Mysten Labs CEO Change: Kevin Boon Takes Over, Cheng Leads AI Unit

Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui and Walrus, has a new chief executive. Kevin Boon, who was president, takes over as CEO. Evan Cheng, who held the CEO job until now, stays on as chief technology officer and will run a new AI business unit. The Mysten Labs CEO change was announced in a letter dated October 16 on the company's own blog.

The passage from the letter that announces both changes. Source: Mysten Labs blog.

Why the Mysten Labs CEO change comes with an AI unit

Cheng writes that the AI business unit will be dedicated to "agentic trust products and AI native infrastructures". It will be self-contained, with its own engineering and product teams, to cut dependencies. Mysten already runs an onchain finance unit set up earlier this summer, and the AI unit will work in the same way.

The letter says the shuffle makes Cheng's scope more manageable. He wants to get back to setting the technical vision, he adds. Boon, in his words, started as the company's lawyer and later became president.

Trust is the product

The letter hangs the new direction on one problem. Agents get real jobs now, Cheng says, from booking trips to shipping code. What stalls it is trust. A language model won't always answer the same prompt the same way. If one goes rogue, nobody neutral can rule on who pays.

Mysten wants to build the tools that let people trust agents and let agents trust one another. The letter names two goals. Control means agents act inside bounds their owners set. Enablement means they can finish tasks alone, with no human watching each step.

The two goals as listed in the letter, with the pledge that the work will sit on Sui and Walrus. Source: Mysten Labs blog.

Figures Cheng quotes in the letter

Cheng backs the pivot with outside numbers. He writes that 40% of enterprise apps should include task-specific agents by the end of 2026, against under 5% a year earlier. He also quotes Morgan Stanley, which he says expects agents to drive up to 20% of US e-commerce by 2030, about $385 billion.

Regulation gets a mention too. Per the letter, the EU AI Act makes high-risk AI systems log what they do starting in December 2027. A company that falls short can be fined up to 15 million euros or 3% of its worldwide turnover. Those claims are the letter's own.

The Google Cloud link to the Mysten Labs CEO letter

Cheng also points to a collaboration announced the week before in Singapore. Mysten Labs and Google Cloud are developing the Verifiable Agent Arbiter, an evidence layer for enterprise agents built on Sui and Walrus. The idea is that logs held by one party cannot settle a dispute, so the evidence must be tamper-resistant and kept somewhere neutral.

The letter is the first in what Mysten calls a quarterly series. It adds that more than 4,500 people attended Sui Basecamp, held alongside TOKEN2049 Singapore, and that the Mysten Labs CEO handover follows that event. This article reports on a company announcement and is not a view on SUI or any other token.