Interviewee: Adeniyi Abiodun, Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs and Co-founder of Sui
Compiled by: Peng SUN, Foresight News
Adeniyi Abodiun co-founded Sui Blockchain and Mysten Labs with Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis and Kostas Chalkias, and currently serves as the co-founder and chief product officer (CPO) of Sui development team Mysten Labs. Adeniyi Abiodun started out as a software engineer in London. In 2012, he built his first crypto infrastructure business and has since held leadership positions at Oracle, VMWare and Meta.
During the Sui Builder House in Denver, Wayne Cunningham, Technical Content Manager at the Sui Foundation, conducted an AMA with Adeniyi Abiodun, where the community and users were able to gain in-depth insights into the Mysten Labs team, two testnet results, favorite product use cases, and Adeniyi’s expectations for the mainnet launch.
Wayne Cunningham: Adeniyi, what is your role as Chief Product Officer at Mysten Labs and co-founder of Sui?
Adeniyi Abiodun: At Mysten Labs, we are building the foundation of a decentralized web that enables everyone to access digital assets securely, quickly, and cheaply.
Beyond that, I am responsible for helping the company execute on this vision, making sure we are measuring the right things and setting the right goals to take meaningful steps. We are a team of great people in economics, product, marketing, design, and engineering. While spanning many verticals, our daily work is more focused on uniting the team around a common goal and making sure we are building a tailored product for developers trying to get on board the Sui platform. We believe that Sui is the next generation blockchain that actually brings what is known as broadband to Web3.
Wayne Cunningham: You mentioned measuring the right things, so what are the metrics?
Adeniyi Abiodun: What we really care about is that developers can build applications on a platform that will really benefit them. First, can they attract a large enough target audience? Second, can they build applications that are highly secure and trustworthy?
This is the advantage of decentralized technology. It allows you to build strong communities, adopt new monetization strategies, build code on public shared infrastructure, and do it in a highly scalable way. We believe that developers can form the largest community on the Sui platform because we can support the largest user base on any Layer1 blockchain.
Wayne Cunningham: Mysten Labs, the Move language, and the Sui blockchain all came out of your work with Evan, Sam, Kostas, and George at Meta. Can you describe what it was like working with them and how you got here?
Adeniyi Abiodun: We were not able to achieve this dream at Facebook, but we believe we have built an excellent team that can help the company achieve most of its goals from a technical perspective. In reality, this goal had no chance of success. So, we thought the best way to achieve this vision was to actually build a fully decentralized infrastructure, rather than building something inside Facebook.
It has been a great experience working with Sam, Geore, Kostas and Evan. They are all really great people and there is nothing better than starting a company with your friends.
Wayne Cunningham: They all have excellent resumes. Sam invented Move, Kostas is an excellent cryptographer, George is an expert in privacy technology and distributed systems, and Evan has a great blockchain vision. So, can they complement each other well?
Adeniyi Abiodun: We complement each other. I have a strong technical background in product, but not as strong as the rest of the team. Evan, the CEO, is an expert and pioneer in compilers, he has a great vision and strong product capabilities. We also have Sam, George, and Kostas, who invented the Move programming language, who are experts in different fields. I think this is what makes Mysten Labs and Sui different. We have experts in programming languages, cryptography, and distributed systems, and we have a history of building highly efficient teams. All of these are necessary to really solve problems to build the most scalable blockchain ever. Some teams with strong lineups may not benefit from this, and this actually shapes our current success.
Wayne Cunningham: Your product focus seems to be on the utility and users of the network. How do you create that vision for a network that’s still evolving?
Adeniyi Abiodun: Obsession with this question. I'm obsessed with creating something that really works for the user base, and our user base is developers. We're focused on creating the best platform for developers to build on. That's why it takes us a lot of time to get there, because we just keep iterating and making it better. The tooling has to be better, the programming experience and the building experience has to be better, and the developer usage of the platform has to be better.
Therefore, my job is actually to make new and old developers better understand the deep technical concepts and components. Our team is achieving this goal.
