Web3 startup Mysten Labs raises $300M led by FTX at $2B valuation

BLOCKCHAIN

Mysten Labs, a Web3 startup founded by former Meta developers, today announced that it has raised $300 million in new funding led by FTX Ventures at a $2 billion valuation to continue building out its Sui blockchain infrastructure product.

The Series B funding round included participation from a number of crypto industry heavyweights, including Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto division, Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Binance Labs and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others.

Mysten was launched in 2021 by former executives of Meta’s Novi Research and lead developers of the now defunct Diem blockchain and Move programming language. The company’s primary product, Sui, is what is known as a Layer 1 blockchain, a similar layer to the blockchains that underly bitcoin and Ethereum. It provides a decentralized ledger technology for developers to create decentralized apps for finance and social media experiences more quickly.

“Current Web3 infrastructure is in the dial-up era – it’s slow, expensive, capacity constrained, insecure and simply hard to build for,” Evan Cheng, co-founder and chief executive officer of Mysten. “With Sui, we are endeavoring to build a blockchain that scales with demand and incentivizes growth, eliminating middlemen, and enabling users across applications to seamlessly integrate and interact with their favorite products.”

Blockchain technology enables what is known as the decentralized web, also known as Web3, the next iteration of the World Wide Web, which incorporates token-based economies, decentralized apps and decentralized finance. It allows users to transact peer-to-peer without the need for centralized authorities such as banks or traditional financial institutions. Instead, they use smart contracts, which are software-driven contracts that execute under certain conditions.

Sui is a high-performance blockchain that uses a proof-of-stake validation mechanism with a scalable capacity and a development environment that delivers a rich, dynamic set of resources and tools for building robust applications. Proof-of-stake blockchains claim they are more environmentally friendly than blockchains such as bitcoin that use proof of work. That’s why Ethereum, the cryptocurrency with the second largest market cap, is switching over to PoS with its Merge update in mid-September.

Smart contracts on Sui are built with the Move programming language, which was originally developed to power Diem blockchain. It was designed to be platform-agnostic and that made it possible to enable tooling for common libraries across blockchains.

In Sui, Move is coupled with modular asset management and object-oriented coding in order to enable greater scalability and smart contract management.

“Sui marries the safe asset-centric features of Move with a new object-centric data model,” said Sam Blackshear, co-founder and chief technology officer of Mysten and the creator of Move. “This pairing enables new approaches to several blockchain scaling challenges and unlocks a more direct, accessible programming style for the next generation of smart contract developers.”

With this new funding, Cheng said, Mysten will continue to scale up Sui and build out its core product to onboard the next wave of web3 developers by providing a superior infrastructure for their decentralized applications. The company will also focus on hiring more staff globally with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

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