Mysten Labs

Mysten Labs, formed by four former executives of Meta’s Novi Research team and lead architects of the defunct Diem blockchain, is a developer of infrastructure and tools to accelerate Web3 adoption. Its products include Move, a programming language for building smart contracts, and Sui, a layer-1 blockchain.

Sui is a proof-of-stake layer-1 blockchain written in the Rust programming language. It supports smart contracts written in Sui Move, a derived version of the Move programming language. The network scales linearly attributable to its parallel transaction execution mechanisms, enabling it to handle a maximum throughput of 120,000 transactions per second. Additionally, simple transactions on the network can bypass the consensus mechanism. Users can sign in to Sui apps using Web2 social logins like Google and Facebook, facilitated by its authentication solution, zkLogin. The blockchain’s native token is SUI, which can be used to pay for gas fees and staking. Moreover, upgrades to the network are subject to a number of peer reviews. The Sui mainnet was launched in May 2023.

Key customers and partnerships

The company formed a partnership with Aether Games, a Web3 game development and publishing studio, to develop Web3 games on the Sui blockchain. It also partnered with Space and Time (SxT), a decentralized data warehouse platform, to provide developers access to a full stack of zero-knowledge-proof-based (ZK) tools for Web3 game development. It also partnered with Stardust, a blockchain infrastructure platform for developing Web3 games to enhance Sui’s Web3 gaming ecosystem by creating a straightforward onboarding process for game developers and introducing new games and capabilities to the network. Additionally, It partnered with Google Cloud to enhance dApp development by integrating Sui blockchain data into BigQuery. Sui also gained access to Google Cloud's Vertex AI for Web3 code debugging and improvement.

Funding and financials

The company’s last funding round was in September 2022, where it raised USD 300 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of more than USD 2 billion. The round was led by FTX Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto), Jump Crypto, Binance Labs, and Lightspeed Venture Partner, among others. It was to use the fresh funds to keep developing its core infrastructure to support Web3 applications and accelerate the adoption of the Sui blockchain.