Podcast: The Round Trip

Compiled & edited by: Yuliya, PANews

As the liquidity tide recedes, the crypto narrative becomes increasingly scarce and dull, and the market landscape is rapidly clearing out. In this crypto winter, underlying infrastructure has undergone a transformation that is more technologically resilient and practically effective, exploring diverse paths to survival.

Sui also offered its own growth solution, achieving robust growth in ecosystem and adoption, and completing the key transformation of technology stack implementation.

Recently, in the new Founder's Talk series "The Round Trip," co-produced by PANews and Web3.com Ventures, Evan Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, the developer of Sui, shared his personal journey from traditional internet to blockchain entrepreneurship, analyzed his vision for Web3, and elaborated on how Sui addresses industry technical bottlenecks and privacy challenges from the underlying architecture, creating a full-stack operating system for AI automation with iOS-level integration, thereby providing developers and users with more efficient and secure blockchain solutions.

A Silicon Valley veteran started his own business at fifty, aiming to rebuild the "foundation" of the internet.

PANews: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Round Trip. We are very fortunate to have invited Evan Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, who supports the entire Sui ecosystem. Welcome, Cheng. How was your Consensus trip to Hong Kong recently? Did you meet any interesting people?

Evan Cheng: Everyone I met at Consensus was very interesting. I met many of our partners, and business negotiations went very smoothly. I think the market in Hong Kong, while not as large as Wall Street—the US will always be the largest—is developing much faster, so I'm very happy about it.

PANews: It's a great honor to have you here today. I've been following the Sui ecosystem for quite some time now. I think we could start with your personal introduction, tell us your story, and how you gradually came to want to create Sui?

Evan Cheng: OK. I was born in Taiwan, but left at a young age to study and develop my career. I started in startups and then spent ten years at Apple, working on some low-level, infrastructure-related projects. 2012 was a big breakthrough for me because I won the ACM Software Systems Award. ACM is one of the largest associations in computer science, and this award is a huge recognition. You know, previous winners of this award include TCP/IP, UNIX, Web Browsers, and Java. Even though everyone is focusing on AI now, these are the most fundamental technologies, and I'm very happy to have achieved this.

After ten years at Apple, I went to Facebook (which later became Meta). Initially, I managed departments related to programming languages and runtime environments, as well as some AI-related aspects. Then I moved to the Libra (Diem) project, where I managed blockchain research and development. Later, I decided to start my own business with a friend.

PANews: I'm curious, throughout your career at Meta, including later at Libra, your career development was quite stable. Why did you suddenly decide at that time that you wanted to start a startup in what is probably the craziest industry on earth? I think that requires a lot of courage and determination.

Evan Cheng: In fact, I've been very interested in blockchain for a long time. I started paying attention to it around 2015, and I've always wanted to contribute my own efforts.

I initially thought the Libra (Diem) project was a great opportunity, but later I felt I couldn't do what I truly wanted to do there, which made me feel a bit exhausted. My wife asked me, and my friends asked me too, "Are you crazy? Why are you starting a business at your age?" But I told my wife, "Don't you see how angry and frustrated I am every day when I come home from get off work? I can't do what I'm supposed to do." So I'd rather focus my energy on things I can control.

Large companies often focus on short-term results and product output. My thinking at the time might have been a bit naive, but what I wanted to do was much grander: I wanted to build a layer on top of the internet to provide underlying support for future full automation, all collaborations, and the transfer and communication between any person, machine, or agent.

You'll often hear us repeat the point that the Web, by its very nature, is built for humans and is extremely unfriendly to all forms of automation, especially agent automation. The man-in-the-middle problem remains severe. You can foresee friction—on the one hand, AI is driving automation, and on the other hand, man-in-the-middles want to maintain control.

I had this idea at the time, and I felt this was what we should be doing. Although we weren't even very clear about what Sui was or what kind of blockchain we wanted to build, we had the idea. This layer is enormous, and this choice was necessary. In my previous career, I had worked on similar very low-level layers (where all runtime and other aspects were handled), and now there are billions, even tens of billions, of devices worldwide, and hundreds of millions of developers using what I helped build. I wanted to do it again. So, starting a business in my fifties is definitely a bit of a challenge, but I felt I couldn't wait any longer, so I did it.

PANews: It sounds like a journey of self-discovery, a mission that must be accomplished.

Evan Cheng: I wouldn't exaggerate to call it a "soul-searching" experience, but I've always felt that I should do my own thing at the right time. In fact, age has never been a factor for me. Look at Asia, Morris Chang of TSMC started his business in his fifties, and look how successful he is! As long as you have an idea and a group of partners who believe in you, you can definitely do it. So I said, "OK, let's do it."

The key to rejecting the notion that "crypto is dead" and blind optimism lies in clarifying goals and vision.

