Exclusive Interview with Mysten Labs Co-founder: L2s Have No Value
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Exclusive Interview with Mysten Labs Co-founder: L2s Have No Value
"I don't think L2s solve anything at all. In fact, they create more problems than they solve."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsInterviewee: Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and CPO of Mysten Labs
Interview and article by: Wendy, Foresight News
"Layer 2s have no value"—While acknowledging the significance of Movement Labs in promoting the adoption of the Move language, when it comes to choosing between L1 or L2 paths, Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Mysten Labs, is blunt. He told Foresight News: "I don't think Layer 2s solve anything. In fact, they create more problems than they solve."
The debate over whether to build on L1 or L2 remains a perennial topic in the public blockchain space. As one of the representative high-performance blockchain projects, Sui developed by Mysten Labs has chosen to build a Move-based L1, while the relatively newer Movement Labs has taken a completely different route—building a Move-powered L2 on Ethereum.
This means the Move language is gaining broader attention, which benefits overall ecosystem development. At the same time, high-performance blockchains still face challenges. In this regard, Sui needs not only to increase Move’s popularity as a foundational language but also to attract a large number of high-quality projects.
In the fiercely competitive high-performance blockchain space, attracting top-tier developers and projects is no easy task. Recently, Adeniyi Abiodun sat down with Foresight News for an exclusive interview discussing Sui’s development over the past year and the competitive landscape in high-performance blockchains.
Foresight News: Over the past year, you've hosted numerous hackathons globally. What achievements have you made? Where has Sui seen the highest adoption?
Adeniyi Abiodun: We’ve seen very high adoption in Asia, which is our primary market. Some of the largest projects and developers in Asian markets are building on Sui. We’ve also had projects that were previously built on Arbitrum and Solana move to Sui because they couldn’t achieve what they wanted there. Additionally, some teams want to diversify across multiple ecosystems, while others prefer to focus on just one. Notably, we have extremely low developer churn within our ecosystem—especially among those who have been building on Sui from day one and are now achieving significant success, such as NAVI, Aftermath, and Scallop.
We’re now welcoming new entrants like Bluefin and Suilend, who have migrated from previous ecosystems on Arbitrum and Solana to Sui.
We're seeing strong success in Asia, but North America and Europe are now catching up, making our user base more diverse. However, our main focus remains on Asia, where we continue expanding our influence. Before mainnet launch, we held hackathons in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and participated in events like Taipei Blockchain Week. We’ve done extensive work in Taiwan, leading to notable growth in our user base there. But more importantly, we’re seeing real success among builders in these regions. Entering a market isn’t meaningful if you have ten thousand developers all building copycat apps nobody uses. We want to see builders succeed—which is why others say, “Look, Bluefin succeeded on Sui, Suilend succeeded on Sui—maybe Sui is the next chain I should consider.” Interestingly, many EVM-native projects now view Sui as their next building destination, which is strong evidence of our success.
Foresight News: In the public blockchain space, many projects offer large bounties and incentives for developers. How do you attract more developers into your ecosystem?
Adeniyi Abiodun: First, we must lower the learning barrier for developers. We believe Sui is currently the easiest blockchain to build on. Evidence shows most developers can fully understand and begin building—or migrating to Sui—within four days.
Second, we prioritize quality of projects over sheer number of builders. Many chains host projects that are simply copy-pasted from other ecosystems without real innovation. Sui offers unique primitives unavailable elsewhere, empowering builders to unleash creativity. For example, several projects are now building decentralized limit order books directly on Sui instead of relying on centralized mechanisms. Others are creating entirely new bounty systems on-chain—something previously impossible. Some are even generating randomness on-chain, eliminating the need for Oracle services. In fact, Sui supports any cryptographic primitive.
Now, you can log into Sui using Google or Facebook accounts—Sui enables things that were never possible before.
As a result, Sui is the fastest-growing non-EVM-compatible chain. We have many builders—and they are high-quality ones—who are capturing significant market share from other chains. In certain Sui protocols, our transaction volume and TVL exceed those of entire competing blockchains.
This success stems from our builders’ achievements. So we haven’t needed to aggressively recruit them. Our hackathons have already attracted over 2,000 developers. In the coming months, we’ll announce winners of our global hackathon—around 200 builders and over 200 projects will be awarded. This demonstrates our ability to attract top-tier talent.
We’ve never tried to buy developers’ loyalty or force exclusivity agreements. It doesn’t work. Ultimately, developers should be free to choose where to build, and we respect that. Some competitors require developers to sign exclusivity clauses, promising not to build on other chains—specifically excluding Sui. We’ve never done that. And when those exclusivity periods end, most of those builders eventually come to Sui anyway.
Therefore, the way to win developers is by building a compelling platform that helps them achieve real business goals. That’s exactly what we’ve done—without resorting to questionable incentives. In the long run, the latter approach simply fails.