Wayne Cunningham: Can you give us some insider information about the operation of the two testnets Wave 1 and Wave 2 so far?
Adeniyi Abiodun: Both testnets have been completed successfully. It looks like everything is running well, but the team has done a lot of work behind the scenes. When a certain date or deadline comes, the whole team will come together. The first testnet is about validators. Can we make this network run with validators, allowing them to run the client instead of running it ourselves for the past six months?
The second testnet is all about token economics. We build tokens directly on the blockchain, and the way the blockchain works in token economics is merged and fused into one. We need to prove a lot of things because it's a big bet, and we think we can prove a lot of things in Wave 2. The next Wave 3 will be developer-centric.
Wayne Cunningham: Are there any surprises in token economics during the run of testnet Wave 2?
Adeniyi Abiodun: From a consumer perspective, one of the things that is frustrating about Web3 is the unpredictable gas prices. We cannot build a system that can achieve mass adoption if gas prices are volatile. We have designed an element in our token economics that gas prices should be as flat as possible even in times of high volatility and network congestion. Wave 2 has proven this.
Wayne Cunningham: Is this a very different model than the cloud model where you have to add servers to keep up with the traffic?
Adeniyi Abiodun: It's kind of similar. Most blockchains can't add more resources to the network, they have a fixed capacity, and the best way to ensure that you are not affected by network congestion is to increase the transaction price so that basically the highest bidder is always processed. This is a way to control network congestion, but it's a bad model. In fact, the cloud model doesn't work like this, Google is not going to increase my bill because they just launched 50 independent applications. What they do is throw more servers at it to solve the problem. Sui's design is the same, that as the network becomes congested, the validator nodes do not increase the gas fee, but can simply throw more resources to keep the balance between resource supply and demand.
Wayne Cunningham: What do you expect the mainnet to look like when it launches? Will it be a smooth transition from testnet Wave 3, or will it be something radically different?
Adeniyi Abiodun：We will not launch a blockchain that is low-performance, insecure, and lacks all the features we want to provide to developers. The mainnet will be feature-rich, and the only thing to do after launch will be to add additional scalability and additional developer improvements to the network.
On the first day after the mainnet launch, users can use applications, play Sui Capys, trade on DEX and central limit order books. Users can do everything on traditional blockchains, but the difference is that we have applications that create more engagement than traditional blockchains.
NFTs on Sui are dynamic and they will provide more user engagement, and these types of user engagement will encourage people to build more interesting communities in new ways.
Wayne Cunningham: What are some of your favorite use cases for apps on Sui?
Adeniyi Abiodun: Gaming is one of our favorites. We think gaming already pairs well with digital asset ownership, including the composability aspects of liberating those assets now on a public ledger, allowing people to freely build on Sui. This is very unique because it is fully composable, which is not possible with other blockchains. This will facilitate a new wave of collaboration that was previously unimaginable.
Wayne Cunningham: Do you expect to see a richer gaming environment, such as that available on consoles? Do you expect to see this type of evolution on blockchain?
Adeniyi Abiodun: We have announced partnerships with some of the world’s leading game studios, experts in creating AAA games. We believe that games must be fun first, which is why we are partnering with experienced game makers. We will be releasing a lot of coverage of specific game applications that will be launched on the Sui mainnet.
Wayne Cunningham: In the long run, will Mysten Labs focus on building the Sui blockchain, or will it develop its own applications and build user experience?
Adeniyi Abiodun: Our goal is to provide ongoing services to developers, and that's what we're going to do, and that's the key to Sui's success. It's been incorporated into the Sui Foundation, allowing it to grow independently of Mysten Labs.
From now on, the job of Mysten Labs is to keep looking at this space and figure out where the gaps are for developers. How can we fund companies that are doing a better job of developer experience, or build companies ourselves that we think have the opportunity to make products that are 10x or 100x better than what’s currently available in the market. It’s really about giving developers better tools to build.
