Evan Cheng: The Architect of Sui's Object-Oriented Revolution

Evan Cheng didn’t just build another blockchain when he created Sui. He engineered a paradigm shift.

Over the past year, Sui, one of the darlings of the bull market, has blown past $1.5 billion in total value locked (TVL), up from just over $200 million at the start of the year, thanks to the market's confidence in its new infrastructure developments, such improvements to Sui’s underlying Move programming language, and the launch of Circle's USDC on the chain.

VanEck's Sui exchanged-traded note, which launched in November, passed $140 million in assets under management, demonstrating institutional interest in the chain.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.

As the founder of Sui and CEO of Mysten Labs, the developer that supports the protocol, Cheng leveraged lessons from the ill-fated Diem project run by Meta (then Facebook) to create a layer-1 blockchain that’s not only faster and cheaper but fundamentally different than other layer 1s. With those lessons learned, Cheng and his team built Move, which makes coding more efficient and streamlined.

“The most successful projects on Sui are not clones of existing DeFi protocols,” Cheng said in an interview with CoinDesk. “They are native products that cannot be built elsewhere.”

Appealing to Institutional Investors

Sui's object-oriented approach treats every asset or piece of data as an independent object, as opposed to being oriented around accounts and their very public balances, allowing interactions to happen directly with that object without affecting the rest of the blockchain.

This means that large institutional investors that would otherwise be hesitant to let the world inspect all of their data on-chain can effectively firewall off sensitive sections.

“This black-and-white model of everything being either fully open or fully closed doesn’t work,” Cheng said, explaining why many institutions opt for permissioned chains.

Sui's competitors spent 2024 watching the chain's growth, especially as the market enthusiastically signaled that it was heading in the right direction. Now, one might wonder if Sui’s rivals will flatter it with imitation.