Podcast: The Round Trip
Compiled & Edited by: Yuliya, PANews
After the liquidity tide receded, crypto narratives have become increasingly scarce and dull, and the market structure is accelerating its clearing. In this crypto winter, underlying infrastructure has undergone a transformation with greater technical resilience and practical utility, exploring diverse survival paths.
Sui has also presented its own growth solution, achieving strong growth in its ecosystem and adoption, completing the critical transition of its technology stack landing.
Recently, in the new series Founder’s Talk of "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 in detail on how Sui addresses the industry's technical bottlenecks and privacy challenges starting from the underlying architecture, aiming to build a full-stack operating system面向AI automation with iOS-level integration experience, thereby providing developers and users with more efficient and secure blockchain solutions.
Silicon Valley Veteran Starts Business at Fifty, Aims to Rebuild the 'Foundation' of the Internet
PANews:Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of Round Trip. We are very fortunate to have invited Evan Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, who are supporting the entire Sui ecosystem. Welcome Cheng, how was your recent experience at Consensus in Hong Kong? Did you meet any interesting people?
Evan Cheng:Everyone I met at Consensus was interesting. I met many of our partners, and business discussions went very smoothly. I think the market here in Hong Kong, although not as big as Wall Street—the US is always the largest—is developing relatively quickly, so I am very pleased.
PANews:It's a great honor to have you here today. I have been following the Sui ecosystem for quite a while. I think we can start with your personal background. Tell us about your past story and how you eventually decided to work on Sui?
Evan Cheng:OK. I was born in Taiwan but left at a very young age,一直在外面求学并发展我自己的职业生涯 (I have been studying and developing my career outside). I did some startups early on, then spent ten years at Apple, working on some relatively low-level, infrastructure-related things. 2012 was a major breakthrough period for me because I won the ACM Software System Award. ACM is one of the largest associations in computer science, and this award is a huge recognition. You have to understand, previous technologies that won this award include TCP/IP, UNIX, Web Browser, Java, and others. Even though everyone is focused on AI now, these are the most fundamental technologies. I was very happy to achieve such a result.
After ten years at Apple, I went to Facebook (which later became Meta). Initially, I managed departments related to programming languages and runtime environments, also some AI-related stuff. Later, I moved to the Libra (Diem) project, responsible for managing blockchain R&D. After that, I decided to start my own business with my friends.
PANews:I'm quite curious. Actually, your entire career at Meta, including later at Libra, was very stable. Why did you suddenly decide during that period to do a startup in what is possibly the craziest industry on earth? I think this requires a lot of courage and determination.
Evan Cheng:Actually, I have been very interested in blockchain for a long time. I started paying attention around 2015 and always wanted to contribute in some way.
I did think the Libra (Diem) project was a great opportunity initially, but later felt that I couldn't achieve what I truly wanted to do there anymore, which made me feel somewhat tired. My wife asked me, my friends asked me: "Are you crazy? Starting a business at this age?" But I told my wife: "Don't you see me coming home from work every day angry and frustrated? I can't do what I need to do." I would rather put my energy into aspects I can control.
The way big companies operate often focuses heavily on what effects can be achieved and what products can be delivered in a short time. My thinking at the time might have been a bit naive; what I wanted to do was very grand: I wanted to build a Layer on top of the internet for future full automation, for all collaboration, to provide underlying support for transfers and communication between any person, machine, or Agent.
You'll hear us repeat a point often: The Web was essentially built for humans; it is very unfriendly to all forms of automation, especially Agent automation. All the intermediary situations are still severe. You can foresee that friction is inevitable—on one hand, AI is advancing automation, on the other hand, intermediaries still want to maintain control.
I had this idea back then, feeling this is what we need to do. Although at that time we weren't even very clear about what Sui was or what kind of blockchain to build specifically, we had this idea. This Layer is very vast, and this choice is necessary. My previous career involved building similar very low-level Layers (all the runtime, etc., were built on it); now there are billions or even tens of billions of devices globally, and hundreds of millions of developers using things I helped build. I wanted to do it again. So, starting a business in my fifties is indeed a bit of折腾自己 (torturing myself), but I felt I couldn't wait any longer, so I went for it.
PANews:It sounds like a journey of self-discovery, a mission that must be completed.
Evan Cheng:I wouldn't exaggerate and call it "soul searching," but I always felt that at the right time, I need to do my own thing. In fact, age was never a consideration for me. Look in Asia, TSMC's Morris Chang also started his business in his fifties, and how successful he is! As long as you have an idea and a group of trusted partners around you, you can absolutely achieve it. So I said: "OK, let's do it."
