Mysten Labs is the company behind the Sui blockchain, another layer-1 network born from Meta’s Diem project. Founded in 2021 by Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, and Kostas Chalkias — all former Meta and Novi engineers — the company raised over $300 million before launching its mainnet in May 2023.
Sui uses the Move programming language (like Aptos) but implements it differently with an object-centric data model. Instead of treating the blockchain as a global ledger of accounts, Sui treats everything as individual objects that can be owned and transferred. This design enables parallel transaction processing for unrelated objects, significantly boosting throughput.
The network’s architecture includes a novel consensus mechanism called Narwhal and Bullshark (later upgraded to Mysticeti), which separates data availability from consensus ordering. This separation lets the network achieve finality in under a second for many transaction types, which is critical for gaming and payment use cases.
Mysten Labs has positioned Sui as particularly suited for gaming, social applications, and consumer products. The company launched Sui Play, a dedicated gaming initiative, and partnered with several major gaming companies. It also built SuiNS (a naming service), DeepBook (a native order book), and other core infrastructure components. The SUI token launched with the mainnet and reached a market cap in the billions, backed by investors including a16z crypto, Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, and Jump Crypto.
