Owning a public chain no longer guarantees a competitive advantage. That was my most immediate takeaway after reading the news about DATA’s migration. According to PANews, DATA, formerly known as Story Protocol, announced that it would gradually shut down its own L1 and migrate to Sui after receiving a $30 million investment from the Sui Foundation. The original chain will remain operational during the transition. This is not an isolated case: Helium moved to Solana in 2023, Celo switched to an Ethereum L2 in 2025, Lisk announced that it would shut down its L2 and pivot to an enterprise finance platform, and Polygon stopped producing blocks on zkEVM.
My view is that these moves are more about cost structures than failure. DATA CEO Andrea Muttoni acknowledged that the company had tried to solve too many problems at once. After pivoting to an AI training data marketplace, its core product, Trace, had recorded more than 250 million data contribution entries as of October. Since the product is a data verification tool, continued investment in validators, infrastructure, and security for a proprietary chain became a fixed cost competing with the need to focus on the product.
This reflects an oversupply of chains: according to DefiLlama data as of October 21, 2026, 343 of 588 public chains had a TVL below $1 million, or 58.33%. Technical performance is no longer scarce; users, capital, and applications are. This suggests that resources will become even more concentrated in leading ecosystems and chains with clear user on-ramps.
To assess whether this thesis holds, two things need to be watched: whether DATA’s product metrics improve after the migration, and whether capital and developer activity in the Sui ecosystem grow in tandem. If the migration brings only a one-off burst of exposure while product metrics fail to gain traction, the logic will be less convincing. The source material does not provide post-migration data, so this is worth following.
#ETH #SOL #Layer2
Sources:
PANews (originally published 10-22 at 16:16 Beijing time)
https://www.panewslab.com/zh/articles/01a16165-9876-705f-809c-686b5be98acd
My view is that these moves are more about cost structures than failure. DATA CEO Andrea Muttoni acknowledged that the company had tried to solve too many problems at once. After pivoting to an AI training data marketplace, its core product, Trace, had recorded more than 250 million data contribution entries as of October. Since the product is a data verification tool, continued investment in validators, infrastructure, and security for a proprietary chain became a fixed cost competing with the need to focus on the product.
This reflects an oversupply of chains: according to DefiLlama data as of October 21, 2026, 343 of 588 public chains had a TVL below $1 million, or 58.33%. Technical performance is no longer scarce; users, capital, and applications are. This suggests that resources will become even more concentrated in leading ecosystems and chains with clear user on-ramps.
To assess whether this thesis holds, two things need to be watched: whether DATA’s product metrics improve after the migration, and whether capital and developer activity in the Sui ecosystem grow in tandem. If the migration brings only a one-off burst of exposure while product metrics fail to gain traction, the logic will be less convincing. The source material does not provide post-migration data, so this is worth following.
#ETH #SOL #Layer2
Sources:
PANews (originally published 10-22 at 16:16 Beijing time)
https://www.panewslab.com/zh/articles/01a16165-9876-705f-809c-686b5be98acd