coindesk.com
$DATA, the blockchain startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto and formerly known as Story Protocol, is shutting down its blockchain and moving to Sui after securing a $30 million investment from the network's foundation.
The move comes after spending years trying to bring intellectual property onchain. But after raising $140 million and building its own blockchain, the company found that changing how the world's intellectual property is licensed was harder than expected.
"We were trying to boil the ocean, and it was a very saturated and entrenched ocean," Andrea Muttoni, CEO of $DATA Foundation, told CoinDesk in an interview.
That realization helped drive Story’s rebrand to $DATA Foundation in June, when it shifted its attention to the market for AI training data. Four months later, the company is now narrowing its focus further to tracking the origins and usage rights of data used to train artificial intelligence models.
When the Bellevue, Washington-based startup was founded in 2022, the original plan covered everything from music royalties to patents and trademarks. The idea was to let owners register their intellectual property on a blockchain and set terms for how others could use it. The problem, Muttoni said, was that many of those industries already had systems in place, while large rights holders had little interest in making their intellectual property available for permissionless licensing.
"We were kind of spreading ourselves way too thin across so many different types of IP," he said.
Then came the rebrand earlier this year.
However, after that, the team began to question whether it still needed to maintain an entire blockchain, given that most of its work centered on a single product: Trace, which is a registry that records where training data comes from, who contributed it and what rights buyers have to use it.
Also, running a blockchain comes with costs, including engineers, validators, audits and infrastructure providers.
"Does it still make sense to run our own L1, or should we focus most of our energy on the protocol, on the product, on Trace?" he said.
That line of thinking led to the decision to shut down its blockchain and move to Sui.
