He And His Team Raised $336 Million 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 and love for Star Trek to building large-scale Bitcoin mining operations, he has had an incredible journey.

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

In this insightful interview, he talks about small teams versus bigger teams, the future of decentralized storage, and other innovations in the crypto world.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Early Life and The Path to Engineering

Born in Nigeria, Adeniyi’s early life was marked by frequent travel. His family moved to the UK when he was eight, following his father’s pursuit of a PhD. This relocation opened up a wealth of opportunities that Adeniyi embraced fully.

After settling in Scotland and then England, he attended university, initially with a focus on astrophysics, a subject born from his childhood fascination with space. Despite his love for the field, he soon realized that it was too theoretical for his liking, with limited practical application.

Engineering and math caught Adeniyi’s attention, offering a blend of the tangible and the technical. He shifted his focus to electronic engineering and computer science, relishing the hands-on experience of building systems.

Adeniyi’s time in university nurtured his skills in coding and computer mechanics, laying the groundwork for a future career as a software engineer that would see him working at some of the world’s largest financial institutions like JP Morgan and HSBC, building their trading systems.

Bitcoin: A Game-Changer

Adeniyi’s early career involved building complex systems for credit default swaps, CDOs, and other financial products. He remembers working in finance and getting familiar with the inefficiencies of traditional financial systems. “No one had a uniform view of the world,” he noted.

In late 2011, Bitcoin entered Adeniyi’s radar after he read the Bitcoin whitepaper, with its vision of a shared, decentralized ledger, particularly compelling. He saw the potential for radical transparency and democratization of information that blockchain could offer.

In 2011, Adeniyi made his first Bitcoin purchase and started mining the cryptocurrency shortly after. He could see the new monetary system as a power of the world. What began as a personal exploration quickly escalated into a full-fledged business when people started asking him to mine for them.

By 2012, Adeniyi had founded CloudHashing, a pioneering Bitcoin mining company that allowed users to rent his mining machines in exchange for Bitcoin, growing organically as interest in the digital currency exploded. He also built a website enabling people to pay him.

Building Peernova: A Blockchain Pioneer

CloudHashing eventually evolved into Peernova after merging with Hybrid Core, one of the first major enterprises to leverage blockchain beyond cryptocurrency. Adeniyi’s mining business had grown so large that his home office could no longer sustain the heat and noise of the mining rigs.

This necessity led him to move the operations into data centers, scaling the company to a point where they controlled around 15% of the global Bitcoin hash rate. By the time Peernova had fully matured, they had mined over $550M worth of Bitcoin and hired a team of 60 people.

Yet, even in the midst of this success, Adeniyi realized that Bitcoin mining had significant limitations. Competing with miners in countries with nearly zero-cost electricity, like China, became impossible.

This led Peernova to pivot, transforming the business from a mining operation into a software company that used blockchain to secure and audit data. This shift kept Peernova alive and growing, making it a key player in the data security and cryptography space.

Today PeerNova is using blockchain or cryptography to secure ledgers for data availability and also for data auditability as well. So there’s still a business with a growing concern today, as Adeniyi points out.

Frustrations with the Crypto Space

Despite his success with Peernova, Adeniyi grew increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of innovation in the broader cryptocurrency space. He recalls early efforts to propose changes to Bitcoin’s protocol.

Adeniyi suggested increasing the block size to allow for more transactions, only to face significant resistance. This inertia, he believes, is inherent to Bitcoin and other similar networks—it’s a feature, not a bug, but it limited the scope of what he felt blockchain could achieve.

“Since everyone had a shared ledger of information, how about a similar ledge for computation?” That’s the question Adeniyi asked. This frustration drove him to explore blockchain’s potential in the enterprise space.

Adeniyi started to think about how the technology had the opportunity to actually have a broader adoption than just being a currency. While he led blockchain initiatives at tech giants like Oracle and VMware, the challenge of onboarding enterprises into blockchain systems remained daunting.

Large corporations were reluctant to adopt shared ledgers, often due to concerns over who would control the infrastructure and the competitive dynamics that it could introduce. This was a very problematic cold start issue, Adeniyi could see.

Mysten Labs and the Birth of Sui

During his time at Facebook (now Meta) Adeniyi saw an opportunity to break through these challenges. Working with a talented team in Facebook’s advanced research department, Adeniyi and his colleagues were deeply involved in the development of Libra.

Libra is Facebook’s ambitious attempt at creating a global cryptocurrency. Adeniyi recalls how they created a consortium of 20 to 25 companies who agreed to ultimately start the blockchain together, agreeing on the terms to execute the plan.

Facebook had massive distribution, so a ton of consumers could benefit from the low cost of sending money in the world. However, Libra faced immense regulatory and political hurdles, and it became clear that the project would not come to fruition under Facebook’s banner.

Undeterred, Adeniyi and four other key team members from the Libra project decided to leave Facebook and start their own company, Mysten Labs. They envisioned building a more decentralized internet, one where users maintained control of their assets and data.

Evan Cheng became the CEO at Mysten Labs who also runs the engineering research while Sam Blackshear is the expert on programming languages.