PANews: So, looking back on your years in Crypto, how much of your initial dream do you feel you've achieved? Or how much of your original vision has the industry itself fulfilled?

Evan Cheng: Just a little bit. I often meet partners from Asia who say, "You're the founder of Sui, it's an honor to meet you." But I feel that we've only achieved a tiny fraction of what we initially wanted to achieve. Our current accomplishments, such as brand recognition and becoming the default choice for many, mean that people know the Sui brand and what we do. We've made significant progress technologically, but in other areas we're still in a very early stage, so we've really only accomplished a tiny fraction.

However, we've been running this business for over four years, and all five of us founders are still here, working tirelessly every day. No one has ever said, "It's too hard, I don't want to do it anymore," which makes me very happy.

PANews: The reason I asked this question is because I entered this industry around the time of the 2022 bear market. I often reflect on how much this industry has progressed since four years ago. I feel that our industry is indeed at a moment of "soul-searching," with a very strong sense of division: on the one hand, we have a clearer regulatory environment and are adopted by many institutions; but on the other hand, the market performance is appalling, and I don't even dare to look at prices. Where do you think this sense of division comes from?

Evan Cheng: This is the first industry in history where, as soon as you have a little product-market fit and just as you have a little success, people can directly assign a certain valuation to your token without going through the traditional intermediate process.

This actually has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that whatever you do, the market reacts immediately, and you get a lot of feedback; but the disadvantage is that you can't give people too high expectations, and sometimes you can't give them too low expectations either, which is really hard to control. Because the token you create has immediate value, it does attract some people who are only focused on making money in the short term. I think this is also one of the reasons why there is a bear market right now: expectations are too high, there is too much noise, and many people haven't done anything substantial.

Every now and then, people feel disillusioned and say, "This industry is a scam." There's a saying: "Not everyone in the crypto industry is a scammer, but it seems like all scammers are in crypto." This is indeed true. I think this is because our industry is still immature, and many necessary regulations are not yet in place. This market is not very efficient and is easily affected by various events. Over time, these problems will be resolved. However, the characteristic of "immediate response" is indeed difficult to cope with; it requires strong resilience to weather the storm.

PANews: Having weathered so many cycles, as an industry team leader, how would you lead your team through this bear market? What do you think are the most important tips?

Evan Cheng: The most important thing is that everyone needs to understand our goals and vision. If you understand what we want to achieve in 10, 20, or 30 years, and you are excited about it, then you can see the ups and downs of the market as a process. You won't completely forget this dream just because the market is bad for a short time.

Of course, we can't expect everyone to have such a high level of commitment and determination. But so far, our progress has been quite good. Our team are all builders; everyone has big dreams and hopes that we will be very successful in the future, truly delivering a lot of results to the world. We're doing quite well in that regard.

In market volatility, some people will get tired, some will be scared, and there will be personal pressure—this is perhaps unavoidable. In the coming period, some ecosystems may not be able to survive because you haven't reached a stage where you can survive; the market collapses, and you can't get more funding—all of this will have an impact. This is unfortunate. But on the other hand, if we are prepared, we feel we face many opportunities, and that's what we're focusing on.

PANews: I recently came across one of your tweets that I found very interesting. You said, "All the 'crypto is dead' posts are silly and annoying. At the same time, all the 'this is great for crypto/us' posts are silly, tone deaf, and just as annoying." I think this is a very philosophical topic. Where do you think our industry is right now?

Evan Cheng: Every now and then, you either hear "Crypto will change everything," or when the market is down, you hear "Crypto is a scam, it has no future." That's really opportunistic. If that were the logic, AI would have been completely dead long ago. How many years has AI developed to get to where it is today?

Often, these major paradigm shifts require going through these stages. Humans tend to underestimate how long it takes to reach the critical moment that truly brings breakthroughs and widespread adoption; but they also tend to underestimate how steep the growth curve will be once the inflection point arrives.

We haven't reached that inflection point yet, but we're definitely not "dead" either. Think about it from first principles: the future world is automated; everything will be automated. But existing networks weren't built for this kind of automation, businesses weren't built for this kind of automation, and humans weren't born for this kind of automation. When you understand this is the ultimate form, you'll know what the outcome will be.

On the other hand, many people are jumping in to say, "The bear market is great for us; we should continue building during the bear market." I think, firstly, this is incredibly inappropriate. Indeed, many people have suffered heavy losses, many have lost money, and many excellent builders will be eliminated , so this is absolutely not the time to celebrate. Some people are even banging on chairs and celebrating, saying "We're doing great," which is truly inappropriate.

Another point is that these cyclical fluctuations can indeed scare away many people , which is bad for our entire industry. We need time to process these things. That's why I dislike those blindly optimistic posts.

