Sui, a proof-of-stake Layer 1 blockchain that has not yet been launched and is intended to compete with Solana and Ethereum, was developed by Mysten.
Evan Cheng, co-founder and CEO of the startup, stated in an interview with The Block that Mysten aims to “bring about consumer adoption—mass adoption.” Evan Cheng previously served as head of research and development at Meta’s cryptocurrency wallet Novi Financial until September of last year.
“We focus a lot on designing an architecture that is completely different that allows us to horizontally scale the capacity of the blockchain,” he said.
The investment arm of Sam Bankman-cryptocurrency Fried’s exchange, FTX Ventures, led the $300 million Series B round for Mysten. Other investors in the round include Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sino Global, Dentsu Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, O’Leary Ventures, and others. In December of last year, Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Crypto unit invested $36 million in Mysten.
The crypto projects at Meta were worked on by all five of Mysten’s founders. Chief Technology Officer Sam Blackshear is credited with developing Move, the coding language used by both Sui and Meta’s disastrous blockchain Diem. He was a principal engineer at Novi (formerly known as Libra).
Adeniyi Abiodun, who previously served as the product lead for Novi, is currently the chief product officer at Mysten. Kostas Kryptos, who previously held the same position at Meta, is the company’s chief cryptographer.
The statement made today comes just after Aptos, a different blockchain that uses Move and was created by former Meta executives, added $150 million to its funding round, increasing its total cash raised this year to $350 million.
The two blockchains are regarded as the newest generation of Layer 1 blockchains and competitors to earlier platforms like Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche. Their challenge will be to entice cryptocurrency projects and developers away from incumbents and onto their platforms.