Mysten Labs has closed $300 million in funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion, announced Thursday.
Mysten is the creator of Sui, a proof-of-stake Layer 1 blockchain that has yet to be released. It was created to challenge Ethereum and Solana.
The startup’s co-founder and CEO Evan Cheng, who headed research and development at Meta’s crypto wallet Novi Financial until September of last year, told The Block in an interview that Mysten was targeting “ will bring mass consumer acceptance.”
“We are very focused on designing completely different architectures. This allows us to scale the capacity of the blockchain,” he said.
Mysten’s $300M Series B funding round is led by FTX Ventures, the venture capital firm of Sam Bankman-Fried crypto exchange. Other investors in this round include Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto unit a16z, whichinvested 36 million dollarsIn Mysten last December, as well as 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.
The five founders of Mysten previously worked on the crypto side of Meta. Chief Technology Officer Sam Blackshear is Novi’s principal engineer and is credited with creating Move, the coding language used by Diem and Meta (formerly Meta). Named Libra), Mysten’s chief product officer is former Novi Adeniyi Adeniyi Abiodun head; Kostas Kryptos, head of cryptographer. have the same role at Meta; And Chief Scientist George Danezis also worked with Novi and Diem.
Both are viewed as the next wave of Layer 1 blockchains. and its predecessors, such as Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche, whose challenge is to lure crypto projects and developers to their platforms.
Cheng hopes new crypto transaction processing will be the key to Sui’s success.
“All blockchains are currently transacting in groups,” he said, an approach defined as “blockchain.” head-of-line blocking “We are the only ones taking a completely different approach.”
Mysten hopes that this and other innovations will give Sui data rates and storage that meet the demands of developers and apps. while keeping transaction costs low
“If you look at Layer 2, they tend to address only one problem,” he said. “We don’t believe that one specific solution is enough to move this area further. So we want to look at everything from a new perspective.”
Cheng thought the same way that Sui was different from Diem, which was ultimately sold cheaply to Silvergate Capital, Silvergate Bank’s holding company. at a price of $182 million.After being repeatedly controlled by regulators
“We want to go one step further… We will make asset transfer or asset programming as easy as data management or data transfer. This requires us to take a huge step forward beyond Diem’s vision.”
Investors in Series B funding receive equity in Mysten as well as tokens. This means that they will be able to claim part of Sui’s original token, which will begin trading when the blockchain goes public. Mysten released Sui’s public development kit and started showing off the software to developers on https://www.mysten.com. March
The startup plans to spend $300 million to continue building the technology. as well as to attract users to the platform and to employ especially in the Asia-Pacific region.
Amy Wu, head of FTX Ventures, told The Block in a previous interview: “Many investors believe in a multi-chain future where there may be some blockchains with specific expertise and advantages based on their architecture.”