PANews: Thank you. This is my second bear market, and I feel that this time, compared to the last one, I know our fundamentals are improving, and our fundamentals are stronger than ever before. Now I can tell myself, don't worry, this winter won't last too long, and there's still a lot of hope.

Three major bottlenecks preventing Web2 developers from transitioning to Web3

PANews: Let's talk about something more positive and optimistic. Let's delve deeper into Sui. Before discussing what Sui does specifically, I'd like to take a macro perspective. If you were to identify three key bottlenecks that prevent Web2 builders or the world's best application developers from building DApps on the blockchain, what would they be?

Evan Cheng:

The first bottleneck is, in fact, industry reputation and misunderstandings about Crypto and blockchain.

Over the years, there have been many misunderstandings about the industry. First, people think that cryptocurrencies are full of scammers and are just a place to get rich quick; we need to correct this misconception. Second, people mistakenly believe that blockchain can only be used for large casinos, transactions, and stablecoin exchanges. Some even say that the blockchain architecture suffers from the "impossible triangle"—every time someone asks me about the "impossible triangle," I get very angry; it's completely wrong! It's simply because the initial design of blockchain was flawed. We have already proven that the so-called "impossible triangle" doesn't exist, and these problems will be resolved.

As everyone knows, Sui's design focuses on describing static assets, but we understand that assets are not static; any asset goes through different stages and lifecycle changes. This is completely different from ledger-based models like Ethereum and Solana. This misconception needs to be corrected.

There's another serious misconception: that EVM and Solidity can solve everything. That's absolutely insane! I swear on my honor, anything built with those programming languages is utterly unworkable. You would never want to build any critical business system on that foundation; it's a ticking time bomb. Go talk to 100 experts in programming languages and runtime systems, and they'll all tell you the same thing: outside the industry, nobody would even glance at Solidity and EVM, let alone use them to build any substantial system.

The second bottleneck is the maturity of the technology.

There are basically two types of people building blockchains now: one is Crypto Native, who create DeFi protocols or NFTs, which are essentially on-chain products. They work at a very low level, requiring them to understand smart contracts, how to manage blockchain-level and protocol-level resources, how to use RPC, and how to handle various tedious details.

Another type you might see are slightly higher-level applications, such as PolyMarket. We all know it's built on blockchain, but it hides a lot of things. In fact, many operations are done off-chain because they don't need to deal with these tedious and complex details.

The current technology stack is simply not good enough, and it's too low-level. Think about financial products, social media, games, and so on; they shouldn't be dealing with this level of complexity and detail. They need a higher-level solution. This is indeed a very serious problem.

The third bottleneck is the fragmentation of privacy and cybersecurity models.

Modern blockchains are largely transparent, with everything publicly available, and often have a single purpose. For example, Ethereum or Solana can be used for smart contracts and asset transfers; however, if you need data storage, storing confidential data, or implementing role-based policies for decryption, viewing, and access control, you might need to find a completely different system, such as Filecoin. If you require privacy features, that's another protocol altogether.

There are too many specialized blockchains on the market. If you want to build a product, you might need to piece together a lot of things: Ethereum here, L2 for confidentiality there, and other protocols to hide balances or senders/receivers. This is insane, it won't work! Because they don't have a unified programming interface (API). This is the only industry in the world where people think they can just cobble together any software. No, it won't work.

Therefore, conceptual misunderstandings, architectural problems, and immature, fragmented technologies are major bottlenecks preventing developers from getting started.

Attracting gaming giants to create truly "timeless games"

PANews: I completely agree with what you just said. I've seen some very reputable Web2 gaming companies wanting to enter Web3, and they don't want to step out of their comfort zones. They want a fully-featured, ready-to-use stack. For example, I spoke with CCP Games as an investor in 2023 and 2024; at that time, they hadn't decided which blockchain to use, and ultimately they chose Sui. What qualities of Sui do you think impressed them in their considerations?

Evan Cheng: They understand that what they're doing is creating an "eternal game," keeping the economic system running even when the companies and people are gone. They want to automate everything; they're smart enough to understand that this game is essentially a virtual environment for automation.

In the game, much of what you do involves world building, resource management, and battles. It's not your typical first-person shooter; it's a whole host of procedural logic, especially the AI management. And this automated AI workflow is precisely the purpose of our Sui Stack platform.

After we talked to them, they understood that if they used other chains, they could probably only do cash management and payment processing; other logic would require piecing together a whole bunch of other things. They had tried building on Ethereum, but found it wouldn't work.

Therefore, they are excellent partners. On one hand, they have previously developed games played by hundreds of thousands of people and operated them for several years; on the other hand, they themselves are a developer platform, with many people writing and running a lot of code on it. So they and Sui are a perfect match. This is actually the first example to demonstrate "what a fully automated world would look like"—not quite fully automated, because it includes both real players and agents. It's a kind of simulation, and I personally am very, very excited to see them create some really fun games on Sui.

