Sui Integrated Into Ledger Live, with Ian Rogers and Kostas Chalkias

Sui is a Japanese word for water, that's why you see the drip symbol. The idea is transactions are flowing, moving fast, and can fit anywhere. I ended up being a white hat hacker for Ethereum Solidity and broke many smart contracts, especially anything related to cryptography. Most attacks you've seen in the past are probably under my umbrella. I want to help people understand what they're doing with their assets and I'm very happy to discuss exactly this. There was a reason Sui was built with cryptographic agility from the beginning. Together we're offering that full spectrum. It's our goal to make sure people know they are above that threshold. Many people I meet in bars have a Ledger in their pocket. Lately Sui is flying, you guys are developing super quickly.

I'm in Dubai. I'm very happy. I'm taking my flight in a few moments for Switzerland. It's getting dark outside.

It's like 'sweet' but without the tea. Sui is a Japanese word for water, and that's why you see the drip symbol. The whole idea is transactions are flowing, moving very fast, can fit anywhere. Parallelization – you have water and small holes, it can go anywhere. That's the whole idea behind what we built.

I started as an AI engineering researcher doing machine learning from age 16-18. Then I was hacked – my system was hacked, a prediction model for the stock market. My professor told me I had to learn security. So I became a white hat hacker at 23, starting by hacking my university, then white hat hacker for Ethereum Solidity. I broke many smart contracts, especially randomness functions, signature schemes, proofs of solvency for exchanges. Most attacks you've seen are under my umbrella. I worked at R3 Corda, then Mark Zuckerberg came to me for Libra. I moved to Palo Alto. Facebook changed my mindset – working with billions of users made me realize Ethereum only has a few thousand developers. That's why I shifted from white hat hacker to cryptography for UX, to help people understand what they're doing with their assets. I'm very happy to discuss exactly this: how we hide the advanced math and let people use a device or passwords to hold assets in a self-custodial way. I've almost hacked one of your competitors. I'm also working on new ideas to hide cryptography for every blockchain user and attract Instagram users.

All five co-founders are former Meta employees, and also from Google. Our CEO ran a huge team at Apple before Facebook. I was at one of the biggest fintech consortiums. Mark Zuckerberg and David Marcus had some of the best talents in the world. Facebook had the audience, but the Libra project itself had a better engineering team on cryptography and security than the whole organization. I was involved in WhatsApp payments. From the beginning, we were exposed to thinking about serving the unbanked, going to Latin America. We learned how to make foundational changes to the blockchain to make it applicable for the average person. It was easy for us to collaborate. Four or five spin-offs left Libra and Novi: Lightspark, Aptos, Linera, others, and Sui. The difference was that each individual who joined Sui at the beginning was either promoted every year or was one of the biggest brains. Our CEO, Evan, cherry-picked people who could change the future of blockchains. The other co-founders: George Danzis created fast consensus algorithms, Sam created the Move language. Everyone had participation in crypto. We found chemistry and built it ourselves, hiring the brightest minds in Silicon Valley. That's how Sui and Mysten Labs started. It was easy to go to a16z and tell them they'd never find such a concentration of innovative brains. We were at the right place at the right time. Having five founders with different skill sets is super useful in this sector that goes through cycles every few months. We can pivot quickly. With the new administration, regulation is changing, and we're faster than any other team.

The most important is starting from developers. How many developers exist for Solidity or Move? A few thousand. Java and JavaScript have millions. We did something wrong. We created Move language with Libra, then switched to Sui Move, which is object-based like Java or Rust. Developers can come in easily, especially for DeFi and gaming. We solved the developer problem and added security elements because Move is more secure than Solidity. Then we needed consensus expertise to have hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. We had a co-founder for that. We needed someone to do cool cryptography so people can create accounts with social login. It's like having a Vitalik in the company. These elements together solved the problem of being a more friendly blockchain for the average user. That's where we win.