Adeniyi Abiodun On Raising $336 Million With His Team To Build An Infrastructure And Tools To Decentralize The Internet And Make It Secure And User-Friendly

Adeniyi Abiodun’s career is a tale of foresight, adaptability, and relentless pursuit of innovation, from his early fascination with astrophysics to building large-scale Bitcoin mining operations.

Along with his team at Mysten Labs, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Adeniyi is now launching groundbreaking decentralized protocols. His journey showcases the boldness of a true visionary.

Mysten Labs has attracted funding from top-tier investors, such as FTX Ventures, Greenoaks Capital Partners, Dentsu Ventures, and Franklin Templeton Investments.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Adeniyi Abiodun pivoted from astrophysics to engineering, finding a passion for building tangible solutions.
• He co-founded one of the earliest large-scale Bitcoin mining companies, Cloud Hashing, which evolved into Peernova.
• Frustrated with Bitcoin’s slow progress, he transitioned to working with corporate giants like Oracle, VMware, and Meta to explore blockchain solutions.
• Abiodun co-founded Mysten Labs, which launched the Sui protocol, aiming to decentralize digital asset management.
• Sui has grown to power billions of transactions, backed by over $336M in venture capital funding.
• Mysten Labs’ vision is to create a decentralized internet where users can control their assets without needing wallets or private keys.
• Abiodun believes decentralized storage will address the current vulnerabilities in data storage platforms like Dropbox and Google.

 

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About Adeniyi Abiodun:

Adeniyi Abiodun is the Co-founder & CPO at Mysten Labs, where Adeniyi is involved in building foundational infrastructure to accelerate web3 adoption.

Adeniyi previously worked as a Product Lead at Meta, focusing on various industry-leading crypto infrastructure products, and as the Head of Product for Blockchain at VMware.

With a background in software engineering and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Queen Mary University of London, Adeniyi has a strong foundation in technology and product development.

Connect with Adeniyi Abiodun:

• LinkedIn
• CryptSlate
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Dealmaker show. So super excited today with the founder that we have you know with us. you know He’s been around the block when it comes to the crypto world, you know Bitcoin and you name it. We’re going to be talking about you know small teams versus bigger teams.

Alejandro Cremades: also raising money, as well as ah thinking about the future of decentralized storage, you know, and other stuff going on in the crypto world, too. So, again, building, scaling, financing, all of the above, all the good stuff that we like to hear. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Adeniyi Abuidun. Welcome to the show.

Adeniyi Aboiodun: Hey, it’s a pleasure to be here. Really glad to be on the show. Thank you for inviting me.

Alejandro Cremades: So, originally born in Nigeria, but, you know, you were you were Kind of a traveler and throughout your ah childhood all the way until you were able to set up food in the UK. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Adeniyi Abiodun: Great. Look, I grew up in Nigeria and that’s when I was eight. had a you know my My dad went to UK to do his PhD, so we all went as a family. We decided to stick around rather than going back home because there’s just more opportunities in the UK. We initially landed in Scotland, then moved over to England where I went to school in London, went to university in in England as well.

Adeniyi Abiodun: um But I had a really great childhood, lovely lovely parents, built a lot of great relationships and it was a bit sad to leave the UK to move to the States. But I did that to go and see my, basically see my dreams fulfilled in the crypto space.

Adeniyi Abiodun: I i was very fortunate to have built one of the very early large scale Bitcoin mining companies in 2000.

Alejandro Cremades: ah we’ll get into that and we’ll we’ll We’ll get into that.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, and let me ask you this.

Adeniyi Abiodun: no

Alejandro Cremades: How how did you get into engineering?

Adeniyi Abiodun: So it’s interesting, when I was going to school, I had a lot of interest in astrophysics, or just even space as a whole. I was a big Star Trek fan, and you know magically I thought, oh, well, look, I’m going to study what i really I’m really interested in in college. And I remember the first couple of weeks in in astrophysics, right? i i was I was down to study astrophysics at uni.

