldn’t necessarily lead to runaway RSI because compute and expert data would become the bottleneck:
"I'd say I'm very RSI pilled. This may be marginally less RSI pilled."
"Even if we had 10,000 Ilyas in a data center, are we gonna give them 10,000 times as much compute? We just don't have that in the world. Are we gonna somehow generate 10,000 times as much human expert data? We don't really have the ability to do that."
"You can actually go quite far probably with just automating labor, but then you quickly are gonna run into these other bottlenecks."
"That said, you can still get obviously very insane results even in the presence of those bottlenecks."
@paradigm
This is actually a very interesting problem space, the main complexity being security rather than functionality.
Basically a locked down interaction zone that is more freeform than MCP but not raw open conversation (risk of prompt injection)
What we’re doing with DATA spans way beyond crypto and is a part of the “security stack” for AI just as much as code hardening.
Looking forward to the discussion this afternoon with some heavy hitters in AI.
Pull up
Today at @WeAreDevs World Congress North America, DATA Foundation CEO Andrea Muttoni @devrelius joins The New Security Stack to discuss what needs to change as AI takes on more of the work.
→ Tech Leaders Stage
→ 1:30pm PT
→ San José, CA
See you there.
Excited to see Meta compete with the Apple vision pro.
When I tried the APV 2 years ago, it was a clear glimpse into the future, but not quite there yet.
These VR glasses will hopefully be a (big?) step forwards in a segment that has high potential but is still too clunky.
Every piece of human contributed data is a unique asset and gets a fingerprint on Trace!
250M assets and counting..
