Sui co-founder Adeniyi: How will Move change the crypto industry in the next five years?

Translation: Finn, Aptos World

Source: Mysten

Jen:

Welcome Adeniyi, I’m glad you could join us as our speaker!

Adeniyi:

I’m also happy to be here. I’m Adeniyi Abiodun, one of the co-founders of Mysten Labs, and I serve as the Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Mysten.

To introduce my background, I started my career in the oil and gas industry, where I worked as a software engineer building remote monitoring systems in countries like Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Scotland. Eventually, I chose to move into finance. I began building algorithmic trading software, including margin risk software for monitoring trading portfolio risks.

In the second half of 2011, I discovered Bitcoin. I found Bitcoin as a technology very interesting, and it kept me thinking about cryptocurrencies for a long time. In 2012, I decided to start my first company in the Bitcoin space, which gradually grew and focused on Bitcoin mining.

I created something called Bitcoin contracts, which others chose to buy from me to make mining more convenient.

After that, I built a big data company, and after completing that work, I chose to join Oracle to launch enterprise blockchain. I worked briefly at VMware, and then had a great conversation with Kevin Weil from Facebook and several other Diem founders, and I was completely captivated by the Libra project. That’s why I joined the Mysten team.

Question 1: What are the similarities and differences between Sui and Aptos?

Adeniyi:

The most obvious similarity between Mysten Labs and the Aptos team is that the founders are both from Facebook and have chosen to adopt the Move programming language. Beyond that, there aren’t many similarities between the projects we are building.

We chose to leave Facebook to start Mysten and build Sui, which incorporates all the research we did with Facebook over the past three to four years. We are very encouraged by the progress we’ve made in a short time; we really can’t wait to launch it.

Question 2: Can you compare Sui with Solana?

Adeniyi:

If you look at the recent situation with Ethereum or Solana, as the scale increases, the fees also start to become very expensive. Therefore, this fundamentally limits the development of all blockchain platforms today; this is something that is relatively impossible for us.

We took a different approach. We set out to build a platform that will scale as demand increases.

Additionally, what sets Sui apart is that we are not just scaling vertically; we are also scaling horizontally. We believe that the ideology of web2 should also translate into web3. If I am a smart contract developer, I want to do the least amount of work to achieve scalability.

When I build my application, I should feel relatively comfortable, and economically, I hope there won’t be too much volatility. This means that today it costs 1 cent, and next week it should also cost 1 cent, which relates to horizontal scalability.

We have an incentive program—a token model that incentivizes validators to add resources to increase the network's throughput, allowing validators to still receive good returns on their investments in transaction processing when a large demand comes in.

So that’s the difference between us and Solana, Aptos, and almost all other blockchain public chains. We have a design philosophy that we believe if you want to build applications that cater to billions of people, from a user experience perspective, the fees need to be relatively stable.

Moreover, you need to be able to enable multiple applications. Lower fees also make many interesting new use cases possible, which you wouldn’t attempt on other blockchains because the costs are too high.

Question 3: What are we doing for the Sui ecosystem?

Adeniyi:

We want to focus our energy on real existing demands. In traditional blockchains, block space is a luxury; it is a very limited resource, whereas in Sui, block space is not a limited resource; it is a commodity.

Gaming is also an area we value highly. It is a visual representation that a person can see and experience. More importantly, there are a lot of users in gaming.

So, if you can enhance the gaming experience through ownership and do so at a certain scale, we believe it will be a great choice from the user’s perspective.

Then, we also have finance. Finance is something we believe we can do relatively well because Sui operates in a write-only mode. You can effectively complete transactions in less than a second. So, to our knowledge, Sui is the only blockchain that can truly achieve sub-second latency.

Another thing that Sui can achieve, which we are genuinely interested in, is the social element. The rarity of NFTs will bring value, but I think we can add some other dimensional elements that make it more interesting.

We have built an SDK that allows you to create more worlds directly on Sui, like Twitter.

Question 4: How is horizontal scaling achieved on the Sui chain?

Adeniyi:

The scalability of Sui mainly comes from the Move programming language and the data model we have. Additionally, there’s our consensus.

