Mysten Labs Closes a $300 Million Raise Led by FTX Ventures

According to WSJ Thursday release, Mysten Labs has completed a $300 million fund round at over $2 billion. Mysten is the founder of Sui, a yet-to-launch Proof-of-Stake Layer 1 blockchain created to pose a challenge to Ethereum and Solana. Evan Cheng, co-founder and CEO of the firm, stated in an interview that Mysten seeks “to bring about consumer adoption- mass adoption.” Evan Cheng served as head of research and development at Meta’s cryptocurrency wallet Novi Financial until September last year. He said, “We focus a lot on designing a completely different architecture that allows us to scale the blockchain’s capacity horizontally.” FTX Ventures Led $300 Million The venture capital arm of 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 last year, Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Crypto unit invested $36 million in Mysten. Mysten’s Founders Worked On Meta Project All five of Mysten’s founders worked on the crypto projects at Meta. Chief Technology Officer Sam Blackshear is responsible for developing Move, the coding language used by both Sui and Meta’s doomed blockchain Diem. He was a principal developer at Novi (formerly known as Libra). Adeniyi Abiodun, a former Novi product...