Adeniyi manages the product aspect and George Danezis works on the algorithms. Their fourth partner is Kostas Chalkias, the crypto genius, building crypto-related products.

The Vision Behind Mysten Labs and Sui

Adeniyi admits that they first faced some amount of trepidation. But they also knew that the crypto and blockchain world needed upgrading and that they were fully equipped to do that.

Their first product, Sui, was born out of this vision—a foundational protocol designed to bring blockchain technology into the mainstream by making it invisible to the average user.

The objective is to make the internet a lot more decentralized and more powerful for the average day user to actually use.

Sui allows users to interact with digital assets—whether it’s money, concert tickets, or even AI-generated content—without needing to understand the technical complexities of blockchain.

Since its launch, Sui has become a $21B protocol, powering billions of transactions across the internet. Adeniyi reveals how it has completed six billion transactions recently. This protocol is growing quickly and has successfully outpaced protocols that have been around for four years.

Raising Funding for Mysten Labs

Adeniyi’s experience in raising venture capital—$336M from investors including Andreessen Horowitz—has enabled Mysten Labs to build a team of top-tier talent, drawing from companies like Google, Facebook, and beyond. Today, the company has around 150 people working in it.

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Adeniyi talks about how their funding is a reflection of the amount of work required to actually launch something as ambitious as Sui is.

Their next protocol is Walrus, a decentralized storage solution, on top of Sui. Being a venture-backed company, they need to be cautious about their spending.

The Future of Decentralization

As Adeniyi looks to the future, his focus is clear: a more decentralized and democratic internet. With everything from money to concert tickets becoming digital assets, there’s a growing need for platforms that enable seamless interaction across these assets while maintaining user control.

Mysten Labs is looking to create this infrastructure—one where platforms no longer own your data, but rather help you unlock its potential. The platforms allow users to mutate or use the assets and add utility and value to them. Every activity allows for monetizing their content as a whole.

The potential applications for this technology are vast. Imagine running AI models and being paid for the data you contribute or buying a digital asset with the same ease as shopping online—all powered by blockchain, but without users even realizing it’s there.

This is the future Adeniyi and his team at Mysten Labs are building toward, and they believe it’s one where users will be empowered like never before. Sui can orchestrate interactions and eliminate the need for wallets and private keys, but with users retaining control of their data.

Vulnerabilities of Today’s Centralized Systems

As for decentralized storage, Adeniyi points to the vulnerabilities in today’s centralized systems. Services like Dropbox and Google Drive are convenient, but they’re prone to outages and data loss. Accidental data deletion can take weeks to restore.

Adeniyi believes the future will see global decentralized storage solutions that give users more control over their data, ensuring its availability regardless of corporate mishaps. Any files, websites, articles, or other assets are represented as assets on a blockchain.

As a result, the data is actually stored replicated across thousands of different machines, making them always available to users. Even if two thirds of the network goes out, users still have their data, thanks to Walrus.

Walrus is going to be more resilient, more robust than any service provider today in regards to data. Users can define who controls the data, transfer ownership, and monetize the data. The rules around what you can do with data is going to be built on trustless platforms like Walrus.

Adeniyi believes the future of data storage or global data storage is one where users own and monetize the data they create on infallible platforms that store data in a replicated fashion.

They need not worry about single points of failure or even multiple points of failure because its storage is done in such a way that prevents failure at the scale seen with cloud providers today.

So in case servers like Amazon or Google go out of business, it stops serving information, silencing or adding filters in front of data, users will have a mechanism by which to circumvent that as well.

Small Teams vs. Big Teams

Adeniyi remarks how having large teams is almost counterintuitive. Having a very highly skilled team that is small enough and nimble to iterate and move can achieve amazing things beyond what a large team could do as well.

Benchmarking what they’ve done at Meta versus Mysten Labs, the problems they were trying to solve at Meta with a large team took a lot of time. Aligning, decision-making, and progress were hampered because of having too many people.

Mysten Labs has thus been able to solve really challenging problems with more freedom to move, iterate, and pivot than at Meta. It has invented algorithms within a shorter time frame, even though Facebook has more money and engineers.

The output the Mysten Labs team has been shipping on a consistent basis is phenomenal. In the one-year and five-month process,

Mysten has shipped a layer one blockchain, storage protocol, and new cryptographic primitives that make the internet safer, allowing users to use blockchains just like they use normal internet.

Mysten Labs has created foundational technologies that have gained the company notoriety in a very short time.

Conclusion

From his early days in Bitcoin mining to his current role as co-founder of Mysten Labs, Adeniyi Abiodun’s journey is a testament to the power of innovation and perseverance.

With Sui, he’s poised to bring decentralized technology to the masses, making the internet more open, secure, and user-friendly.

The road ahead may be challenging, but with a track record like his, it’s hard not to believe in the transformative potential of Adeniyi’s vision for the future of digital assets and blockchain.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• 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 $336 million in venture capital funding.
• Mysten Labs’ vision is to create a decentralized internet in which users can control their assets without the need for 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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