Everyone talks about consensus being a bottleneck, and the network cannot scale the blockchain because of consensus.

We took a different approach; we have an object-oriented data model that allows us to pre-determine the dependencies between different types of transactions.

For example, if I send you $5, and you send your NFT to someone else, these two transactions have no relationship with each other. On other blockchains, these two transactions are built in the same block and have dependencies.

If there isn’t enough space in the block, you have to wait for the next block to finally complete them. This creates inherent dependencies in transactions that actually have no relationship with each other, but it limits throughput and increases latency.

From the platform’s perspective, it just imposes more restrictions on what you can do, and developers are powerless against it.

Sui’s object-oriented data model allows us to scale. Due to parallel execution, we can add more CPUs and more machines. That’s why we have the performance of other platforms.

People may also forget that Move brings us a lot of this flexibility. Unlike other smart contract programming languages, such as Solidity, where contracts own all the state.

In Move, our design is a bit different; everything is an object, and contracts and state are decoupled. This gives developers more flexibility.

We believe that compared to existing smart contract programming languages, a web2 developer coming from a "regular" data programming language should be able to relatively quickly use Move.

Question 5: What is the most important issue in blockchain right now? Why is Sui a solution?

Adeniyi:

There are countless problems waiting to be solved, and simply adopting a modular architecture is far from enough.

Every innovation that comes needs to pay attention to its relationship with the previous ones. For example, with Sui, we feel we are solving the issue of making consensus no longer a bottleneck. When we don’t localize in the early stages, we can also increase the network's ability to store on-chain.

Unlike the very expensive storage of other blockchains, Sui’s storage is relatively cheap. Of course, it won’t be as cheap as storing on AWS because you still need to pay for replication costs—the cost of multiple validators needing to store the same data.

Nevertheless, it will definitely be closer to the storage cost multiplied by the number of replicas than traditional blockchains. You not only get speed and this wonderful programming language with an object-oriented data model, but you also get on-chain storage, so you can store an NFT on Sui along with all its attributes.

Question 6: What is the vision for Sui in the next five years? What kind of landscape will Sui bring to the cryptocurrency industry?

Adeniyi:

For Sui, our goal is essentially to build a scalable first layer where you will see a large number of applications running on it long-term and interacting with each other.

This will create a world where developers can interact and co-create; I can have financial modules, social and gaming integrations, and all forms of other things.

We believe that scaling Sui will make it possible for you to build your metaverse in the future, where you and your assets have these attributes and can interact with each other.

Our intuition is that if we can create a blockchain that makes it easy for builders to bring users with very low friction and low cost, then we can bring billions of people to the ecosystem in every cycle, allowing these users to understand cryptocurrency without going through traps.

Question 7: How does it feel to choose to step out from a billion-dollar umbrella like Meta to start a company and build an ecosystem from scratch?

Adeniyi:

Yes, I left Google in 2015, but this is not my first time as an entrepreneur. I think my entrepreneurial experience has been concentrated in companies with double-digit employees, mainly because I had done some small companies before Mysten.

In any case, I would definitely say that there is a different energy between the two. When you are in a room with the right people, it feels like there is some kind of magic. That’s why everyone tells you that when you start a business, you are really investing in people because that’s the most important thing.

This is not my first time participating in such a "race"; it might be my third time being an entrepreneur.

I think the difference between a large company like Facebook and a small company like Mysten mainly lies in the speed of reaching consensus on specific issues.

Within a company, there are broad company goals, and you get a timeline around those goals and work to ensure your timeline aligns with the overall company mission.

Small teams have an agility that allows them to stay aligned with just a very small task description. Mysten can reach a very large decision through a five-person conference call, execute it, and then move forward.

We are striving to replicate the best communication moments we had at Facebook, but our company is not just made up of colleagues from Facebook; we also have some colleagues from Google and other startups.

So, we are bringing many different cultural atmospheres into the company and gradually building our own communication style.

Question 8: Have you encountered any failures in Diem? What have you learned from those experiences that will prevent them from happening in Sui?

