New year, new position as former Mysten Labs' CLO Kevin Boon moves to president role

Kevin Boon, the newly appointed president of Mysten Labs, plans to focus on strategy and day-to-day operations in the new year as he navigates the changing regulatory and political landscape for the Sui blockchain ecosystem.

Boon was appointed president after serving as chief legal officer by the web3 infrastructure firm's board of directors and assumed that role this month. He previously led regulatory, product, commercial and international legal teams at Block, the payments and blockchain infrastructure firm founded by Jack Dorsey, among other roles.

"The timing is really quite wonderful in our view because there's so much change that's happening in the regulatory landscape," Boon said. "To be a successful lawyer in the space, you really have to understand industry, you have to understand technology, you had to understand the way the regulatory patterns are looking."

One of Boon’s largest initial responsibilities is helping to lead Mysten Labs through the release of Walrus Protocol's Mainnet, which is expected to launch “very soon” in 2025, he said. Built on Sui, Walrus is a decentralized storage platform designed to manage the lifecycle of programmable storage and aims to reduce data availability costs for blockchain-based applications.

"People think of Sui as our monolithic innovation and that is very true, we're the team behind it,” Boon said, referring to the Sui blockchain born out of Meta’s aborted Diem project.

"If you think of all the things you need to be to able to recreate the best experiences on the internet through technology, then you could think of Sui as kind of the compute layer, the app layer, but you still need storage and so that's why it's our next one," he added.

Sui, like a number of rival blockchains that use the bespoke Move programming language, including Aptos and Movement, is a general-purpose blockchain designed to support decentralized applications.

Boon's appointment comes as regulatory winds in the U.S. are expected to shift under the incoming Trump administration and newly elected lawmakers, some of which have taken a more open approach to crypto. During the last Congress, lawmakers worked on bills to regulate stablecoins and take on crypto market structure.

The FIT21 market structure bill and stablecoin legislation could be reintroduced in the new year. Boon said Mysten is interested in exploring the stablecoin sector, especially if clear regulations are imposed.

“You're seeing a rush for teams to create stablecoins because there's just so much opportunity there," Boon said. "How can we make sure that they are going to be building on Sui?"

There are tier 1 stablecoins on Sui already, including USDC , Boon said. Following stablecoin legislation passage, Boon said Mysten Labs can start looking for use cases and embark on partnerships for the company.

"You're going to see a proliferation of more stablecoins and also the interesting use cases that come out of those," he added. “We want them on Sui.”

What's next

Beyond launching the storage and retrieval platform Walrus, which is currently live on a testnet, Mysten Labs is also looking for opportunities to advance decentralized technology through AI, Boon said.

Boon alluded to a few "major announcements" coming in the first quarter but would not specify, but later said to "keep an eye on gaming."

Speaking at The Block’s Emergence conference in December, Mysten Labs co-founder Kostas Chalkias said artificial intelligence could be used to create “smart wallets” that make using crypto as easy as swiping a credit card.

"We focus on various verticals," Boon said. "When you look at the type of partnership skills that we do, we have verticals that are in infrastructure in finance, in gaming … in gaming specifically there has been a lot of momentum and we're not done yet in that space."

When reflecting over the past year at Mysten Labs, Boon equated Sui's growth to coming out of its infancy.

"[SUI] a year and a half ago was still in its early days, infancy, crawling and now it is at a good, healthy run," Boon said. "Soon, in this year, next year, you will be able to get to a sprint."