Evan Cheng is the co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain.
Background
Cheng spent over a decade at Apple, where he led the development of LLVM code generation and runtime technologies. He then joined Meta (Facebook), where he directed the Novi Research team and was a key engineer on the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain project and the Move programming language.
Mysten Labs and Sui
After Meta wound down its crypto ambitions, Cheng co-founded Mysten Labs in 2021 with several other former Meta/Diem engineers, including Sam Blackshear (creator of the Move language), Adeniyi Abiodun, George Danezis, and Kostas Chalkias. Mysten Labs raised over $300 million in funding.
The team built Sui, a Layer 1 blockchain that uses an object-oriented data model and the Move programming language. Sui’s architecture enables parallel transaction execution, allowing high throughput without the bottlenecks of traditional sequential blockchain processing. The network launched its mainnet in May 2023.
Sui has attracted a growing ecosystem focused on gaming, DeFi, and consumer applications, differentiating itself through its developer experience and performance characteristics.