Adeniyi:

I have great respect for the leadership, who dared to choose to try to do something so brave.

I think my biggest takeaway has been gradually understanding that while innovation is great, if you try to do many things at once, sometimes it intertwines you and the company’s value proposition when you are the public face of a company.

When I say there are many innovations at the same time, I find that in addition to needing to launch a global payment system, there is also a need to launch a basket of global currencies.

At Mysten, we are not trying to launch a currency; we are trying to launch a platform. We are just building a platform for developers to start doing all the things the crypto industry has promised them but hasn’t delivered yet.

I always carry the perspective that capital has eroded a lot of the artistry in the cryptocurrency space.

Question 9: How did you get into product management?

Adeniyi:

I got into product management starting as a software engineer, initially building services and software in the banking and oil and gas industries.

I discovered Bitcoin, so I started building a platform that would allow people to easily mine Bitcoin and earn rewards without having to deal with the complexities of building hardware. That’s what I did, continually pushing forward to become the CEO of my own company.

When I stepped down as the founder of that company, I naturally wondered what the next step was, and I was hired to help launch a blockchain platform at Oracle.

I was there as an architect, but also as a sort of product manager. The same thing happened when I went to VMware. I led the product team to launch a blockchain platform.

Question 10: What have you and your team been doing on this trip to Switzerland?

Adeniyi:

We have been planning for the next steps and tomorrow, thinking about how to make Sui the largest network, and then bring the next generation of applications that will change the infrastructure of the internet. When the time is right, I will share more.

Question 11: When will there be a funding program for the Sui project? Or how will such a program be built?

Adeniyi:

We hope to launch the funding program and announce it publicly as soon as possible.

If you are in the Discord group, please share any suggestions because we are actually monitoring those channels. We would love to hear your thoughts, but we are particularly interested in those who want to do something different from others.

Sui is unique; it provides new forms of additional stability for creators and developers. This has not existed before, so we want to support founders and developers who want to develop tools, applications, and ecosystems around new products that better reflect Sui’s role than elsewhere.

We place a strong emphasis on quality because for us, we believe the technology we are building will serve as the foundation for builders to establish their businesses and visions in the coming years.

I am interested in collaborating with teams that have a very long-term vision, who are thinking about solving real problems through the unique characteristics of blockchain technology, and how Sui as their platform can help them achieve that vision.

We want more people to enter web3, and I think that largely relates to accessibility.

I think a major category that has been largely overlooked is the developer tools category. If you think about the tools available in web3, it’s quite ridiculous because there are really not many tools available.

We look forward to seeing the creativity of the community; our testnet is about to launch, and the creativity of the community will help us. So, stay tuned.

Question 12: We anticipate that Sui will become a very popular network. How will the network and wallets prepare for the influx of users?

Adeniyi:

We recently released a wallet, and in the coming weeks, there will be a better user experience. I think maybe we should have Bauer do an AMA about our wallet at some point.

But we need to wait until our Devnet, Testnet, and the bugs of the incentive testing are resolved, or at least the issues around storage, speed, and everything else.

The platform will be tempered through the process of people continuously finding errors, becoming a truly tested platform. Testing the platform's capacity, ensuring it can handle load and storage, and guaranteeing it can manage all scalability will be part of the incentive testing network.

These internal devices will have various ways to ensure that each device is tailored to the specific characteristics of the Sui platform and that by the time we enter the mainnet, it has been sufficiently tested.

People will be able to build those realizable programs we promised, and we are confident about that. The community collaborates with a team that is genuinely passionate about building a truly scalable and well-designed platform for the masses.

So, this is what we want to do with the community; we believe all of you will be very important in helping us validate some of the claims we make and ensure that the Sui platform can fit everyone.

Adeniyi:

I would love to talk to those building software in the social space.

I think this is an area that will see massive growth and will enhance our experiences in other things we do in web3.

If you have interesting ideas about social and how we can help you, I would love to find ways to increase user engagement, as I think this is an area that will bring many users to the cryptocurrency space.

Stay tuned for our work on products. Our goal is to have a comprehensive best experience. If you have any feedback on how we can do better, please feel free to follow our updates.