Evan Cheng is the CEO and co-founder of Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui blockchain, which develops tools to make web3 secure, reliable, and ready for mass adoption.

Early Career

In 1992, Evan graduated from Marietta College with a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science and Math.

In 1996, he graduated from Syracuse University with Masters of Science (MS) in Computer Science.

In 1997, Evan entered the software world as an Engineer Manager at Equator Technologies, Inc.

In May 2004, he worked as Senior Principle Engineer at Synfora Inc.

Later, Evan worked for almost 10 years (2005-2015) at Apple in various fields, where he started as a Senior Compiler Engineer. He has become a technical lead for LLVM (Low-Level Virtual Machine) code-generating efforts. Later, Evan became a Senior Manager to lead the LLVM backend team to oversee the static and runtime compilation efforts for CPUs and GPUs, Swift performance, and optimizations, including hardware architecture explorations.^[3] Evan Cheng was a co-recipient of a 2012 ACM Software System Award for work on LLVM in 2013. He was specifically recognized by ACM for his contribution to computer science.^[4]

In November 2015, he became the Director of Engineering at Facebook, supporting programming languages and runtimes.

After that, in June 2018, he went and became the Director of Research and Development at Novi Financial.

In September 2021, he started to work as the co-founder and CEO at Mysten Labs.^[2] Evan also supported the research in crypto, system, PL, verification, and Dev Platform-Move teams.^[7]

Evan joined PARSIQ as an investor and advisor. He was also an advisor to Chainlink, the decentralized oracle network that provides live data to blockchains.

Evan, who spent over ten years working at Apple, is a real supporter of what PARSIQ is doing. He said, ^[5]

Blockchain data & analytics is a rapidly growing field, supported by the increasing usage and popularity of projects in this space. PARSIQ stands out among its peers by enabling programmable triggers on top of streaming data with high precision and high availability. PARSIQ is a game changer and I’m thrilled to be working with the team as a strategic investor and technical advisor.^[5]

Blockchain Career

After joining Apple as a senior compiler engineer, Cheng stated:

My mode of operation is, “This system you’ve been using for years is trash. You don’t want to deal with it. Give it to me. I’ll build a team and replace it.” On day two after joining Apple, I went to a VP and said, “You’ve been using this thing for 20 years. I found this other engineer who’ll replace it with me.” We did it in nine months and went from there, making that into a huge team inside Apple. Our work is running inside every smartphone in existence, pretty much, both Android and iOS.

After I got to Facebook, I operated the same way. Anything people found hard, building large-scale systems, doing new kinds of runtime, they gave it to me. I’d just go and build it. When you have a high enough success rate, people put up with you. That’s how I got into blockchain. The concept was interesting. I could see how it would change ownership, change product experience, change how people think about transferring value and assets around.^[8]

Evan Cheng also expressed how the entire team was working to put the solution into implementation for the 'only-system that works as a routine':

If you think about the whole concept of Web3, it’s the kind of network where all the assets can be there. You can create assets there. You can efficiently transfer them. They can update and move around. That can be the source of truth for all the assets. If you want anything that’s outside, you can put it there. It could be almost just like a trophy. But with all the information attached to it. Maybe they want to resell it after they’re done with the game, or transfer it or rent it out. It could be that there’s a second part of the game that’s going to come later and they want to bring it to the next game, or they could want to take it outside the game and interact with a website through crafting and changing other things. It could just be a way to show off what you have. The worst thing about it is that, if you have network congestion, because it’s so limited in capacity, the whole thing falls apart, or your fee becomes huge. You can’t build a business like that.

This is when Evan founded Mysten Labs to develop tools to make web3 more secure and reliable.

Mysten Labs

Evan Cheng co-founded Mysten Labs in 2021 with a mission to develop tools to make web3 secure, reliable, and ready for mass adoption. Mysten Labs is a team of leading distributed systems, programming languages, and cryptography experts whose founders were senior executives of Meta’s Novi Research and lead architects of the Diem blockchain and Move programming language.^[1] Mysten Labs is priorly known for Sui Blockchain, a decentralized Layer 1 blockchain.