Editor’s note: Adeniyi Abiodun shares his personal experience in this article and discusses how these experiences led to the creation of Mysten Labs. His team consists of a group of experts with rich experience in the blockchain field, especially in Encryption Algorithm and system construction, which has given him great confidence. Mysten Labs also plans to develop a global storage layer and network infrastructure in the future, while continuing to work towards realizing the SUI vision.

The following is the original content (for ease of reading and understanding, the original content has been reorganized):

Picture this: your wife is in labor, your first child is about to be born, and you put all your savings into a risky project. It was a turning point in my life that eventually brought me together with some of the brightest minds in the industry to co-found Mysten Labs and created Sui.

The ‘Magic Internet Currency’ that almost destroyed my marriage

In 2012, I worked in the financial industry, and my days were monotonous. From waking up to clocking out, I could almost accurately predict what would happen at every moment. I could even tell you which subway train I would take, what I would write, how I would do testing, how I would submit code, and what the trader would say after I improved the system before going home. Everything was so predictable.

But if you understand my way of thinking, you’ll know that this kind of determinism doesn’t appeal to me. When everything is predictable, it can feel boring, so I crave some uncertainty, something challenging, at least something that makes me feel like I can break through existing boundaries. It was then that I discovered Bitcoin.

I first read the BTC White Paper from a colleague, and at first I thought it was a bit of eyewash. I thought it was not reasonable until I carefully read the code and reread the White Paper. I suddenly realized that it was a great idea.

The concept of Decentralization currency touched me at once, which is not just a problem of Mining, but a larger blueprint. BTC made me see that reliable currency can exist outside the traditional system. So I started buying BTC and doing Mining myself. I started building my own Mining equipment at home. As time went by, I found a gap in the market and started to provide Mining services for others.

Until one day, my wife told me to move these machines out of the house because there was no more space left. Everywhere were these constantly running Mining machines. So, I started renting space in data centers and unintentionally founded my own Mining company. Then, the moment came when I went all in.

Imagine, your wife is giving birth in the hospital, and you have to admit: you just spent all your savings on the BTC mining machine. That was my situation at the time, and the outcome could have taken two completely different paths. I was nervous and anxious, but also full of anticipation. I knew it was a gamble, but I believed Cryptocurrency could change our lives.

My wife was naturally very angry, but I assured her that this is an investment for the future. I know very well that only by making thoughtful risk decisions can I continue to pursue my passion in the face of uncertainty and potential failure. So, I used all my money to buy mining machines and put them in data centers. People will rent my equipment to mine Bitcoin, and I will charge a certain fee for it.

Most of the orders come from the United States. In fact, my biggest supplier is also in Texas. Therefore, considering the large amount of money I have invested in suppliers and the money I have earned from American customers, I have decided to personally develop the business in the United States. The original plan was to temporarily move there for six months, cooperate with the supplier, and wait for the machines to be produced. But in the end, this move became a permanent migration. Actually, this is not the first time I have suddenly moved to a completely new place and adapted to a new environment and people.

Nigerian boy with a Scottish accent

I was born in Nigeria and left my hometown at the age of eight. My father was pursuing a PhD in Economics at the time, so our whole family moved to Aberdeen in the east of Scotland, where he continued his PhD (a few years later, my younger brother would also follow the same path). After my father obtained his PhD, we moved again, this time to England. He started working, but then made a bold decision - he quit his job and became a full-time pastor, dedicating himself to serving God. This made me realize: anything is possible, and your life does not have to be confined by previous choices.

As for my mother, she is a full-fledged entrepreneur. She is always investing in business and real estate. Let me tell you, she may be the most skilled negotiator I have ever seen. If you go to the market with her, she will haggle to an embarrassing extent until the other party compromises and gives her the price she wants. She never accepts no for an answer… I may have inherited some of her abilities, but I am nowhere near as skilled as she is.

Having moved to several countries, adapting to different environments, and witnessing my parents taking bold risks, this journey has not been smooth sailing. But looking back, I have no regrets. My parents have always been a great inspiration and motivation for me on my path forward.

If life remains unchanged, it would be really boring.

Later, I entered Queen Mary University of London, but to be honest, I had no interest in education and just wanted to enjoy life. It wasn’t until the final exams were approaching that I realized: I should take my studies seriously. Looking at some of the friends I used to hang out with, I found that they didn’t have much of a future. Two of them ended up in jail, and some others got involved in dark things like drug trafficking.

