Dialogue with Mysten Labs Product Director: The Position of Sui in the Commercial Technology Stack

Written by: Sui Network

Recently, we interviewed Lola Oyelayo - Pearson, Director of Commercial Products at Mysten Labs, to discuss how blockchain technology can provide business services for enterprises and why Sui is particularly suitable for these use cases.

Here are the contents of the interview:

Q1 Please briefly introduce yourself, your role, and how you got into the Web3 space?

Currently, I lead the commercial product team at Mysten Labs. Generally speaking, business encompasses everything; it can be the foundation of most things, touching various commercial fields such as gaming, retail, loyalty, travel, ticketing, and more.

This is my sixth year exploring the blockchain space; I started in 2017. I took about 14 months off to take care of my child and then prepared to re-enter the workforce. I wanted to work on an interesting, complex, and challenging tech stack. Previously, I had worked for a long time in a leadership team at an agency, so I felt very satisfied with this part of my career. I wanted to solve unsolved problems; I didn’t want to rely on selling "let us build a homepage for you" or "let us create another retail checkout page." I felt that many problems had already been solved online, and I wanted to tackle those that remained. Through mutual friends, I was guided into the blockchain space, and it was an amazing process that gradually helped me understand blockchain, much of which also overwhelmed me.

My past work experience has been at the user experience level. Therefore, I focus heavily on optimizing the "least common denominator," which is to find the simplest way to understand the problem. I found that, just like now, the information about blockchain at that time was almost chaotic. Most of the information was confusing, and a lot of it was related to finance. Eventually, I began to believe in the problems that blockchain could solve; some described blockchain as a solution-seeking tool. But I actually think it addresses a very clear problem: asset ownership and digital agency. In traditional Web2, we don’t have this. My data doesn’t belong to me, and my online behavior doesn’t belong to me; it belongs to the companies that interact with me.

Blockchain disrupts all of this; my transactions are mine, my assets are mine, my outcomes are mine. Additionally, I am very interested in the privacy implications of some blockchain technologies. I have always been fascinated by zero-knowledge proofs and how to do things online in a way that protects privacy rather than sacrificing it. Zero-knowledge is a very interesting proposal for me. So, I fell in love with blockchain in 2017, but since the startup I was in lost funding at that time, I went on to do other things while still keeping in touch with the blockchain world. This year, I finally had the opportunity to return to the blockchain space in my current role.

I love blockchain not as a standalone thing, but as an infrastructure that can improve the internet as a whole, and Sui actually has that potential; it is infrastructure suitable for the internet. I think many other blockchains are great, but they often have slower speeds and higher costs, making them less suitable for enterprise use. I believe Sui has more potential to easily tackle all these challenges. I am really looking forward to Sui validating my personal hypotheses about the impact blockchain can have on the entire internet.

Q2 For enterprises that have already developed well in the Web2 space, how do you guide them to think creatively about the problems in their business and how blockchain can be a solution?

Let’s look at this from a business perspective. In business, we often talk about the sales funnel. At any given moment, if I attract 100 people to the top of my sales funnel, some will drop off, and some will engage more deeply; this group will also have drop-offs, and those at the bottom of the funnel will be the ones who ultimately convert, meaning they are the ones who actually purchase or take the action I need them to take. This funnel game is a fundamental principle of any business, whether you are a movie theater or a shoe retailer; you are trying to attract as many people as possible to the top of the funnel so that as many as possible can naturally drop off and ultimately reach the bottom of the funnel and convert.

For example, the top of the funnel is a very complex place; basically, that’s where advertising is. You are trying to attract as many people as possible to learn about your business, understand your products, and engage with your brand. My previous work was at Shopify, which can be said to be an advocate for small businesses. Their mission is to empower more people to become entrepreneurs, giving them the ability to define their own businesses and destinies. The biggest challenge every entrepreneur on Shopify faces is acquiring customers. This involves how to tell my story? How to find people who want to buy the products I sell? How to adjust my sales approach to fit those who might be slightly interested in my products? How can I maintain sales so that even if I perform excellently this week, I can continue to build on that next week? These are long-term challenges faced by small businesses. But for various reasons, these challenges have become very daunting in the current internet environment.

First and foremost, the privacy issue is critical. Web2 and the internet have followed the path of "I need to collect as much data about you as possible to show you ads." I remember when I first encountered the internet, there was a lot of super personalized content that made you feel like you were having a very special experience interacting with the website. The problem is that the only way to achieve this is to collect and hold a lot of very personal and private information. Thus began a transaction of selling such information, and the advertising world became addicted to buying private data. This is why we established rules like GDPR and California's CCPA, which aim to protect individuals from having their information shared or even collected without consent. Unfortunately, this also means that the quality of data needed to build customer channels has declined. So, where I could previously obtain your gender, name, and home address from dealers with high confidence, now I can’t actually purchase that information. So now I need to guess or try to infer that data. This has created space for companies like Google and Facebook to monopolize the advertising market because they have applications that give them the right to collect this data. They have become the only places where you can look for new customers.

For example, at Shopify, Apple changed their privacy rules, and as a result, we observed a significant drop in sales for Shopify merchants on iOS devices, as many of those merchants relied on collecting Facebook ad data through mobile phones. Although it was not intentional, Apple essentially stifled the marketing channels at the top of the funnel for thousands of small businesses because they are not big brands with million-dollar budgets. We are talking about your part-time or corner store, these small businesses that want to find target users in their communities.