Rejecting "Crypto is Dead" and Blind Optimism, the Key Lies in Clear Goals and Vision
PANews:So, after all these years in Crypto, compared to your initial dream, how much do you think has been realized? Or how much of your initial vision has the industry itself realized?
Evan Cheng:A little bit. I often meet partners in Asia who say: "You are the founder of Sui, we are honored to meet you." But I myself feel that the goals we initially wanted to achieve have only been realized a little bit. What we have achieved so far,比如有了一定的品牌认知度,成为了很多人的默认选择 (like having some brand recognition, becoming the default choice for many people), people know the Sui brand and what we are doing. We are very advanced technologically, but other aspects are really still in the very early stages, so really only a little bit has been completed.
However, we have been in business for over four years, all five founders are still here, working hard every day. Not a single person feels "it's too hard, I don't want to do it anymore," which makes me very happy.
PANews:The reason I ask this is because I entered this industry around the 2022 bear market. I often reflect on how much the industry has progressed compared to four years ago. I think our industry is now at a moment of "灵魂探索" (soul searching), with a very large sense of fragmentation: on one hand, we have a clearer regulatory environment and adoption by many institutions; but on the other hand, the market performance is惨不忍睹 (too awful to bear), I don't even dare to look at the prices. Where do you think this sense of fragmentation comes from?
Evan Cheng:This is the first such industry in history: when you just have a little product-market fit, just have a little success, without going through the traditional intermediate processes, people can directly assign some valuation to your token.
This has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the market reacts immediately to what you do, you get a lot of feedback; but the disadvantage is that you must not give people expectations that are too high, and sometimes you can't give expectations that are too low either, it's really hard to control. Because the Token you create immediately has value, this indeed attracts some people who only focus on making money in a short time. I think this is also one of the reasons for the current bear market: expectations were too high, there was too much noise, and many people didn't produce anything substantive.
From time to time, people feel disillusioned and say "this industry is a scam." We have a saying: "Not everyone in the Crypto industry is a scammer, but it seems all the scammers are in Crypto." This is indeed true. I think it's because our industry is not yet mature, much of the regulation we need is not yet in place. This market is not very efficient and is easily affected by certain events. Over time, these issues will be resolved. But this characteristic of "immediate reaction" is indeed difficult to deal with and requires strong resilience to endure.
PANews:Having experienced so many cycles, as an industry Team Leader, how do you lead your team through this bear market? What do you think are the most important Tips?
Evan Cheng:The most important point is that everyone needs to understand where our goals and vision lie. If you understand what we want to achieve in 10, 20, 30 years and are excited about it, then you can see the market's ups and downs as a process. You won't completely forget this dream just because the market is bad in the short term.
Of course, we can't expect everyone to have such great commitment and determination. But so far, our progress has actually been quite good. Our Team are all Builders, everyone has big dreams, hoping that we can be very successful in the future and truly deliver many results to the world. We are doing quite well in this aspect.
During market fluctuations, some people will get tired, some will be scared, there will be personal pressures, this is perhaps unavoidable. In the coming period, perhaps some ecosystems will not survive because you haven't reached the stage of survival yet, and the market collapses, you can't get more funding, this will have an impact. This is unfortunate. But on the other hand, if we are prepared, we feel we face many opportunities, this is what we focus on.
PANews:I recently came across a tweet of yours 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 topic is very philosophical. Where do you think our industry is now?
Evan Cheng: From time to time, you either hear "Crypto will change everything," or during bad times you hear "Crypto is a scam, has no future." This is really snobbish. If you follow this logic, AI would have definitely died long ago. How many years did AI develop before reaching today?
Often, these big paradigm shifts need to go through these stages. Humans always underestimate how long it takes to truly achieve breakthroughs and reach the critical moment of large-scale real adoption; but they also always underestimate how steep that growth curve will be once the inflection point truly arrives.
We haven't reached that inflection point yet, but it's definitely not "dead." If you think from first principles: the future world is automated, everything will be automated. But the existing web was not built for this automation, enterprises were not built for this automation, and humans were not born for this automation. When you understand this is the ultimate form, you will know what its outcome will be.
On the other hand, many people jump out and say: "The bear market is good for us, we will continue to build during the bear market." I think first, this is tone-deaf. Indeed, many people suffered heavy losses, many people lost money, many excellent builders will be eliminated, so this is absolutely not a time for celebration. Some people even celebrate by敲着椅子 (banging chairs) saying "we are doing fine," this is really tone-deaf.
Another point is that these cyclical fluctuations do scare many people away, which is also not good for our entire industry. We need time to deal with these things. So I really dislike those blindly optimistic posts.