I absolutely don’t want to live that kind of life. After enrolling, I attended a year of basic courses to determine my future direction. I chose astrophysics because I have always been curious about the universe. But gradually, I realized that I needed to do something more practical. Astrophysics is too theoretical for me. Theory is good, but I feel that my thinking prefers concrete things that can be touched.

So, I turned to the major of electronic engineering and computer science, and my passion for computers, enthusiasm for programming, and interest in software development were truly ignited. After graduation, I joined a startup company, where I started to build software and hardware for remote monitoring of oil and natural gas production.

Later, I switched to the financial industry and participated in building trading systems, trading algorithms, and Risk Management systems. I worked at JPMorgan and HSBC, responsible for the construction of these systems. Although this experience was interesting, over time, I began to find it boring. As I said before, everything became predictable. I also couldn’t see where my long-term value was, and couldn’t determine where I could make a significant impact.

I don’t want 1% improvement, I want a 100-fold leap. I hope what I do can make me proud repeatedly. So it is an unexpected fortune for me to move to the United States because I understand that the technology created by Bitcoin Mining Company goes far beyond peer-to-peer cash transactions. It can change the way our world operates, and I am beginning to see a bigger picture.

Find Clarity through Weariness

After spending some time in the BTCMining field, I felt a bit disappointed because I didn’t think we made much progress in the development of BTC. While Mining is important, what else can we do besides Mining? What other possibilities are there? Due to my background in the corporate world and my experience building systems for large banks, I started to think that blockchain technology could be the key to solving many enterprise problems. Therefore, I decided to bring blockchain technology into the enterprise.

This is why I started working at Oracle and then moved to VMware. VMware is a software company that focuses on cloud computing technology. For me, joining VMware is a new challenge. They are building a solution based on enterprise blockchain, and the development progress of this product lags behind competitors. They have almost nothing, except for the basic Algorithm.

So we have to establish this new product to sell to enterprises and customers, while trying to catch up with companies that have long been rooted in the industry, we face tremendous pressure to catch up. Because of my experience in the encryption industry, I know that things change very quickly. I realized that I had to launch some kind of product quickly because I know how bad it feels to lose. If you don’t give it your all and fail, you’ll understand it’s because you didn’t try your best.

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I have always been a competitive fool, whether playing football on the field or video games, I always crave victory. To me, victory means winning by a landslide. I don’t want to beat you 1-0 in ‘FIFA’, I have to win by 6-0. For me, there must be a clear gap to count as a win. Therefore, I took on more responsibilities in a short period of time because the workload was just too much. I found myself busy with marketing, engineering, product development, you name it.

But I am very motivated inside, and I always tell myself and the team that we must do our best and launch this product as soon as possible. I work long hours every day, and I feel that I can’t be beaten at all. But I soon realized that the real problem is not technical. The technology exists, we can build it. The real problem lies in ownership.

You see, these companies all want to have a part of the infrastructure they need in order to control it. When you have this mindset, you cannot build a reasonable alliance because there is no common goal. The first real experience of weariness in my career hit me like a truck, and I exhausted myself in just six months.

This experience has taught me that you cannot equate failure with what happens within six or seven months. You need to see it as a long-term focus, which is a principle we keep in mind in SUI. We strive not only for quick victories, but also for long-term development, aiming to create a truly decentralized internet.

Encounter with the 100x Team

After VMware, I came to Facebook. At Facebook, I joined a project called Libra. This is a very ambitious plan where Facebook has formed a consortium to build a blockchain for creating global Digital Money and payment systems. What attracted me to join Facebook is that here they have the consortium that we couldn’t establish in our previous work: at Facebook, they are able to unite around achieving goals.

So although I still see the ‘boot problem’ that exists in Oracle and VMware, I think Facebook has solved this problem through the alliance of Libra and Diem, and they are committed to building this infrastructure for the whole world.

Our idea is to make sending money on the Internet as simple as sending an email, and we believe this is a public good that can truly benefit the world. Facebook has been able to build one of the best research teams I’ve ever seen, with professors from Stanford University, outstanding computer scientists, and bright minds from around the world. Working with everyone there makes me very happy, and they have built a very good team culture, and everyone is passionate about the mission we are pursuing.

But even with so many talents, we still face huge challenges. Due to Facebook’s past issues with public trust and data privacy, people are skeptical about their new financial system. Just imagine, if you woke up tomorrow morning and 200 million people had opened bank accounts in ‘Facebook Bank’, that would be the largest bank in history.

For any country, this is a terrible thing. In addition, public opinion is ‘I don’t trust Facebook, it’s a monopoly’. This is the problem we need to solve. How do you build trust when you start from a point of mistrust? It is because of these reasons that Libra did not succeed in the end.

