Last May, Mysten Labs co-founder and CEO Evan Cheng Sui Sui
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Blockchain could enable cryptocurrency’s “ChatGPT moment,” he told The Block. Come anytime.
In a recent mainnet conference interview, Cheng reiterated that that moment has not yet arrived, but is still just over the horizon.
“Consumers know what they don’t like and what they like, but they can’t always say what they want. Otherwise, we would have a faster horse,” Cheng said. Here’s an oft-quoted quote from Henry Ford: .
As for Cheng’s plans to enable Sui to achieve breakthroughs, his view was that by embracing “disruptive developers” and experimenting broadly, his blockchain has the best potential to achieve such breakthroughs.
“We have an authentic voice. The most disruptive creators tend to think very differently. They are attracted to our authentic voice, our craft,” Cheng said. “From the beginning, we refused to take shortcuts and do things like, ‘Oh, let’s just start with EVM L2…fork an existing project and do repetitive work.’”
One of Sui’s notable upcoming experiments is the SuiPlay0X1 portable gaming device, which is currently taking pre-orders ahead of its scheduled release in 2025. While some may see this device as a hardware play, like Solana’s web3-enabled phones, Cheng sees it as a software play.
Cheng said, “It’s a gaming device that can play all your Windows games. What makes it better than other devices? It’s deep software integration and operating system integration. Even if it caters to existing web3 gamers, it’s an excellent product because of the software.”
“Hardware is almost like a necessity. The magic is the software experience, and that’s how you win,” Cheng said.
Some gamers and gaming companies have resisted web3 integration in the past, but Cheng, a gamer who likes Soulslike games, said the right games will highlight the benefits of blockchain technology to gamers.
“You need to understand what blockchain offers to gamers: convenience, capturing the provenance of items, authenticity, anti-cheat: many of these features, taken together, will help you achieve what you want to achieve with all of these properties. Imagine Turn it into a real product, a real experience,” Cheng said.
Instead of focusing solely on gaming, Sui’s partnerships have ranged widely, from TikTok owner ByteDance to MoviePass, which the original CEO relaunched in 2023. Cheng said Sui looks for partners with a similar mindset, regardless of what specific industry they represent.
“We talk to pretty much everyone on everything. We’re looking for like-minded partners who want to do things better and challenge the status quo. That’s what we’re looking for. ‘Oh, man.’ It’s not ‘we’re in this industry or that industry,'” Cheng said. “The bottom line is, ‘Do we have the capacity to do as much as we want to do? As a startup, we always have to worry about that.”
As for being a relatively new L1 at a time when other projects are choosing to participate in existing ecosystems like Optimism’s Superchain, Cheng doesn’t think Sui is missing out by developing its own platform and community.
“We believe this space will grow 10-fold, 100-fold. We believe we have an authentic voice and we will stick to that,” Cheng said. “The way we win is not simply by taking market share away from existing players. We want to grow the pie.”
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