DeepBook serves as a liquidity hub for creating iOS-level Web3 experiences.

PANews: You just mentioned "privacy." I think privacy might have been a well-worn topic in the past, but right now, there's a real urgency to improve this layer. In the past few weeks, we've seen many funds and whales get wiped out because they exposed their positions. What kind of attempts is Sui making regarding privacy?

Evan Cheng: First of all, people often confuse confidentiality with privacy. These are not the same thing, and privacy is not a universal solution.

In this field, there are roughly several models for privacy . Some people hope that "anonymity" on public blockchains is sufficient, but in reality, all details are publicly recorded on the chain. So some people say, "OK, let's adopt a completely permissioned or private blockchain." When the internet first emerged, people thought of this too, but it was a completely foolish idea. This "one-size-fits-all" model, either completely closed or completely open and relying on pseudonyms and trust—which we now know very well is unworkable.

It's a good thing that people are interested in privacy now. But look at current privacy payments and privacy transfers; as I mentioned earlier, they're often on completely separate blockchains. Are you really going to operate on Ethereum, then simultaneously interact with another blockchain for privacy payments, and transfer your assets there? That's too complicated.

There are also models like Canton that allow institutions (such as JP Morgan or other funds) to run all private data and negotiate deals privately. But isn't asset liquidation itself a separate step? Whoever runs the private pool can control the matching process and all off-chain matters.

You can't say, "I'll use one blockchain with this privacy model, and another blockchain with a different privacy model, and then configure it myself." Our approach is completely different. We built a unified layer from the beginning; whatever privacy configuration you need, you configure it on that layer.

In fact, we were the first to address data privacy issues. Walrus is a data storage service. Technically, you can use Seal to store encrypted data, and then your decryption policy is directly written into Sui's smart contract. For example, if you are a PANews subscriber today, articles are automatically decrypted for you; if someone else doesn't have the same email access, the smart contract will require them to pay 50 cents to see the article. As you transfer data, the access policy also transfers with it.

This is a data-level confidentiality and privacy model that can be applied to various different models, all controlled by Sui's unified interface, enabling you to build complex products.

If you only have one model, your capabilities are limited. All value must be reflected at the protocol layer. If your assets are not on the main chain, you will face problems in finance: without a shared infrastructure and transparency, firstly, your liquidity will be fragmented, affecting capital efficiency; secondly, you cannot see the big picture, increasing risk management costs.

We've spent a lot of time on this; four years and so much has been accomplished. This year we'll be launching Nautilus (a framework for secure and verifiable off-chain computation on Sui), along with several other projects. Whether you're building something for privacy or participating in DeFi or other areas, it can all be done on Sui. Importantly, everything is controlled by the developers at the asset issuance level.

Because of Sui's Object model, all these attributes are imprinted in the assets. Assets are not static like those in the ERC-20 model; they can be processed and signed by the owner, their state can change, and their entire lifecycle can evolve.

Therefore, we are very confident because our model is correct, and other models don't work. Thinking in terms of first principles, you'll understand: the more automation there is, the more complex the system becomes, and other models simply won't work. We will soon launch some relatively simple features, such as privacy payments and hidden balances, and begin to gradually adopt them in our products, bringing value to consumers.

PANews: My biggest takeaway from listening to Sui is that it provides a very complete stack. Other blockchains are very fragmented; users or developers have to piece things together from many different places to solve a problem, resulting in a very unintuitive experience. If I want to develop applications or build an economic system, I need a complete stack that makes everything controllable. As you said before, others are building ledgers, while you are building a stack; Sui is a true platform.

Evan Cheng: Yes. In fact, if you look at any major platform, whether it's Apple's iOS, Microsoft's platform, or Google's Android platform, you can see the richness of that platform— all the functions, interactions, and SDKs are included . You can't expect someone to piece together a Stack themselves. Our core is to build the Sui Stack; from the very beginning, our vision and expectation has been to build such a rich toolkit.

PANews: Finally, I have a very interesting question. Could you explain to my grandma what DeepBook is?

Evan Cheng: OK, DeepBook is like a "central bank".

On Sui, all exchanges and swap applications can directly obtain liquidity from DeepBook. You can access a unified liquidity pool and perform price matching on it, as it is a central order book.

On other platforms, without this centralized shared infrastructure, each project has to find its own "bank" and establish its own liquidity pool.

Why is this important? Because it prevents fragmentation and improves efficiency. With DeepBook, everyone sees the same prices, and everyone has access to the same liquidity pool. When every company can share the liquidity pool, DeFi on Sui becomes highly efficient, and capital efficiency is greatly improved.

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