In hindsight, I think we may have underestimated Congress’s tough stance on Facebook. But I really think Zuck should be praised, and David Marcus should be praised, because they had the courage to try something that others hadn’t tried. In the process of failing to launch Libra successfully, Facebook actually opened the door for other companies like PayPal, Visa, and Circle. So, their investment in Libra and the subsequent decision to cancel the project paved the way for other companies.

To me, it’s heartbreaking to see this excellent team fail due to external factors. This is the best team I’ve ever worked with.

And I have no idea what to do next.

Outstanding team without a plan

I also want to say that, for me personally, the failure of Libra has also planted the seeds of success. Without that failure, I would never have had the opportunity to collaborate with those outstanding minds who eventually came together to create Mysten Labs and later developed SUI. Looking back on my time at Facebook, one thing that impressed me deeply was my admiration for Evan and his team.

Evan is an outstanding leader and a great visionary.

Evan is one of the key innovators of LLVM technology, which provides support for most iPhones and countless other devices we use every day. It is a huge revolution in the tech world, and his work has earned him the prestigious ACM Computer Science Award, which has been awarded to some of the top computer scientists in the world.

He has also led the development team at Facebook.

They are like mad scientists, creating a variety of products that we use every day. So when I had the opportunity to work closely with Evan and his team, I chose to join without hesitation. This experience brought me a friendship with the future co-founder of Mysten Labs. When we saw that there was no end to the latency in the release of Libra/Diem, Evan and I came together. He asked me: If we were to start a company, who would you like to work with? He asked the same question to other founding team members, and when we all gave the same answer, it was clearly meant to be.

Sam Blackshear is one of Facebook’s top engineers, and Move programming language is his brainchild.

There is also Consensus expert George Danezis

Facebook actually acquired his company Chainspace to help build Libra, which shows his capabilities. Finally, there’s Kostas ‘Kryptos’ Chalkias, whose creativity is amazing.

At Facebook, he is the chief figure in all matters related to encryption, and many of the Encryption Algorithm used in one of the most widely used applications, WhatsApp, are developed by him. We all participated in a conference call and mentioned the same person. So we decided to do it this way! No one argues about roles or responsibilities. To be honest, we don’t even know exactly what we want to build, but we do know for sure that we want to work together. And that’s how Mysten Lab came into being. It’s a good starting point.

Smart Assets Global Coordination Layer

The vision of Libra is to make sending money as simple as sending an email, built on an infrastructure controlled by multiple companies. When we started creating Mysten Labs, we realized that this vision was too narrow. We wanted to build something bigger, but also wanted it to be open and Decentralization.

The world is undergoing a comprehensive digital transformation, with every asset defaulting to digitization. Today’s Internet performs exceptionally well in transmitting data, but falls short in conveying value or intent. If I want to send you money, we will face a variety of protocol chaos, and these protocols cannot truly control funds.

So, what kind of infrastructure does the Internet need to create a world where assets can be seamlessly built, coordinated, and combined? If we are to have billions of assets, each person having their own assets, how can we enable the intent coordination of these assets in a unified way so that others can participate?

This is our mission, so on the ruins of Libra, the vision of SUI is gradually becoming clear - to build a global coordination layer for digital assets.

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We are not a group of technical brothers playing with encryption technology. Some of our team members have been involved in building systems and applications that can scale to billions of users. We have the technical expertise and practical experience to build a solution that can truly operate globally.

For me, everything comes together: a grand vision, a team that I have no doubt about, and an opportunity to have a lasting impact on the future of the internet. As we embark on this journey, the strength of our team becomes even more apparent. From the fastest Consensus protocol to object-centric approaches, and a platform with the best developer experience in the industry, SUI is gradually taking shape.

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Our complete vision is not just a global coordination layer, but also a storage layer and network infrastructure. Next, what we are building is a global storage layer, which we are developing in collaboration with Walrus. Then we will establish a global Network Layer, and we are building the entire technology stack layer by layer.

I can confidently say that currently no L1 Block chain can truly match the vision or technology we have built at Mysten Labs. And no company has the human capital that Mysten Labs possesses, which is why I am confident that we will win. As I said before, I hate failure. I am a person who cannot afford to lose, and this is a game I know we will win.

You might be wondering why I spent so much time telling my personal story instead of diving straight into all the exciting things happening at Mysten Labs. I believe that understanding my background is important for you to have a more complete picture.

At first glance, it seems to be smooth sailing, but the reality is definitely not. Just like the world of encryption itself, my path is full of Fluctuation, uncertainty, and sometimes even risky, perhaps a bit reckless.

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