PANews:Thank you. This is my second bear market. I feel that this time compared to the last time, I actually know our fundamentals are progressing, and our fundamentals are stronger now than ever before. Now I can tell myself, don't worry, this winter won't last too long, there is still quite a lot of hope here.
Three Major Bottlenecks Hindering Web2 Developers from Entering Web3
PANews:Let's talk about something more positive and optimistic. Let's delve into Sui. Before talking specifically about what Sui is doing, I hope to look at it macroscopically. If you were to point out 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 actually the industry's reputation and misconceptions about Crypto and blockchain.
Over the years, there have been many misconceptions about the industry. First, people think there are many scammers in Crypto, that it's just a place to get rich quick; we need to correct this. Second, people mistakenly believe that blockchain can only be a big casino, only for trading and stablecoin exchange. Others say there is a "blockchain trilemma"—every time someone asks me about the "trilemma," I get angry, it's completely wrong! It's just that the initial design thinking of blockchain was wrong. We have proven that there is no so-called "trilemma"; these problems will be solved.
People also understand Sui's design. Traditional architecture focuses on describing static assets, but we understand that assets are not static; any asset will go through different stages and lifecycle changes. This is completely different from Ethereum, Solana, and these ledger-based models. This misconception needs to be corrected.
Another serious misconception is that people think EVM and Solidity can solve everything. This is simply crazy! I would stake my reputation on it: things made with that programming language absolutely will not work. You would never be willing to build any critical business system on this foundation; it is absolutely a ticking time bomb. If you find 100 experts in programming languages and runtime systems, they will all tell you the same conclusion: outside this industry, no one would even glance at Solidity and EVM, let alone勉强用它来构建任何有实质性的系统 (reluctantly use it to build any substantive system).
The second bottleneck is technical maturity.
The people building blockchains now are basically of two types: One is Crypto Native, doing DeFi Protocols or NFTs, which are essentially on-chain products. They work at a very low level, must understand smart contracts, must understand how to manage blockchain-level, protocol-level resources, and also know how to use RPC, how to handle various tedious details.
The other type is perhaps slightly higher-level applications you might see, like PolyMarket. We all know it's built on blockchain, but they hide a lot of things; actually, many operations are done off-chain because they don't need to deal with these tedious and complex details.
The current Stack is just not good enough, and it's too low-level. Think about external financial products, social media, games, etc.; they simply should not be dealing with this level of complex details; they need a higher-level solution. This is indeed a very serious problem.
The third bottleneck is the fragmentation of privacy and network security models.
Current blockchains are basically transparent; everything is public, and often single-purpose. For example, Ethereum or Solana can do smart contracts, transfer assets; but if you need to do data storage, store confidential data, or need to set up role-based policies for decryption, viewing, and access control, you might need to find a completely different system, like Filecoin. If you need the privacy part, that's another protocol.
There are too many specialized blockchains on the market. To build a product, you might need to piece together many things: use Ethereum here, use an L2 there for confidentiality,还需要另外的协议来隐藏余额或收发方 (and need another protocol to hide balances or senders/receivers). This is simply crazy; it won't work! Because they are not a unified programming interface (API). This is the only industry in the world where people think they can just随便用software拼凑一下就能搞定 (casually piece together software and make it work). No, it won't work.
So, conceptual misconceptions, architectural problems, and immature, fragmented technology are huge bottlenecks hindering developer entry.
Attracting Gaming Giants, Creating Truly "Eternal Games"
PANews:I very much agree with what you just said. I see that when some very reputable Web2 gaming companies want to enter Web3, they don't want to leave their comfort zone; they hope the Stack is ready and very complete,可以直接上手 (can be used directly). For example, CCP Games before; I talked to them as an investor in 2023, 24, when they hadn't decided which chain to go to, and they finally chose Sui. In their considerations, which qualities of Sui do you think impressed them?
Evan Cheng:They understand they are making an "eternal game," to keep this economic system running forever, even if the company is gone, the people are gone, the system can still operate. They want to automate everything. They are very smart and understand that this game is essentially a virtual environment for automation.
In the game, many things you do are world-building, resource management, Battle, and such. Many things are not the first-person shooter games you might think of, but a whole lot of program logic, especially the parts managed by AI. And this track of AI automation is precisely what our Sui Stack platform is built for.
After we talked with them, they understood that if they used other chains, they might only be able to do cash management, payment consumption; other logic would still require piecing together a bunch of other things. They had tried to build on Ethereum but found it wouldn't work.
