My guest today is Evan Cheng, co-founder & CEO of Mysten Labs. Mysten Labs is a team of leading distributed systems, programming languages, and cryptography experts whose founders led Meta’s Novi Research and helped develop the Diem blockchain and Move programming language. The mission of Mysten Labs is to create foundational infrastructure for Web3. They partner with crucial ecosystem builders to make step-change improvements to their networks. Before co-founding Mysten Labs, Evan helped lead Novi Financial and was the research and development director. Evan focused on systems & security, programming language & formal verification, and new product experimentation as the Director of R&D at Novi Financial. Novi Financial is Meta’s crypto R&D division. Before leading Novi Financial, Evan worked at Facebook as the Director of Programming Languages and Runtime. Evan focused on supporting Facebook's world-class team in programming languages, runtimes, and compilers: Hack, HHVM, Skip, Flow, Python, Reactive programming, C++, LLVM, Android + iOS mobile runtimes and optimization pipelines, mobile JavaScript platform, and runtimes, Glow, and more. Evan worked at Apple for over a decade, where he was a third-level manager overseeing seven engineering teams. He focused on leading efforts in static and runtime compilation for both CPUs and GPUs, Swift performance, static and dynamic linker, shared cache optimizations, debugger, and bitcode tooling. He collaborated on HW transitioning plans, a simulation tool for early GPU architecture exploration, built & integrated tools, App Store tools, and security hardening. Evan Bootstrapped various new "engineering effectiveness" initiatives. In our conversation, we discussed multiple topics, including; Mysten Labs, the future of Web3, the infrastructure of Web3, decentralization, and much more. We began our conversation by discussing what attracted Evan to crypto and what compelled him to make the jump to start Mysten Labs with co-founders. Evan explains why we are at the precipice of the next innovation wave in crypto. Our next conversation topic centered around the infrastructure layer of crypto. Evan discusses the various limitations current blockchains have to meet the rigorous demands of scaling and composability. Evan addresses how Mysten Labs is building tools and infrastructure to solve these bottlenecks. Our conversation pivots to discuss the future of Web3 and NFTs. Evan outlines why we are still in the early days of NFT and Web3. He discusses how the NFT space may evolve as the tools and infrastructure built around NFTs and Web3 becomes. One significant evolution we discussed is how NFTs will be able to send and receive data unlocking a tremendous amount of potential for collaboration and value for both builders and owners of NFTs. We finish our conversation by discussing how we imagine NFTs and Web3 changing how society interacts and communicates. Please enjoy my conversation with Evan Cheng.
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