Why We Invested in Mysten Labs (Sui)? — A&T Capital

01. Financing Information

Mysten Labs, the developer of a public blockchain project called Sui, said on 8th Sep that it had raised $300 million Series B at a more than $2 billion valuation. The round, which was led by FTX Ventures, also had the support of A&T Capital, a16z Crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Mysten Labs was founded in 2021 by Evan Cheng, the former R&D director of Meta-Novi (the main research and development body of Diem blockchain), and Sam Blackshear, the former chief engineer of Meta-Novi. It designs its own high-performance PoS blockchain Sui

Compared to the payment-focused Diem architecture, Sui’s research progress in scalability and consensus improvements enables it to support mass adoption. In addition, Sui still follows the Move emerging programming language promoted by Diem, which has significant advantages over other mainstream blockchain programming languages ​​in terms of programming efficiency and security.

02. Why Should We Invest in Mysten Labs (Sui)?

1 ►The Logic of Investment

1. Significant Innovation and Has Great Value in an Innovation-Driven Industry

Unique innovation: The object model of Sui focuses on is completely different from the existing mainstream blockchain frameworks such as Ethereum and Solana (account model), and the parallel transaction execution and consensus based on block software transaction memory (achieving low latency and higher throughput) is also an innovative solution, which is a significant improvement as shown from the test data (100K TPS).

Expand the value of Move: Sui employs Move as its programming language, which was the most important innovative part of the Diem project in Meta, and has not been modified along EVM/WASM, but is completely innovative, and successfully improve the security/correctness of smart contracts from the programming language level. For developers familiar with the Move language, it is more efficient than that of mainstream blockchain programming languages.

2. Top Technical Strength and Rich Accumulation

Top team: The team involves Meta-Novi’s R&D director, chief engineer, product manager, chief cryptographer, etc. The technical strength is at the top of the industry, and the team also has a long history of cooperation, which will further strengthen their combat effectiveness. The Mysten Labs team has the most extensive knowledge and experience in using Move in the entire industry, and their accumulation must be rich.

2 ►Industry Status

1. The Public Chain Upgrade Has Entered a New Stage

In the past bull market, the first-generation Ethereum killers such as Solana/Avalanche/Near came to the stage one after another, and gained their own highlights, but they had not built their own solid ecology, which was reflected in the lack of actually valuable applications or hard to retain users;

Ethereum has secured to upgrade its infrastructure (layered structure, and L2 is as good as the first generation of Ethereum killers in efficiency), and the first batch of “killers” have not kept up quickly. Combined with the aforementioned ecological situation, the Ethereum competitors may be changed in the next bull market.

Two types of emerging public chains that could be the next generation of Ethereum’s main competitors:

Diem Mafia: This type of single-layer public chain represented by Sui inherits the innovative development language of Move, and updates to parallel computing, and finally realizes an ultra-high theoretical upper limit of $160K in a single-chain environment (which cannot be achieved in a single Ethereum environment).

Modular blockchain: The layered architecture represented by Celestia is fundamentally different from that of Ethereum, which enables it to give upper-layer developers as much autonomy as possible (the current framework of Ethereum cannot do this, and it takes a different path).

3 ►There Are Three ‘Biggest’ in Sui’s Scheme

1. Parallel Computing:

Parallel computing is the core reason for Sui to provide ultra-high processing power, and it is also the biggest difference from the current mainstream blockchain:

Sui first distinguishes all transactions into simple transactions (independent transactions without causality) and complex transactions (transactions that are interdependent / intertwined with shared objects), where simple transactions can be easily computed in parallel and quickly achieve consensus through Byzantine Consistent Broadcast; and complex transactions involve Block-STM.

Block-STM actually separates the execution and ordering of transactions: all transactions will be executed first (and recorded as execute), and if there is interdependence (or it is classified as a simple transaction), then look for the preset transaction; if the preset transaction is available, it will be recorded as Validate, and if it is not available, it will be verified after the preset transaction is available (see Figure 3 on the right); finally, when all transactions in a block are validated, the consensus and block generation will be achieved;

Under such a design, Sui dramatically reduces the requirement to peer with each other to achieve lower latency while allowing validators to compute in parallel.

2. Move Language and Object Model:

Move adopts a static type system which is essentially a logical constraint (stricter than Solidity and can expose many vulnerabilities at compile; Rust, Golang, Typescript are all static type systems) and convenient for shielding low-level errors;

Move implements First-class Resources, in which Resources (an object model) is a concept corresponding to Value (Ethereum and others use the Value method in accounting). Value can be copied at will, but Resources can only be consumed and not be copied. Thus, it is more secure on the one hand, and on the other hand, it also provides a basis for parallel computing;

3. State Synchronization to Optimize Data Availability:

For a non-validator node, it only needs to download (usually for the node with the highest reputation in the current network) the full chain state at a certain point and the state update data package between the time point and the latest state (The Ethereum node needs to download all the transactions between them and get the latest status after execution), which saves a lot of computing resources.

4 ►Economic Model

Sui is designed to allow users to pay separate fees for transaction execution and for storing the data:

The Gas Fee submitted by users will be divided into two parts: one is normally for the current execution transaction fee; and the storage part will be directly attributed to the Storage Fund (in the Staking state) which will pay the current storage fee for one thing, and for another, pay the storage costs that will increase in the future as the network grows and matures.

If users decide to delete this part of the transaction data, they can get a rebate.

At the same time, Sui’s Gas Fee Price per epoch is determined by validators voting on the network-wide gas price, which helps to keep the gas price low and predictable (and compared to Ethereum’s setting, it also helps to prevent DoS attacks)

5 ►Team Introduction

Evan Cheng, CEO

Former Novi R&D Director and Meta Engineering Director (Programming, Languages ​​& Runtime, 2015~2021); worked at Apple for 10 years and has always been an engineer.

Sam Blackshear, CTO

Former Novi chief engineer, focusing on Move programming language (2018~2021), Meta’s Staff Engineer since 2015.

Adeniyi Abiodun, CPO

Used to be the product leader of Meta Novi; previously worked on blockchain in VMware and Oracle.

Koh Kim, Head of Ecosystem

Worked as a BD at Google Play Games for 5 years; later built a startup in the beauty industry (Ever Prime).

About A&T Capital:

A&T Capital is an early-to-growth stage venture fund for emerging disruptive technologies. Led by three founding partners based out of Berlin, Singapore and Shanghai, we are supported by a global dynamic team of researchers and analysts. Our varied backgrounds in high tech, TradFi and venture capital help us understand what is essential for a startup to succeed. In 2021, we raised 100M pool of funds. Our portfolios include Amber Group, Cobo, Gnosis Safe, Nestcoin, Infstones, Consensys, and Commonwealth.

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