Foresight News: Within the Sui ecosystem, which sectors do you prioritize for project development?
Adeniyi Abiodun: Gaming, finance, and commerce are the three key categories we focus on in Sui. Gaming presents a massive opportunity to naturally onboard millions—even hundreds of millions—of users into Web3.
Even before launching Sui, we secured partnerships with 50 game studios. Today, we have over 70 gaming partners, including South Korean gaming giant NCSoft with a multi-billion dollar valuation, veteran game studios with decades of experience, and early-stage startups. We believe gaming is an ideal gateway for bringing users into Web3. In fact, we believe DeFi will grow further alongside gaming, as hundreds of millions of gamers will be able to seamlessly swap between native in-game tokens and stable assets.
That’s our goal. If you buy an NFT or in-game asset, you’ll use some form of decentralized finance. Therefore, targeting only existing Web3 users isn’t enough—we must expand the overall market. We’re already seeing early signs. For instance, WaveWallet, a wallet in our ecosystem, has brought over a million users into Web3. Concurrently, DeFi usage has surged, along with transaction volume—many users don’t even realize they’re using DeFi. Because we focus on bringing larger markets into Web3, we’re confident Sui will have more daily active users than any other chain.
Beyond gaming, finance is another rapidly growing area. Games rely on financial infrastructure for transactions and exchanges.
Commerce refers to the ability to track payment inflows and outflows on-chain—whether using existing assets as point-of-sale tools or converting points, rewards, memberships, and fan engagement metrics. These capabilities were previously impossible. Companies building on Sui are making this a reality. A large number of game studios will bring millions of daily active users to Sui. Meanwhile, we have numerous DeFi protocols and financial applications under development that will serve this user base.
Many companies are also building fan engagement tools on Sui. For example, we’re partnering with Red Bull Racing—one of today’s top Formula 1 teams—to develop a suite of fan engagement tools around their brand. We’re also collaborating with other sports brands like the NBA. We see this as a major opportunity—Sui enables businesses to interact with fans in far more engaging ways than traditional methods.
At Token 2049, we’ll announce a series of major new gaming partnerships in South Korea. There will also be exciting updates regarding SuiPlay0x1, our gaming console announced recently at Basecamp.
SuiPlay0x1 allows both Web2 and Web3 players to enjoy gaming seamlessly. You can play PC games on a portable device with high resolution and frame rates, earning rewards across both Web2 and Web3 games. We believe this completely redefines gaming.
It’s not a phone, but an affordable, low-barrier gaming console accessible to everyone. We’ll also share major updates on stablecoins soon. Overall, we’re extremely excited about the progress we’ve made in ecosystem development so far.
The number of developers in our ecosystem I just mentioned, plus over 2,000 registered for our hackathon—this continuous influx of builders creating innovative, exciting things on Sui fills me with great anticipation.
From day one, Sui has been listed on every major exchange—Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and any other you can name. In fact, Sui received more exchange support at launch than any other project in history.
Foresight News: Recently, Movement Labs—a Move-language-based project—announced a new funding round, drawing significant attention. You also chose Move, but opted for a base-layer L1, similar to Aptos. Looking back today, how do you view these two different development models—L1 vs. L2?
Adeniyi Abiodun: Fundamentally, the more developers adopt the Move language, the better it is for the ecosystem.
Solidity, being a notoriously difficult language, has actually hindered ecosystem growth. Even excellent developers face bugs and vulnerabilities when using Solidity. We’ve seen top EVM developers struggle, and hacks continue to happen. Move eliminates many common smart contract security issues. It’s a safer programming paradigm, and we’re pleased to see Movement Labs promoting Move adoption, just as Aptos does. Eventually, we expect Avalanche, Solana, and other ecosystems to adopt Move, growing the overall pie so everyone gets a bigger slice.
There are only 20,000 Web3 developers today, but nine million JavaScript developers. If we can get those nine million to write code in Move, then Move becomes the JavaScript of Web3. With an easier-to-learn, error-resistant language, we’ll have better applications, better user experiences, and a more secure ecosystem overall. More developers can enter Web3, bugs and hacks will decrease. Ultimately, we believe superior architecture and infrastructure will allow our Move ecosystem to prevail.
I believe we’re heading toward a multi-chain world, but I’m convinced we’ll be the best. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. We strongly believe in having an object-oriented language suitable for most developers—one holistically designed from the ground up to leverage the object model. This gives us unmatched scalability. It also means Move on Sui will be more scalable than Move on any other chain.
Ultimately, Sui is more scalable, more secure, and faster, enabling you to build primitives that were previously impossible. The creator of the Move language, Sam Blackshear, is a top engineer from Facebook and our CTO. So we’ll always lead in Move innovation ahead of anyone else in the ecosystem.
Foresight News: But which path is better—L1 or L2?