Adeniyi Abiodun: That was very quickly, man. The astrophysics jobs dont to seem to pay very, very well. And I have no interest in like doing PhDs and stuff like that. so um And generally, i do like it seemed that a lot of things were very theoretical. I liked the things I can touch. And I felt and engineering lent itself towards that. So things that you can actually model, touch, feel, you know mechanics of all the things I loved in math as well. I loved the… That was one area of math mathematics I really, really enjoyed.

Adeniyi Abiodun: But and yeah electronic engineering and computer science is what I studied. I found those things to be really tangible. I love playing and fiddling with computers. I love coding. I really enjoyed ah the high I got from like really making something work. And I felt like there wasn’t an opportunity for me to build something in astrophysics space, ultimately. I saw more of a future in engineering. And ah ultimately, I felt the career had a lot more upside. And I think I was probably right in that regard.

Alejandro Cremades: So in your case, you know you ended up getting you know becoming a software engineer, you know building the some of the pipes and the trading systems of organizations like ah JP Morgan or HSBC. At what point does the idea um of Bitcoin you know come knocking? At what point do you do you encounter it?

Adeniyi Abiodun: good Good question. I remember vividly when I was working on a trading desk, um building I worked on systems building credit default swaps, CDOs, where do you name it? And I had a lot of fun doing that. And I remember like thinking how complicated these systems were, because I knew from when you click a button to do a trade, all the way to when it settles, and all the process that goes through, it touches a lot of systems. And no one has a uniform view of the world. And I remember finding about Bitcoin in late 2011.

Adeniyi Abiodun: And I started buying my Bitcoin in 2011 and then I started of mining in 2012. What got me into Bitcoin? I read the paper and I’m very excited about the potential of what could happen. The fact that everyone can have this shared ledger to trade from and have the same information. um It was going to be an amazing revolution in terms of information availability than we’ve ever seen.

Adeniyi Abiodun: um I started buying Bitcoin and then I started mining it for myself and by proxy, people started asking me to do it for them and I built a business out of it just accidentally as a result of that. But Bitcoin got me excited because I saw a new monetary system like a power of the world. Beyond Bitcoin as a whole, just the technology itself was very interesting.

Alejandro Cremades: So then tell us about starting your first company, Cloud Hashing, which ended up maybe becoming Pernova.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Yeah, so i the way Cloud actually started is I was mining in my house and my study, i sorry, mevin my study I had a study in my spare room was getting so hot to the point where no one could come and visit. We just had our first child. So none of the parents would come and visit because the study was always where machines were running hot day in and day out.

Adeniyi Abiodun: And my wife told me, you either move that machine out, I kick it out. So I had to basically find data centers to start putting my machines in, which was really helpful. And I scaled it up significantly to the point where others started asking me, can you mine Bitcoin for me? Because it started finding out about it. So instead, I just built a website. And this website I built had the ability for people to pay me in Bitcoin or other fiat to rent my machines and to get to keep the Bitcoin as a result. So I grew a business out of solving a problem for me, but ultimately helping others.

Alejandro Cremades: So then, let’s talk about the Piernova. It ended up becoming Piernova. You guys say they’re already 60 million, and now it’ it’s still going. you know There’s like about 60 people there. How did eventually the chapter with Piernova come to an end for you?

Adeniyi Abiodun: So ultimately, I’ve got to a point where I’ve fully invested my stock in Pianova. So there’s really not much else to do and the team had a really good set of leaders behind it who are doing a great job.