So the question is how blockchain can contribute to that data ecosystem and how to use zero-knowledge technology to feed information about people's behaviors back into the internet without sharing private information. Zero-knowledge allows for smarter verification of facts. And Sui's speed and scalability make it the most suitable place to serve real-time internet queries using zero-knowledge.

How to tell my story? How to find people who want to buy the products I am selling? How to adjust my sales approach? How to maintain continuity? These are all long-term challenges faced by small businesses.

However, not all problems have been solved, but it is certain that just as the entire online advertising world was built in the early 2000s with online behavior, we now see that blockchain can be used to lower customer acquisition costs.

You can think of many blockchains offering zero-knowledge proofs. I think Sui stands out because it can provide this service at internet speed and predictable costs.

Another example is loyalty. Every time I encounter a company that wants my email address, I think, what have you done for me to make me feel satisfied? Why should I be loyal? With digital asset ownership, you can give me something that will always belong to me, which can be updated, changed, and developed. Sui has the capability to provide dynamic, composable NFTs (at internet speed and low cost), so suddenly, loyalty programs may mean more to customers; they can actually offer more than just more emails and discount codes.

Q3 Is this about adding Sui to your tech stack to achieve what you are trying to do in a broader business model?

This is actually what I firmly believe; Sui is a type of blockchain that is essential in your tech stack. The era of cloud computing basically introduced us to the idea of rapid scalability. Now, if you are a business starting tomorrow or investing in your infrastructure, you would absolutely include cloud computing because not doing so would be foolish. I think Sui represents a blockchain era that you can think about in a similar way. Some things are only possible through a blockchain like Sui, or can only be secured using a blockchain like Sui, so trying to accomplish these things in other ways would be absurd. Sui is still new in this field, and it needs partners willing to build with us and embark on this journey.

Q4 In many ways, what you are describing is the opposite side of what is typically considered with blockchain, which is building Web3 businesses.

Interestingly, the distinction between Web2 and Web3 is only useful when helping to describe the difference between blockchain technology and standard foundational internet technologies. There will come a moment in the future when this distinction will become irrelevant because we are not trying to create an internet that you need to go to; we are just trying to make the internet you are already using better for everyone. A win-win should be for everyone, including end users, and right now saying Web2 and Web3 can help you describe that distinction. But at some point in the future, we will just be talking about the internet and generalized internet behaviors and activities, and what will become the norm.

We are not trying to create an internet that you need to go to; we are just trying to make the internet you are already using friendlier for all participants.

Q5 What role do end users play in understanding the value of decentralized technology and blockchain, as it relates to their own privacy? Do you expect them to demand more from businesses, and once businesses are ready to provide benefits, will they start to reap those benefits?

All of the above; let’s start with the decentralized tech stack. The incredible thing about having this capability in decentralized blockchains is that there will be many people involved in making it a reality. Many people have invested a lot, not just the companies that founded it, not just investors, but all participants. Based on successful open-source technology, this collective investment has been foundational for years. But there has always been this notion that if something is open source, it cannot make money. What blockchain does is tell you that you can make money within this open-source culture because the decentralized tech stack allows you to do both, especially blockchain technology. Some people will delve into all aspects of validating nodes, staking, node operations, and everything needed to actively operate and run a well-functioning economy to stabilize globally available blockchain networks. Another group of users will be very focused on what it means for their activities.

I think there is another group of people who, honestly, whether it’s blockchain or anything else, they don’t care much. They just want a really good loyalty program, and they want a secure experience online. They want the companies they trust not to use their information for bad purposes, and they want to feel that they can access experiences and value propositions that suit them. So they want to buy a hat and hope that the concept of ownership is reflected in a way that makes sense to them. They want to participate in a loyalty program that genuinely changes with their location, so it doesn’t just exist in this little box, or if they scratch this particular coupon, etc. If blockchain realizes its potential, then the entire range of users will be interested in it.

That’s the internet today. Some people are very technical and delve into the details, but there are also others whose grandparents just need a smartphone with a large font, and they are excited to be able to do something on their phones that previously required them to go to a bank or travel agency in person. Sui will serve every one of these users.

Moreover, I also believe that ultimately, even for many people who are trying not to engage with technology, they will feel more secure and then expect to see it as the default option, where my privacy is provided by default. Any applications that do not provide this must be suspicious. Because why wouldn’t you provide this for me? We will turn to places where individuals have more choices. I think this is fundamentally beneficial.

Q6 What excites you the most about the future of Sui?

What excites me the most about the future of Sui is zkLogin. For me, zkLogin is incredibly exciting. Sui will provide a primitive that allows you to log in using what most people consider reasonable login patterns. That is, by logging in with my email or other existing accounts, you can access the blockchain, but Sui eliminates the need to remember keys or forget the private key for this transaction. Those truly high-risk requirements disappear.

This is a significant step forward, and you could say Sui has the potential to bring a billion users into the blockchain. Seeing this become a reality and providing a simple way for non-blockchain businesses to leverage this capability is exciting. As more and more people adopt this technology, we will see more use cases emerge.