Adeniyi Abiodun: I believe L2s don’t work. I firmly believe that instead of building a fast chain, adding another complex layer on top is not viable. Because each layer cannot scale, and yet another layer is added to compensate—that’s why we have L2s, and now even talk of L3s. The root cause is that each layer fails to scale, so another layer is tacked on to fix it.
Solana doesn’t believe in L2s because they believe the solution is building an extremely fast L1. We agree—the way to scale is simply to build the fastest possible L1.
Sui is precisely the only chain that allows infinite scalability. If you need higher performance, just add more hardware—double the hardware, double the TPS; double it again, TPS doubles again—with no increase in latency, and horizontal scaling just like the internet. No need to build additional complex layers—we see that as regression.
I fundamentally don't believe L2s solve anything. In fact, they create more problems than they solve. Because Ethereum will never scale, you can't escape its L2s. But Sui doesn’t need L2s at all—because Sui itself is scalable. You don’t need to build another layer for higher performance when the base layer already delivers it. I believe L2s will always have various roles within the Ethereum ecosystem. They have value in Ethereum and in low-bandwidth, low-scale chains. But for high-bandwidth, high-scale chains, it's not an issue—L2s have no value.
But Move is open-source—the more builders, the better.
Foresight News: Can you elaborate on how Sui achieves self-scalability?
Adeniyi Abiodun: In most blockchains—and most programming languages—you have contracts where bytes represent ownership. But due to data structure limitations, you can’t know whether your transaction interacts with others. This forces sequential processing—one transaction at a time—creating a bottleneck. Since you can’t tell if your transaction affects others, everything must be processed linearly.
But Sui is an object-oriented system—if you hold a phone and someone else holds a pen, these are separate objects—so I can process them independently. The more CPUs we have, the more transactions we can process in parallel. Sui lets us determine whether transactions are related. Knowing this upfront allows us to process all transactions in parallel—meaning we have no throughput limits.
Other blockchains face a fundamental problem: they can’t detect transaction conflicts—like Solana, Aptos, and EVM chains. And they can’t scale beyond a single machine. But because we have an object model, we not only know when two objects are distinct—we can place that object on another machine and process it faster. This is a new scalability model—one that companies scaling their businesses use every day. Our team has technical backgrounds from building infrastructure at Facebook and Google—we know how to scale systems. This approach is unique to Sui. Solana hits a CPU ceiling—you need ever-larger CPUs, but eventually, you run out of processing power. For Sui, that’s not an issue. We just add more hardware to increase CPU capacity. Double the hardware, double the TPS—no upper limit.
In short, we’ve already solved the scalability problem. Hardware improvements help too—like faster signature verification.
But signature verification isn’t our bottleneck, so optimizing it won’t help us much. Other chains might benefit, but they’ll eventually hit other bottlenecks.
Foresight News: Speaking of hardware, generative AI’s rapid advancement is creating massive new hardware demands. How do you see this potentially impacting Sui?
Adeniyi Abiodun: AI and blockchain will definitely interact. But I see this as agent-to-agent communication. My AI agent will need to negotiate and pay fees to your agent.
That’s where blockchain becomes essential. In fact, today we announced a partnership with Atoma Network, a team building interference technology directly on Sui. So we believe AI and blockchain will integrate well.
I think much of today’s discussion around AI and blockchain is hype. People are buying tokens, but it won’t succeed. What truly excites us is partnering with teams solving fundamental problems for consumers and enterprises.
So we’re very optimistic about the future.
Foresight News: Recently, some researchers in the Ethereum ecosystem—such as Justin Drake—have faced controversy after accepting substantial token grants from EigenLayer. Some call this “corruption,” arguing it could influence Ethereum’s development direction. Sui is also an L1 and must maintain fairness and health in its ecosystem. What are your thoughts?
Adeniyi Abiodun: Sui is a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) network, open to anyone with sufficient stake. In fact, even the rules of the Sui blockchain can be changed through community voting. Since mainnet launch, we’ve implemented several community-requested changes that improved the protocol. So Sui is fully decentralized.
Over time, as more developers join, Sui will become increasingly decentralized. This means not only we but also the community can drive change. This matters deeply to us. We foster a secure ecosystem where builders have the freedom to innovate.
This isn’t just theory—it’s proven by actual proposals. The proposal to launch DeepBook was initiated externally. The change to validator staking thresholds was also community-driven.
The community will gradually propose more fundamental changes to Sui’s protocol direction. Isn’t that the essence of DPoS? Sui is only one year old—more governance mechanisms will emerge, allowing broader participation.
But the challenge with DPoS is ensuring everyone is incentivized to vote. That’s always difficult. We don’t yet have perfect answers to all these issues. Still, delegation will ultimately be the solution. It’s reasonable for me to delegate my stake to someone who votes on my behalf. Of course, we’d love every user worldwide to vote, but not everyone understands technical nuances.
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