Who is Evan Cheng, the ex-Apple engineer behind Sui?

From Apple's Compiler Labs to Crypto's Frontier

Before co-founding one of the most talked-about layer-1 blockchains in crypto, @EvanWeb3 spent close to a decade inside Apple. He joined Apple in 2005 and rose to become a senior manager leading the LLVM backend team, overseeing static and runtime compilation for CPUs and GPUs, Swift performance, and hardware architecture explorations. LLVM, short for Low-Level Virtual Machine, is the compiler toolkit that translates application code into instructions a chip can execute. In 2012, Cheng received the prestigious ACM Software System Award, one of computing's most respected honors, recognising his contributions to LLVM alongside the project's original founders.

After Apple, Cheng moved to Meta, where he led Novi Research, the team developing cutting-edge blockchain technologies including the Diem blockchain and the Move programming language. After Diem was shelved, key engineers left Meta to build Sui using the Move programming language, originally developed at Meta.

Building Mysten Labs and the Sui Network

Mysten Labs was founded in late 2021 by five senior engineers from Meta's Diem project: Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, and Kostas Chalkias.They took the lessons and the Move language they had developed at Meta and built a permissionless public blockchain around them. Cheng serves as CEO of @Mysten_Labs to this day.

The @SuiNetwork protocol uses a modified version of the Move programming language initially created at Meta before it decided to wind down its Diem project.Sui's mainnet launched on May 3, 2023, marking the point at which the protocol became a live, publicly accessible blockchain network. Since then, the chain has gained significant traction. Cheng leveraged lessons from the ill-fated Diem project to create a layer-1 blockchain that is not only faster and cheaper but fundamentally different in design.

Sui has been backed by top-tier venture capital firms including a16z, Binance Labs, and Jump Crypto, which has added to the project's credibility and helped drive initial ecosystem growth.By September 2022, Mysten Labs had closed a $300 million Series B round and reached a $2 billion valuation.

Cheng's path from compiler engineering at Apple to founding a major blockchain network reflects a broader pattern in crypto: deep systems-level expertise, built over decades in traditional tech, being redirected toward decentralised infrastructure. For @SuiNetwork and its $SUI token, that pedigree remains a core part of its story.

Sources:CoinDesk: Evan Cheng, The Architect of Sui's Object-Oriented RevolutionSygnum Bank: Sui PrimerDecrypt: Sui Token and Network Launch