How four Meta alumni aim to finally bring crypto to the masses 

For Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, and George Danezis, the writing was on the wall: Diem, the blockchain project formerly known as Libra, was doomed to fail. 

The four engineers all worked at Novi, the crypto firm spun out of Facebook (now called Meta), where they researched and developed the Diem blockchain network. 

But by the fall of 2021, it became clear that regulators in the US were not going to let Diem or its stablecoin get off the ground for the foreseeable future. Novi went looking for other stablecoins, eventually partnering with Paxos. And in November, Cheng, Blackshear, Abiodun, and Danezis left Novi to start their own company, called Mysten Labs. 

"We decided to launch the company and try to launch products ourselves rather than waiting for a big company to come around and push a little bit harder," says Cheng.

The goal of Mysten Labs is to advance the work the quartet did at Novi, including on the Diem network, the Move programing language, and the Narwhal and Tusk consensus mechanism. 

Diem's stated ambition was to bring cryptocurrency to the masses. With Mysten Labs, which raised $36 million in December from high-profile investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures, Cheng and his team hope to build crypto infrastructure that web3 developers can use to realize this ambition. 

'A long way to go'

Working as a startup instead of as part of a big company is already paying off, says Cheng. "We are able to move a lot faster after leaving Meta because we, in a way, feel unshackled."

Still, he says, there's a long way to go if the goal is widespread adoption of crypto. "We're nowhere near what web3 or crypto can bring to the masses."

Cheng calls the current crypto infrastructure immature, and its consumer products "very basic." There haven't been many real breakthroughs yet outside of payments, he says. That's why the user experience for compelling applications like NFT games typically pales in comparison to their traditional counterparts. 

The areas most urgently in need of improvement, according to Cheng, are scalability and performance of blockchains, security of smart contracts, and private key management. Mysten Labs aims to improve these issues one at a time. 

Its very own L1 chain

To begin with, the startup is building its own new Layer 1 blockchain and smart contracts platform, a testnet for which it hopes to launch in a couple of months. 

The platform will support several uses cases, including e-commerce, gaming, NFTs, and DeFi. And according to Cheng, the yet-unnamed chain will have "unrivaled scalability capability."  

"Our blockchain will have no limit on throughput. It will scale unlimitedly. The finality of transactions will be sub-second," he says, adding that product developers won't have to worry about hitting transaction limits and high transaction costs.

Mysten's blockchain also promises to eliminate so-called miner-extractable value, or MEV, which refers to the value that miners, validators or bots can extract by ordering transactions in specific ways. To date, such entities have reaped nearly $600 million this way on other chains.

The team would not reveal specific technical details about its blockchain system, but Cheng says such details will be disclosed in a couple of months.

Built-in security auditing

Another thing that will make Mysten's smart contract platform unique as well as easier for developers to build on, according to Cheng, is that it will have a built-in ability to audit smart contracts for security bugs. 

The difficulty and expense associated with auditing smart contracts make it hard for traditional web developers to enter into the crypto space, says Cheng. If the crypto industry wants to have millions of smart contract developers, then under the current model, it will require tens and thousands of audit firms, says Cheng, who calls that an unscalable solution.

Faulty codes have led to over $1 billion stolen from DeFi protocols last year, according to smart contracts auditing firm CertiK. In fact, DeFi hacks accounted for over 75% of all major hacks and exploits worldwide last year, according to a report by security firm AtlasVPN.

Mysten's blockchain will use the Move programming language, which the team had helped develop at Novi. Chang calls Move "easy to use and secure against exploits."

On top of that, he says, the platform will use formal methods to verify smart contracts. "Developers can write specifications and requirements in code, and our platform will prove its correctness. It will give examples where it fails."

Private key recovery

Mysten is also working to improve the user experience for crypto self-custody, specifically the management of private keys. Crypto users who self-custody their funds can lose it all if they lose their private keys.

"We think that's a terrible user experience," says Cheng. "It's very, very daunting for new users coming into crypto."

So he and his colleagues are working on a key recovery scheme that would work similarly to how users can now reset their passwords through big tech companies like Google. But in this case, they will be able to do so via a blockchain transaction, not via a centralized entity, says Cheng.

Here's how it will work: the real owner of a private key will have to submit a transaction that functions as the report of a key loss. That will trigger a period of time (days or months, depending on how it is implemented) during which it is possible for others to prove that the key was not, in fact, lost by sending a second transaction using the key.

If nobody challenges the report before the time period expires, the user who submitted it would be allowed to transfer the funds to an account for which they own the key.

Though Cheng's team at Novi published a paper on this method, it hasn't been attempted before, says Cheng. 

"Our scheme would mean individuals receive recourse in the worst-case scenario (i.e., lost the key and the recovery seeds) without giving away control to centralized entities," he says. This addresses one of the biggest hesitations for non-experts who wish to self-custody their private keys/ crypto assets, says Cheng.