Why the room needs them.
Cheng came to blockchain from compiler and runtime engineering at Apple and Facebook, and he runs the company that built Sui and Walrus. At Proof of Talk Paris 2026 he addressed the institutional question on the Hecto Main Stage, in a fireside with Citi's Ronit Ghose on what institutions need from blockchain infrastructure. His line through that period was consistent: the industry's unfinished business is products people actually use, not more ledgers.
The full account.
Evan Cheng spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as Co-Founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, in a fireside on the Hecto Main Stage titled "What Institutions Need From Blockchain Infrastructure". It ran on 2 June from 15:00 to 15:30 on the Tokenisation of Finance track, alongside Ronit Ghose of Citi, with Frank Chaparro of GSR moderating.
His route into crypto ran through compilers. His own conference biography places him at Apple from 2005 to 2015, working on low-level developer and system design tools first as an individual contributor and then as a manager, and credits him with the ACM Software System Award for LLVM. That award, for 2012, went to Vikram S. Adve, Evan Cheng and Chris Lattner; the University of Illinois release of April 2013 described that Evan Cheng as an Apple software engineer. He joined Facebook in 2015 to build its programming language and runtime organisation, and from 2018 to 2021 he built and led Novi Research, the team that delivered the Move programming language. In 2021 he and four Novi colleagues founded Mysten Labs: Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, Kostas Chalkias and George Danezis.
Mysten built Sui, a layer-1 blockchain written from scratch, which reached mainnet on 3 May 2023; the company had raised 300 million dollars in September 2022 at a valuation above 2 billion dollars. It also built Walrus, a decentralised storage protocol. The Walrus Foundation announced a 140 million dollar token sale on 20 March 2025, with Standard Crypto, a16z crypto, Electric Capital and Franklin Templeton Digital Assets among the buyers. Cheng told Fortune the sale had come together in the previous three weeks and that the protocol and its token would go live on 27 March; Walrus marked a year live on that date in 2026.
What he argues in public has changed little since 2024. Sui, he has said, is neither a clone nor a fork; Mysten resisted the shortcut of launching an EVM layer 2 or iterating on someone else's project. In a year-end conversation published in January 2026 he set the company's direction as a move from building infrastructure to shipping products people use. In August 2026, after Sam Blackshear left Mysten for Anthropic, Cheng added the CTO role to the chief executive's job, writing that he was returning to leading technical teams and would be hands-on.
What Evan believes about the next ten years.
Years of shipping.
Lines that keep proving correct.
“While everyone else is building a ledger, we're building a stack, a control layer that lets automation actually work.”
“Hardware is almost like a commodity; it's the software experience that's the magic, that's how you win.”
“What I can say about Apple is that I wrote a lot of code back then and there are pretty much billions of devices out there now running my software which is exciting and scary at the same time.”
What they have built, written, and backed.
Built
- SuiThe layer-1 blockchain Mysten Labs built from scratch, on mainnet since 3 May 2023. In May 2026 the Sui Foundation announced gasless stablecoin transfers at protocol level.
- WalrusA decentralised storage protocol developed by Mysten Labs. The Walrus Foundation announced a 140 million dollar token sale on 20 March 2025, with Standard Crypto, a16z crypto, Electric Capital and Franklin Templeton Digital Assets among the buyers; the protocol went live on 27 March 2025. Its own blog now describes it as a verifiable data platform, with a memory layer for AI agents.
- MoveThe programming language delivered by Novi Research, which he built and led from 2018 to 2021. His own conference biography also credits that team with Diem Core, the Diem Framework and DAPL, a distributed auditing proof-of-solvency solution. Five of its members founded Mysten Labs in 2021.
- LLVMThe compiler infrastructure recognised by the ACM Software System Award for 2012, whose named recipients were Vikram S. Adve, Evan Cheng and Chris Lattner. The University of Illinois announcement of April 2013 described that Evan Cheng as an Apple software engineer; the link between that engineer and Mysten Labs rests on his own conference biographies.
Evan at Proof of Talk Paris 2026
The next Proof of Talk is in Abu Dhabi.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, 3–4 December 2026. Admission is by application, and the room is capped at 2,000.
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