Adeniyi Abiodun: and i think at that point after you’ve been doing something for the last like five years. Because Pianova wasn’t just Pianova, Pianova was like a merger from Cloud Ashing into Hybrid Core, which became Pianova as a whole. I’d been in that business for like five years and I needed something new and interesting to do. And what i but led me from Pianova was Oracle to then go and launch blockchain for Oracle. I did the same at VMware, but we had a really great sense of Pianova. I think a Bitcoin in Cloud Ashing with mind, um something to the tune of I’m sure I remember the valuation back then, but we had mine over 550 million BTC. Sorry, 550 million dollars worth of BTC at the time. And that was insane. that was we We controlled about 15% of the Bitcoin hash rate. So back then, the value is of over 500 million is, I don’t know what it is today if I try and run the the back math.

Adeniyi Abiodun: But we we built a business ultimately that was generating revenue. And the reason why we got out of Bitcoin mining was to realize there are people who are mining in countries like China for free. They basically just bought the hardware. But then the electricity costs were largely subsidised as zero. We can’t compete with zero. So we pivoted into software. So PNOver today is actually using blockchain or cryptography to secure ledgers for data availability and also for data auditability as well. So there’s it’s still a business with a growing concern today.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously at this point, you know you you were an entrepreneur. You know you knew the you had the adrenaline of building and scaling stuff. Why going into the corporate world and you know getting involved with companies like Oracle, VMware, or even Meta?

Adeniyi Abiodun: Very good question. So one of the things that one of the things that got me out of the Bitcoin space was my frustration and just progress. Like I remember in 2012 having we meetings with a bunch of miners and a few coordinates from the Bitcoin space, trying to convince them to make certain changes to the protocol to you know maybe increase the block size.

Adeniyi Abiodun: just to try and ensure that we can add more transactions to the network. And ultimately, things are always going to be slow. And by the way, I think Bitcoin’s slow, it’s always going to be slow. It’s a feature, not a bug. And I think the way in which it progresses is always going to stay the same. And that’s fine. But I felt like this technology had the opportunity to actually have a broader adoption than just being a currency. The idea that everyone has a shared ledger of information. What if you had a shared ledger for computation as well? And enterprise my my point of view was enterprise would benefit significantly from it

Adeniyi Abiodun: and boy was i wrong right like you know the the problems a great thing about things like bitcoin etherorem is it’s almost switzerland the rules of set yeah adopt the rules or you don’t accept it right you you have a you know ah neutral ground of which you all accept what the rules are going to be and you play. Whereas enterprise, I felt like people were fighting for, I want to own a piece of the infrastructure. Nobody wanted to join jump and on top of J.B. Morgan’s and and ledger, for example, just because they felt, well, look, why am I going to empower your business? Ultimately, why don’t we have a ledger we all share ownership in? And I feel companies that are building enterprise blockchain always have this very problematic cold start issue.

Adeniyi Abiodun: um So Oracle was largely successful launch in launching its blockchain, but I don’t believe that’s going to see much adoption in enterprise, just because the the the ability to onboard the masses is going to be largely caused with a lot of friction, just because there’s always going to be a question on who owns the online infrastructure? Who am I empowering by participating? um The same thing with VMware, quite frankly. and What excited me about Facebook is they’d almost solved the cold start problem.

Adeniyi Abiodun: they’d already got together a consortia of 20 to 25 companies who had agreed to ultimately start the blockchain together and they all agreed on what the terms were and I felt that’s at least going to make progress. That’s a lot better than where we were in a lot of the other enterprise enterprise use cases. Although I agree with common shared ledger, Facebook had massive distribution so you could see a ton of consumers benefit from low cost for sending money in the world.

Adeniyi Abiodun: So that’s what really introduced me to the world of a crypto for enterprise. But beyond that, I believe Facebook probably had the best shot at it because they had set up a consortium and they had mass distribution, whereas most companies just didn’t.

Alejandro Cremades: So they missed the labs. How did the whole thing of um thinking about doing it once again and and getting out there, how how did this come about?

