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A&T Capital: Why did we invest in Mysten Labs (Sui)?

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Sui's research in scalability and consensus improvements enables it to support mass adoption.

Original source: A&T Capital public account

Original title: "A&T Family: Why did we invest in Mysten Labs (Sui)?"

Financing information

Mysten Labs, the development team of the public chain Sui, officially announced on September 8 that it has completed the B-round financing of US$300 million. More than $2 billion. FTX Ventures led the round, with participation from A&T Capital, a16z Crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Mysten Labs was established in 2021 by former Meta-Novi (the research and development body of Diem blockchain) Evan Cheng, former R&D director, former Meta-Novi chief engineer Sam Blackshear and others Founded in 2009, Mysten Labs designed its own high-performance PoS blockchain, Sui.

Sui's further research results in scalability and consensus improvements compared to the payment-focused Diem architecture allow it to support mass adoption. In addition, Sui still follows the new Move programming language promoted by Diem, which has significant advantages over other mainstream blockchain programming languages in terms of programming efficiency and security.

Why we invest in Mysten Labs (Sui)

1. Investment logic

1. Innovative content is remarkable and of great value in an innovation-driven industry

Unique innovation:Sui's main object model is completely different from existing mainstream blockchain frameworks such as Ethereum/Solana (account model), on this basis The introduction of parallel transaction execution and consensus based on block software transaction memory (to achieve low latency and higher throughput) is also an innovative solution, and the test data shows a significant improvement (100K TPS).

Move value continuation:Sui uses Move as its programming language, and the latter is the most important innovative part of meta in the Diem project, It is not modified along the EVM/WASM, but completely innovative, and successfully improves the security/correctness of smart contracts from the programming language level; for developers familiar with the Move language, its development efficiency is higher than that of mainstream areas Blockchain programming languages are more efficient.

2. The technical strength of the team is top in the industry, and the accumulation is rich

Top Team: The team has gathered Meta-Novi's R&D director, chief engineer, product owner, chief cryptographer, etc., and its technical strength is at the top of the industry, and it is not short The historical basis of cooperation will also further strengthen the combat effectiveness of the team. And as a group of people with the most knowledge/experience in using Move in the entire industry, the accumulation of the Mysten Labs team cannot be regarded as insignificant.

Second, the status quo of the industry

The public chain upgrade has entered a new stage:

In the past bull market, Solana/Avalanche/Near and other first-generation Ethereum killer public chains have stepped onto the stage one after another, and Harvested their own highlights, but failed to build their own solid ecology (reflected by the lack of/actually valuable applications that can retain user interaction within the ecology);

Combining the infrastructure of Ethereum has been upgraded (layered architecture, the efficiency of L2 has not lost to the generation of Ethereum killers), but the first batch of "killers" did not catch up quickly, combined with the aforementioned ecological situation, the next bull market Ethereum's competitors may need to change batches.

Two emerging categories could become the next generation of main Ethereum competitors:

Diem gangster: This type of single-layer public chain represented by Sui inherits the innovative development language of Move, and updates parallel computing, finally giving a super high value of $160K in a single-chain environment. Theoretical upper limit (cannot be realized in a single environment of Ethereum);

Modular blockchain: Layered architecture represented by Celestia , its layered architecture is fundamentally different from Ethereum, enabling it to give upper-level developers as much autonomy as possible (the current framework of Ethereum cannot be realized, and Ethereum has taken a different path).

Third, there are three "maximum" in Sui's proposal

1. Parallel computing:

Parallel computing is the core of Sui's ability to provide ultra-high processing capabilities, 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/interwoven with shared objects )>>>Among them, simple transactions can be easily calculated in parallel and quickly achieve consensus through Byzantine Consistent Broadcast; complex transactions involve Block-STM.

Block-STM actually separates transaction execution and sequencing: all transactions will be executed first (and recorded as execute), if there is interdependence (or vice versa), look for the pre-transaction, if the pre-transaction is available, record Validate, if it is not available, check it after the pre-transaction is available (see Figure 3 on the right for details); finally when a block After all the transactions of are Validated, the consensus/block generation of the entire block is completed.

Under this design, Sui greatly reduces the requirements for peers to achieve lower latency while allowing verifiers to compute in parallel .

2.Move language and object model:

Move uses a static type system, which is essentially a logical constraint (stricter than Solidity, which can expose many vulnerabilities during compilation; Rust, Golang, Typescript, etc. are all static type systems), which is convenient for shielding Low-level errors;

Move implements First-class Resources, where Resources (an object model) is a concept corresponding to Value (Ethereum, etc. Value method is used), Value can be copied at will, and Resources can only be consumed, not copied>>> On the one hand, it is safer, on the other hand, it also provides a basis for parallel computing;

3. State synchronization to optimize data availability:

For For non-validator nodes, they only need to download (usually for the most reputable node in the current network) the full chain state at a certain point in time and the state update data packets between this point in time and the latest state ( Ethereum nodes need to download all the transactions between them and execute them to get the latest status), which saves a lot of computing resources.

Fourth, economic model

Sui is designed to separate payment for storage fees and transaction execution:

The Gas Fee submitted by the user will be divided into two parts, one part will normally pay the current execution transaction fee; and the storage part will be directly attributed to the Storage Fund (in Staking State), on the one hand to pay the current storage costs, on the other hand to subsidize the storage costs that will increase with the development and maturity of the network in the future.

If the user decides to delete this part of the transaction data, he can get a rebate.

At the same time, Sui's Gas Fee Price at each time is obtained by validators voting on the gas price within the network, which helps to maintain Gas prices are low and predictable (and help prevent DoS attacks compared to Ethereum's setting).

V. Team Introduction

Evan Cheng, CEO

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

Sam Blackshear, CTO

Former Novi Chief engineer, focusing on the Move programming language (2018~2021), and has been a Staff Engineer of Meta since 2015.

Adeniyi Abiodun, CPO

Former Head of Meta Novi product; previously engaged in Blockchain-related work in VMware, Oracle, etc.

Koh Kim, Head of Ecosystem

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