Mysten Labs

Mysten Labs is a crypto and blockchain infrastructure technology company founded in September 2021 by four former Facebook engineers—Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, and George Danezis. The partners worked together at Facebook's Novi financial products unit. Cheng was director of research and development at Novi and serves as Mysten’s CEO.

Rather than receiving revenue from products and services, Mysten Labs plans to hold tokens for the different blockchains that it works with to profit as their value grows.

Evan Cheng, in an interview with the CNBC, stated

“We’re not building a service where we charge other people money for them to use this. Our partners get the benefit of having access to the technology, and we become co-owners in their network. We take back a portion of the network shares in return. So it’s a mutually beneficial kind of relationship. We’ve been dreaming about doing something together for a long time. We’re building infrastructure that, based on our previous research, will overcome a lot of limitations.”

Mysten raised $36 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The cash infusion is meant to assist the four founders in building infrastructure technology to allow other crypto and blockchain-based companies to deliver technologies. The series A founding round led by a16z saw participation from Redpoint, Lightspeed, Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Standard Crypto, NFX, Slow Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Samsung NEXT, Lux Capital, Bienville, Hack VC, Finality Capital, Elad Gil, and other funds and angel investors in the Web3 space.

The company's projects launch in two ways: through partnerships with existing networks that integrate Mysten technology or through platforms based on Mysten-designed components. The first project the company is introducing is Narwhal, a mempool targeting several scalability issues regarding the adoption of Web3. One of Narwhal’s major features is that it can be integrated with different BFT consensus protocols. The company is also working on their second project: growing the adoption of the Move programming language by integrating it into these networks.

The Move programming language is positioned to be a secure, cross-platform lingua franca that allows developers to share contracts, tooling, and expertise across heterogeneous ledgers in Web3. The company is also working on an NFT platform for the Metaverse, particularly the ownership and programmability model of NFTs in the Metaverse. In 2022, Mysten Labs is set to launch a platform enabling this vision. The platform’s foundation is an open network made with an asset-centric blockchain design supporting different transactions per second, near real-time finality, Move-powered programmability, and storage that scales horizontally.

On September 21, 2021, Sommelier, a co-processing protocol to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) announced a research and development partnership with Mysten Labs to enhance liquidity transaction speeds and release smart contract applications on the Cosmos blockchain. Established in 2020 by Zaki Manian, Sommelier is a test-net protocol made to deliver automated financial transactions like limit orders, batched orders and portfolio rebalancing to decentralized finance, or DeFi, traders and liquidity providers, or LPs.

On the same day, Celo, an open-source blockchain ecosystem specializing in making decentralized financial (DeFi) systems and tools accessible to smartphones, announced a multi-year partnership with Mysten Labs. The partnership is meant to enhance Celo’s transaction speeds and bring Move smart contracts, the programming language created for Diem, to the Celo ecosystem, allowing developers to build advanced, audit-free dApps.