Adeniyi Abiodun: So Mission Lads is a company co-founded by me and five ah me and four other of my very good friends at Facebook. So we worked in at Facebook, we worked in the advanced R and&D department of the company, led by Evan Chung, who’s our CEO, um and we all became really good friends. Sam was our expert on programming languages.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Evan was our team lead who ran all engineering research. I led the product aspect for everything we did on research. George works in all our algorithms. In fact, we acquired his company at Facebook to move over to Meta to help us build Libra. And Costas was our crypto genius. He built everything crypto related. So when we realized Libra wasn’t going to see light of day not because of anything technological but all the the political and the angst around Facebook’s previous past and dealing with user data we saw an opportunity to leave and build our own firm and we when we decided to build a firm we each named each other as people would ideally want to work with again. We weren’t 100% clear what we’re going to build but we knew we all weren’t to work together, we knew like if we put our minds together, we could always build something great. But we also knew that the current state of the world for crypto or blockchain as a whole needed a big upgrade. And we felt we we’re the right people to do that. And so Mr. Labs, the goal of Mr. Labs is to build foundational protocols on platforms that’s going to make the internet a lot more decentralized and more powerful for the average day user to actually use. So that’s a core mission and values of trying to build on on from the internet. And SWE is the first product that we launched on top of that.

Alejandro Cremades: So why didn’t they be coming? You know, the business model there. How are you guys making money?

Adeniyi Abiodun: So a bit of background, we raised a Series A round and um in, believe August, well, it was ratified actually in November, 2021. Then we raised, that was at 35 million, I believe. And then we raised a subsequent round of another 300 million in Series B, about it just under a year later. So we’ve capitalized, ah the company capitalized about over 336 million adventure-backed money from Amveason Horowitz and a few other top name brands and ecosystem.

Adeniyi Abiodun: um We’ve since launched a protocol called SWE. SWE is today, I think it’s a $20 billion, $21 billion dollars protocol that is live on the internet today. And it’s powering billions of transactions. It’s powered, I believe we we’ve done our six billions transaction last week. So it’s seeing a tremendous amount of adoption from developers and builders as a whole. So it’s a fast-growing protocol, only been around a year and a half, and totally outpacing most protocols have been around for three to four years.

Alejandro Cremades: So what has been to the um the experience of going through the motions and and raising all that money? Because that’s ah that’s a lot of money.

Adeniyi Abiodun: it’s I mean, we we needed we knew we needed a big team to build what we wanted. Big in a sense of a large breadth in terms of the skill set required to make it happen, but not big in terms of meta. I think in meta we had over a thousand people working on Libra, whereas our team today is only about 150 people.

Adeniyi Abiodun: So a number the amount of funds we raised helped us build a team to the size we wanted, to get the experts. We’re hiring people from Google, Facebook, some of the top companies in the world, the expertise that just had never been in crypto before. So that’s an expensive team. But also, there’s a lot of potential upside to build a company that would do what we’re trying to do.

Adeniyi Abiodun: So the amount of funding we raise was a reflection of the amount of work required to actually launch something as ambitious as SWE is. And we’re on to our next step in launching LORUS, which is going to be the next protocol on top of SWE. But ultimately, you know they’re being as a venture-backed company, we’re very, very careful with capital, and we’re very careful in where we invest. But ultimately, it’s it’s it’s been a very good investment for the and recent or other investors as well, the investment labs.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, you know, all these investors, when they are investing in you guys, you know, they’re investing in innovation, right? And I think that they not only just the investors, also the employees that you guys bring on board, and then the people in the ecosystem too, no? So if we’re thinking of division, let’s say you were to go to sleep tonight, and you wake up in a world where the vision of the company is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Adeniyi Abiodun: So as I mentioned before, like the goal of Meson Labs is that the platforms and protocols I’ve built on the internet are more decentralized. We succeed where everything you do, like if I give a bit of background the world is going for the digital. The money you have is digital, the concert tickets you have is going to be digital, your passport is going to be digital, everything you do, every asset you own, your title, you name it, all these things will end up in a digital form. What is needed is a cohesive platform to allow you to interact with all your assets across a multitude of platforms. So platforms no longer own your data,