So, they are very good Partners. On one hand, they have previously made games with hundreds of thousands of players, operating for several years; on the other hand, they themselves are a developer platform, with many people writing a lot of things to run on it. So they and Sui are a perfect match. This is actually the first example showing "what a fully automated world would look like"—not fully automated, as there are both real players and Agents. This is a kind of simulation; I personally am very, very much looking forward to them making a very fun game on Sui.
Creating an iOS-level Experience for Web3, DeepBook is the Liquidity Hub
PANews:You mentioned a point earlier about "privacy." I think privacy might have been just a worn-out narrative in the past, but at this point in time, there is a very urgent need to build this Layer well. In the past few weeks, we have seen many funds and whales get血洗 (slaughtered) because their positions were exposed. What attempts is Sui making in terms of privacy?
Evan Cheng:First point, people often confuse confidentiality and privacy; these two are not the same thing, and privacy is not some universal solution.
In this field, there are roughly several models of privacy. Some people hope that "anonymity" on a public chain is enough, but in fact all details are publicly recorded on the chain. So some people will say: "OK, then let's fully adopt permissioned chains or private chains." When the internet first emerged, people also thought this, but this is completely愚蠢的想法 (a stupid idea). This "one-size-fits-all" model, either completely closed or completely public and hoping for pseudonymous trust—we now understand very well that it doesn't work.
Now that people are interested in privacy, that's good. But look at current privacy payments, privacy transfers; as I said before, they are often a completely separate blockchain. Are you going to operate on Ethereum, and then for privacy payments, also interact with another blockchain simultaneously, and还要把资产转移过去 (also transfer assets over)? This is too complicated.
There are also models like Canton, which let institutions (like JP Morgan or other funds) run all private data, negotiate business privately. But is there a separate step for asset settlement itself? Whoever runs the private pool can control the matching and all off-chain matters.
You can't say I use one blockchain with this privacy model, use another blockchain with that privacy model, and then configure it yourself. Our method is completely different. We built a unified Layer from the beginning; whatever privacy configuration you need, you configure it on this.
In fact, we are the first to handle data privacy issues. Walrus is for data storage. From a technical architecture perspective, you can use Seal to store encrypted data, and your decryption policy is directly written in Sui smart contracts. For example, today if you are a PANews subscriber, the article is automatically decrypted for you; if others don't have the same Email permissions, the smart contract will require them to pay 50 cents to see the article. As the data flows, the access policy flows with it.
This is a data-level confidential privacy model, which we can apply to various different models, all controlled by Sui's unified interface; only then can you build complex products.
If you only have one model, what you can do is very limited. All value must be reflected at the protocol layer. If your assets are not on the main chain, you will face problems doing finance: first, your liquidity will be fragmented, affecting capital efficiency; second, you cannot see the全局 (big picture), so risk management costs will increase.
We spent a lot of time on this; four years doing so many things. This year we will launch Nautilus (a framework for secure and verifiable off-chain computation on Sui), and there will be some other projects. Whether you want to do something private or participate in DeFi or other areas, you can do it on Sui. Importantly, everything is controlled by developers at the asset issuance level.
Because of Sui's Object model, these properties are all imprinted in the asset. Assets are not all static like the ERC-20 model; they can be processed, signed by the owner, their state can change, and their entire lifecycle evolves.
So we are very confident because our model is right; other models won't work. Thinking from first principles, you will understand: the more automation, the more complex the system, other models just won't work. We will soon launch some relatively simple things, like privacy payments, hidden balances, etc., start step by step doing adoption in our products, bringing value to consumers.
PANews:The biggest feeling I get from listening is that Sui provides a very complete Stack. Other blockchains are very fragmented; users or developers have to go to many places to piece together solutions, the experience is not intuitive. If I want to develop an application or build an economic system, I need a complete Stack where everything is controllable. Like you said before, others are building ledgers, while you are making a Stack; Sui is a true platform.
Evan Cheng:Right. 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 the platform—all the functions, interactions, SDKs are inside. You can't ask people to piece together a Stack themselves. Our core is to build the Sui Stack; our initial vision and expectation from the start was to build such a rich toolkit.
PANews:Finally, a very interesting question: can you explain to my grandmother what DeepBook is?
Evan Cheng:OK, DeepBook is like a "central bank."
On Sui, all exchanges or Swap applications can directly obtain liquidity from DeepBook. You can access a unified liquidity pool, do price matching on it, because it is a central order book.
On other platforms, there is no such centralized shared infrastructure; every project has to find their own "bank," establish their own liquidity pool.
Why is this important? Because it prevents fragmentation and improves efficiency. With DeepBook, everyone sees the same price, everyone can access the same liquidity pool. When every company can share the liquidity pool, DeFi on Sui will become very efficient, and capital efficiency will greatly improve.
