Mysten Labs’ $300M Fundraise Values Business at More Than $2B
Capital from the Web3 infrastructure company’s FTX Ventures-led round will go toward scaling the Sui blockchain
From left: Mysten Labs’ Sam Blackshear, Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun | Source: Mysten Labs
key takeaways
- Other participants in the funding round were a16z, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton and Coinbase Ventures
- Sui, launched in March, forgoes consensus for most transactions, allowing it to speed up transactions
Mysten Labs is putting its fresh round of funding toward powering more Web3 applications and speeding up the adoption of its new blockchain, the company revealed Thursday.
The California-based Web3 infrastructure company launched decentralized blockchain platform Sui in March. Mysten Labs CEO Evan Cheng said in a statement Thursday that Web3 infrastructure is currently “in the dial-up era.”
“It’s slow, expensive, capacity constrained, insecure, and simply hard to build for,” he added.
The Mysten Labs team said it can build a better blockchain. As an example of one novelty to improve scalability, Sui forgoes consensus for most transactions, allowing it to parallelize the execution of them and reduce latency, a technique known as “casual ordering.”
The project was expected to launch an incentivized testnet in August and has solicited prospective validators to participate, but the team has not announced a launch date. A token, SUI, is also planned, which will be used to participate in the proof-of-stake network after mainnet launch, also on an unknown future date.
Cheng had spent the last 16 years at tech companies such as Apple and Facebook, which is now known as Meta. He and three other former Facebook employees — Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun and George Danezis — worked on Meta’s Novi Financial team to help develop the Diem stablecoin and Move programming language.
Sui’s use cases, according to Mysten Labs, include facilitating airdrops to millions of people in a single, low-cost transaction; creator-owned decentralized social media networks; and developing blockchain gaming interactions such as equipment crafting, character leveling and battle records stored on-chain.
FTX Ventures led the Series B round. Other participants included a16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sino Global, Dentsu Ventures, Greenoaks Capital and O’Leary Ventures.
FTX Ventures Partner Amy Wu said in a statement that Sui’s parallelizable agreements and “object-centric architecture” were key technical innovations that make it a next-gen platform for Web3 builders.
Arianna Simpson, a general partner at a16z added: “We believe that Sui’s novel architecture will meaningfully improve scalability and lower transaction costs, unleashing new web3 applications and experiences for a broader audience.”
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