Key Highlights
- Mysten Labs has appointed President Kevin Boon as CEO, while co-founder Evan Cheng remains CTO and leads a new AI business unit.
- The new unit will develop AI-agent trust products and AI-native infrastructure built around Sui and Walrus.
- The move follows Mysten Labs’ collaboration with Google Cloud on Verifiable Agent Arbiter, a system designed to help enterprises verify AI-agent activity.
Mysten Labs, the developer behind the Sui blockchain, announced a major leadership change this week. It appointed Kevin Boon as its new Chief Executive Officer.
It came in as the co-founder Evan Cheng who was till now serving as the CEO, stepped away from the top executive role to focus on artificial intelligence (AI).
Boon, who joined Mysten Labs as Chief Legal Officer in 2022 and became President in January 2025, will take over as CEO. Cheng will remain Chief Technology Officer and lead a newly established AI business unit focused on agentic trust products and AI-native infrastructure.
The leadership transition comes as Mysten Labs looks to expand its focus beyond blockchain infrastructure and build technology for AI agents that can carry out tasks autonomously. In a letter from the ceo published on October 16, Cheng said the new unit would develop products and services designed to help people and businesses trust AI agents. It’s work built around Sui and Walrus, Mysten Labs’ decentralized data storage network.
Kevin Boon Takes Over as CEO
Boon brings a mix of legal, operational and executive experience to the role. Before becoming President in January 2025, he served as Mysten Labs’ Chief Legal Officer.
His earlier career included general counsel responsibilities at Picsart, leadership of product, regulatory, commercial and international legal teams at Block. He has also served in legal roles at Amazon and Shearman & Sterling.
His appointment as President placed him alongside Cheng in overseeing the company’s strategy and operations. The move to CEO gives Boon responsibility for the company’s broader leadership as Cheng concentrates more directly on technical direction and the new AI business.
In his announcement, Cheng said Boon had been with Mysten Labs since its early days and had built trust across the organization. He described the transition as a way to make his own responsibilities more manageable and return more of his time to technical vision and engineering leadership.
Founded in 2021, Mysten Labs is the original contributor to Sui, a layer-1 blockchain. It also develops infrastructure and products including Walrus. Its latest organizational changes place AI-agent trust alongside its existing blockchain and onchain finance work as a more formal business priority.
Mysten Labs Creates Dedicated AI Business Unit
The transition comes with a pivot to AI-led strategy by Mysten Labs. The new AI business unit will bring together engineering, product development and other functions, allowing the team to operate with greater independence and fewer internal dependencies. Cheng said the unit would follow a similar structure to the onchain finance business unit Mysten Labs established earlier in 2026.
The focus is on a growing challenge for businesses adopting AI: ensuring that agents act within the authority they have been given, particularly when they handle transactions, access sensitive data or interact with other organizations.
AI agents are increasingly being developed to perform tasks such as making payments, negotiating agreements and executing workflows with limited human involvement. However, businesses may be reluctant to hand over consequential decisions without reliable ways to verify what an agent was authorized to do and whether it followed those instructions.
Mysten Labs wants to address that problem by building systems that can restrict agent behavior while allowing agents to complete tasks without requiring a human to approve every step.
The leadership change also follows Mysten Labs’ October 6 announcement of a collaboration with Google Cloud to develop Verifiable Agent Arbiter (VAA), an evidence layer designed to help enterprises verify whether their AI agents acted within their assigned authority.
Under the proposed system, detailed activity records, including prompts, model outputs and tool calls, remain in customer-controlled Google Cloud Storage. Cryptographic proofs are intended to be stored on Walrus, while Sui coordinates verification. The system is designed to give organizations a way to investigate disputed agent activity and reconstruct potentially problematic executions.
Mysten Labs said initial enterprise deployments were planned ahead of broader availability.
The AI business unit will build on this direction, with Cheng taking responsibility for its development alongside his CTO role. The company has not disclosed the unit’s budget, staffing levels or a timeline for its first standalone product launches.
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