Evan Cheng

Evan Cheng is a Taiwanese-American software engineer who co-founded Mysten Labs in 2021 alongside Adeniyi Abiodun, Kostas Chalkias, George Danezis, and Sam Blackshear — all former members of Meta's blockchain division where they had spent years engineering the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain and the Move programming language. Before Meta, Cheng spent over a decade at Apple as a compiler engineer, leading the development of LLVM optimisations and the Swift programming language's compiler infrastructure — a background that gave him deep expertise in programming language design and compiler technology.

Cheng's role as Director of Engineering at Meta's blockchain division from 2019 to 2021 placed him at the centre of one of the most ambitious — and ultimately unsuccessful — attempts to build a global digital currency. Libra/Diem was announced in 2019 with the backing of 28 founding members including Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, but faced immediate and intense regulatory opposition from central banks, the Federal Reserve, and the US Congress. Meta ultimately cancelled the Diem project in January 2022, selling its assets to Silvergate Bank.

Rather than viewing Diem's cancellation as a defeat, Cheng and his colleagues saw it as an opportunity to apply the technical work they had done — particularly the Move language and its safety-first approach to smart contract programming — in a public, permissionless setting. Mysten Labs raised $36 million in a Series A in December 2021, followed by a $300 million Series B in September 2022 led by FTX Ventures (which complicated things when FTX collapsed two months later), with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Sui's mainnet launched in May 2023. The protocol's foundational innovation — the object-centric execution model — was developed primarily by Cheng and his team. In Sui, blockchain state consists of objects (data structures with unique IDs and ownership properties) rather than accounts. Transactions that touch different objects can be processed in parallel without consensus, while transactions touching shared objects require the full Narwhal-Bullshark consensus protocol. This dual-track approach allows Sui to process simple transfers at extraordinary speed while maintaining correctness for complex DeFi interactions.

Cheng has been a prominent advocate for the Move programming language as a fundamentally safer foundation for DeFi smart contracts than the EVM and Solidity. Move's resource type system — inherited from linear type theory in programming language research — makes it impossible to accidentally duplicate or destroy a digital asset. In Solidity, many of the most costly exploits have involved reentrancy attacks, integer overflow, and improper access control. Move's type system eliminates reentrancy at the language level and forces explicit handling of asset transfers.

Cheng's compiler engineering background is reflected in Move's design: the language has strong static analysis properties that allow many classes of bugs to be detected at compile time rather than at runtime (when the smart contract is already deployed and potentially controlling user funds). Mysten Labs has also invested in formal verification tooling for Sui Move, allowing protocol developers to mathematically prove the correctness of their smart contracts.

Under Cheng's leadership, Mysten Labs has grown Sui into one of the most active new DeFi ecosystems, with Cetus Protocol, Turbos Finance, Scallop Lend, and Aftermath Finance building a comprehensive DeFi stack on the platform. Sui's NFT and gaming ecosystems have also flourished, attracting major gaming studios and IP holders who value the non-custodial asset ownership properties that Sui's object model enables.

Cheng has emphasised Sui's ambition to be the blockchain infrastructure for mainstream consumer applications — not just DeFi — positioning the network's UX innovations (sponsored transactions, zkLogin for Web2-style onboarding, and the Sui wallet) as differentiators for reaching the next billion blockchain users. Whether this vision translates into the network effects necessary to challenge Ethereum and Solana's dominance remains the central question for Sui's next phase of development.