Kevin Boon is taking over as CEO of Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui Layer 1 blockchain. Evan Cheng, who held the top job, will stay on as chief technology officer and lead a new in-house AI business unit.
A leadership change after a short handoff
Cheng announced the move in an Oct. 16 letter and in a post on X. He said Boon had accepted the role. Boon was previously chief legal officer before becoming president. Cheng noted that he had planned for this step when he named Boon president, which suggests the transition was not a sudden break.
The change gives Cheng more room to focus on technical work, he wrote. His scope, in his words, becomes more manageable. He also said he will keep supporting Sui and Walrus, Mysten’s decentralized storage protocol. Walrus launched its mainnet in March 2025.
New AI unit gets its own teams
The AI unit will have its own engineering, product development and other functions. That setup is meant to reduce dependencies on the rest of the company. It follows the model of Mysten’s onchain finance business unit, which was set up over the summer. The group will focus on agent-trust products and AI-native infrastructure.
Cheng described the goal as letting agents carry out tasks on their own while staying within limits set by users. The products and services will be tied to Sui and Walrus. That link matters because Mysten wants AI activity to settle on its own network and storage layer, rather than sit entirely outside it.
Verifiable Agent Arbiter is an early project
One project Cheng highlighted is Verifiable Agent Arbiter. Mysten announced it on Oct. 6 as an evidence layer being co-developed with Google Cloud. The idea is to let businesses prove that their AI agents acted within the authority they were given.
Under the planned design, detailed agent records would stay in customer-controlled Google Cloud Storage. Cryptographic proofs would be stored on Walrus and coordinated on Sui. Mysten said initial enterprise deployments are planned before broader availability. There is no firm public date yet, so the timing remains something to watch.
The CEO swap is a small structural move on paper. In practice, it puts a lawyer-turned-president in charge of daily operations and sends the co-founder back toward engineering and AI work. For Sui, the test will be whether that split helps ship products without slowing the core network effort.
