The Significance
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 Numbers
$300M
Raised by Mysten Labs, September 2022
$140M
Walrus Foundation token sale, March 2025
The Thesis · on the record
What Evan believes about the next ten years.
01
Products, not infrastructure milestones
Cheng framed Mysten's 2026 direction as a move from proving infrastructure to shipping things people use. "The way to get people excited is to build products that actually impact their lives," he said in a year-end conversation published on the Sui blog in January 2026. He had made the same argument in February 2024, telling Brave New Coin's podcast that the industry has to build products that hundreds of millions of consumers will want to use, rather than waiting for the next bull run.
02
Build the stack, do not fork one
Sui was written from scratch rather than derived from an existing chain. Cheng told The Block in October 2024 that from the very beginning Mysten resisted shortcuts such as launching an EVM layer 2 or forking an existing project to do something iterative. He had put it plainly in February 2024: "It's not a clone. It's not derived or a fork of anything, we built pretty much the entire stack from the ground up."
03
Storage should be programmable, not archival
Pitching Walrus to Fortune in March 2025, Cheng said existing decentralised storage protocols were either "very, very slow" or "very, very expensive". "They're only good for archival storage," he added. "They're not programmable." Walrus was designed against that judgement, and went live later the same month.
04
Grow the market rather than take share
Cheng put Mysten's target outside the existing market. "The way we win is not just about taking market share from an existing player; we want to grow the pie," he told The Block in October 2024. In the same conversation, about a consumer gaming device tied to Sui, he argued that the hardware matters less than the depth of the software and operating system integration around it.
The Timeline
Years of shipping.
2005–2015
At Apple, working on low-level developer and system design tools, first as an individual contributor and then as a manager, according to his own conference biography.
2015–2018
At Facebook, building the programming language and runtime organisation, per the same biography.
2018–2021
Built and led Novi Research at Novi Financial, the team that delivered the Move programming language.
2021
Founded Mysten Labs with four Novi Research colleagues: Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, Kostas Chalkias and George Danezis.
2023
Sui reached mainnet on 3 May, after a 300 million dollar raise in September 2022.
2026
Spoke at Proof of Talk Paris on 2 June; added the CTO role alongside chief executive in August, after Sam Blackshear left Mysten Labs.
In Their Words
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.”
Sui blog, 27 January 2026
“Hardware is almost like a commodity; it's the software experience that's the magic, that's how you win.”
The Block, 12 October 2024
“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.”
The Crypto Conversation, Brave New Coin, February 2024, as transcribed by MooLoo
The Body of Work
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.
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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