The round valued the startup at more than $2 billion.

Mysten Labs, a developer of the Sui blockchain network and creator of infrastructure for Web3, announced an initial close of $300 million series B funding round led by FTX Ventures, and including participation from new and existing investors, including a16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sino Global, Dentsu Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, and O’Leary Ventures, among other investment funds and strategic partners. (Businesswire)

Mysten has been founded by former executives of Meta Platforms’ Novi Research, its blockchain and crypto research unit.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mysten commenced fund-raising discussions with investors as far back as in May. However the fundraising process was hampered and slowed due to crypto market events such as the collapse of Terra USD and the bankruptcy of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital Ltd.

In the ultimate analysis however the size of the funding does show that VC interest in crypto and block chain projects is still strong. Note that Palo Alto-based Layer 1 startup Aptos Labs recently closed a $150 million Series A, also led by FTX Ventures, along with Jump Crypto. The round valued the company at $2 billion. Aptos also previously closed a $200 million round in March.

Mysten’s inaugural product, Sui, is a decentralized, proof of stake blockchain designed to enable creators and developers- from gaming to social media to finance – to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3.

The company will use the funds from the latest round for additional hiring, to accelerate the growth of Sui, and to continue development of the infrastructure for Web3.

“Current web3 infrastructure is in the dial-up era – it’s slow, expensive, capacity constrained, insecure, and simply hard to build for,” said Evan Cheng, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mysten. “With Sui, we are endeavoring to build a blockchain that scales with demand and incentivizes growth, eliminating middlemen, and enabling users across applications to seamlessly integrate and interact with their favorite products.”

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