Adeniyi Abiodun: or own your assets. You are always in control of your assets, but platforms allow you to mutate the assets or use the asset, um give utility or value to the assets at the time. So that’s what SWE ultimately is. So if SWE succeeds, which we believe it will, everything you do on a day-to-day basis, whether you’re paying for groceries, whether you’re buying a concert ticket online, whether you’re launching a YouTube campaign, and you know you’re you’re monetizing your content as a whole,

Adeniyi Abiodun: you know Whether you’re submitting you know research papers, you get paid as a result for the input that you provide. Or you’re running AI models, you want to be, for the data you contribute, you get ah a piece of the pie for that as well. We believe SWE is going to orchestrate those kind of interactions. And we’ll also succeed because it’s not in the user’s face. It’s built with a way that the internet works today. No need for wallets, no need for private keys, right? It just works the way the internet works today. You love it with Google, you love it with Facebook, you love it with Twitch, whatever. And it just happens in the background. Users should not know that they’re using a blockchain.

Adeniyi Abiodun: And that’s why I believe we’ll succeed. The way in which the future would be is platforms ultimately take less control of your data. They take less control of your assets. You’re more in control with the assets you own. And we think that’s going to be a much more democratic world where platforms are democratic themselves by nature.

Alejandro Cremades: And then what about the ah future of decentralized storage? you know Since we’re talking about the future here, you know talk to us about that too.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Good question. So we launched we to be a global coordination layer for digital assets. One thing that people haven’t thought of is your asset that you store, anything you store on the internet is your data to a large extent. So let’s say today I store data on Dropbox. Dropbox goes out of business. I’m out of luck.

Adeniyi Abiodun: or I store data on Google. Well, Google has an outage, how do I access my file? It’s actually happened. They’ve accidentally deleted data in the past and it takes weeks to restore that data. the It becomes and a question of who really controls and really owns your data as a whole.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Now, what we’re building and what we’ve actually launched in testnet a couple of days ago is something called Warus. Warus is a world’s global decentralized storage layer. And it really puts ownership as an emphasis. So if I store my images or I store files, I store websites, I store you know Wikipedia articles, whatever, these are represented as assets on a blockchain and the the data is actually stored replicated across hundreds, different thousands of machines.

Adeniyi Abiodun: So even if Google goes down, my data is always available. In fact, if two thirds of the network goes out, you still have your data. It’s going to be more resilient, more robust than any service provider you can get today in regards to your data. And you can define who controls the data, who can transfer ownership, who can monetize the data. The rules around what you can do with data is going to be built on um trustless platforms like Walrus.

Adeniyi Abiodun: So we believe the future of data storage or global data storage is one where you own the data which you create, you monetize the data which you create, and you have you know infallible platforms that store your data in a replicated fashion. So you don’t have to worry about single points of failure or even multiple points of failure because it’s ah it’s done in such a way that prevents failure at the scale that we see with cloud providers today. So unlike Amazon or Google,

Adeniyi Abiodun: anyone goes out of business you’ll find or anyone decides to stop serving information or or or even silencing your, you know, providing filters in front of your data, you have a mechanism by which to circumvent that as well. So we’re very, very proud about that.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about scaling then. you know Talk to us about you know scaling teams and then also the difference between small teams and then also perhaps bigger teams.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Yeah, we’ve we’ve been very fortunate, at Mr. and me, myself and my co-founders in building large-scale teams, whether it’s working at Meta over at or at Apple, you know you name it, um George at Microsoft as well. um we We’ve had the opportunity of working and with big and small teams.

Adeniyi Abiodun: What we found, I mean, it’s it’s almost counterintuitive, having a very high skilled team that is small enough and nimble to move can achieve amazing things beyond um what a large team could do as well. So um can you hear me?

Adeniyi Abiodun: um Yeah, um but beyond what um large teams can actually do, actually. So if we benchmark what we’re able to do at META versus what we’ve done at MISTEN, there are things, problems we’re trying to solve at META that with a large amount of team, with a large team we had, just took a lot of He tried to convince people, tried to you know buy alignment and and just really too much decision make too many decision makers that blocked progress. Whereas with our team, we are small enough and nimble enough to iterate really, really quickly. And we’re able to solve really hard problems in the shortest space of time just because we have the freedom to move and iterate and pivot than we could at Meta.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Algorithms we invented at Miston, we couldn’t have invented at Facebook in the time, in the time frame. Even with more money at the Facebook ad, more engineers at Facebook ad, we just felt like it’s it’s evident, like just the output our team is shipping on ah on a consistent basis. Small teams, small, very powerful teams do better than large, powerful teams in our view.

Adeniyi Abiodun: And it proves itself over and over again. we in the same in ah In a one-year and five-month process, most people don’t even ship layer ones. We’ve shipped a layer one. We’ve shipped up we’ve we we’ve shipped our storage protocol. we’ve We’ve shipped new cryptographic primitives that makes the internet safer, allows users to use the use blockchains just like they use a normal internet. We’ve really created foundational technologies that, in a space in this in a very short space of time, has gained notoriety for our company.

Adeniyi Abiodun: which I think will be new and impossible to do at Meta or any large-scale company, quite frankly.

Alejandro Cremades: So imagine if I was to put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time, you know to that time where you were thinking about starting something of your own in 2012. And let’s say you had the opportunity of having a chat with your younger self and giving that identity one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Adeniyi Abiodun: Or, jokingly, don’t sell any bitcoins. but right I was buying bitcoin for for pennies at the time, right? So, don’t sell any bitcoins, but I kid. In reality, that yeah if i if I didn’t sell any bitcoins, I would only build new companies, quite frankly.

Adeniyi Abiodun: but um i think i believe the the thing to to to give a previous version of myself is really that you know you have to remember success is a is sometimes, ah it takes a lot longer to recognize. So you always have to have a vision, like plot out that vision. like if i always we always mention this thing in product called mission to metrics right you state your mission and then what would you measure at the end of the mission if you were had to succeed you ask me a very good question like what does success look like right and for me i’ll say the mission of mists and labs is to build decentralized platforms

Adeniyi Abiodun: that make the internet more decentralized for consumers. And we’ll see when everybody’s using, and every app in the internet is using a piece of infrastructure to give benefit to consumers. What I’d give myself is, especially in ah in the Bitcoin space, right um is to have a really good thought out mission statement for the problems I’m trying to solve and measure myself against that. Set some guardrails. I felt like a lot of crypto back in the days was YOLO. War making money, war doing really well. We’re mining Bitcoin. It’s easy. like There’s not really much hard work to do. um But like I believe that the Bitcoin space as a whole could have benefited a lot by having more longer term goals and strategies and built around that, whereas I felt

Adeniyi Abiodun: You know, there are a lot of people in our space that would likely not want to do any form of innovation, which is why we’ve seen Ethereum, which is why we’ve seen SWE, we’ve seen other platforms. And I actually think for now, we leave the Bitcoin community alone. They’ve done what they’ve done. It’s always going to be where it’s at. But the onus is on people like us to do the innovation.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. So for the people that are listening, I would love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so?

Adeniyi Abiodun: Yeah, you can check me out at um on on Twitter, um at E-M-A-N-A-B-I-O, or check out um Mr. Lab’s website, mistinlabs.com or mistinlabs.io. um We have a lot of information there about what we’re building. We’re building building at least five or six different products at any given time. But reach out at any given time. Happy to to talk and collaborate.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, hey, well, thank you so much for being on The Deal Maker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Adeniyi Abiodun: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

*****

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