PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mysten Labs (“Mysten” or the “Company”), a web3 infrastructure company and developer of the Sui Layer 1 blockchain, today announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with NCSOFT, a global premier game developer and publisher. Under the terms of the partnership, NCSOFT has invested $15 million in Mysten as part of the Company’s $300 million Series B funding round, which values Mysten at more than $2 billion. The two organizations will also explore future collaborations to create digital entertainment experiences that are more engaging and player centric leveraging Sui.
Founded in 1997 and headquartered in South Korea, with subsidiaries around the world, NCSOFT is a leading digital entertainment and publishing company that develops online and mobile games for millions of fans globally. Best known for critically acclaimed franchises including Lineage, Aion, Guild Wars, and Blade & Soul, NCSOFT’s portfolio of successful games are recognized for their massive worldview, multiplayer capabilities, technological prowess, and graphic quality.
Dr. Songyee Yoon, President and Chief Strategy Officer of NCSOFT, said, “Blockchain technology has the potential to create novel and innovative player experiences. We are excited to partner with Mysten, who shares our vision for the technology as a platform for truly distributed player centric economy, passion for community building, and trustworthy technology which is crucial for those who desire to build a platform of desired scale and reach.”
Mysten was launched in 2021 by former executives of Meta’s Novi Research and lead architects of the Diem blockchain and Move programming language. The Company’s inaugural product, Sui, is a decentralized, proof of stake blockchain that builds on important innovations in consensus algorithms and leverages novel data structures to deliver a high-performance, low-cost Layer 1.
Evan Cheng, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mysten, said, “NCSOFT is a storied name in gaming with a rich legacy of building fun, innovative experiences that have attracted millions of loyal players worldwide. We are grateful for NCSOFT’s financial support and partnership, which is a strong testament to the power of Sui as the definitive blockchain for gaming applications.”
Sam Blackshear, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mysten and the creator of the Move programming language, said, “Bringing gaming to web3 requires infrastructure that can support millions of players while enabling these players to own and interact with fully on-chain, dynamic and composable digital assets. The scalability and object-oriented architecture of Sui render it the destination of choice for developers seeking to build densely populated games that realize the benefits of on-chain elements, monetize well, and, most importantly, result in high quality user experiences.”
Mysten announced the initial close of its Series B funding round in September. The round was led by FTX Ventures, and included 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. Mysten has also entered into several strategic partnerships with entities across gaming, social media, and finance to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3.
About Mysten Labs
Mysten Labs is a team of leading distributed systems, programming languages, and cryptography experts whose founders were senior executives of Meta’s Novi Research and lead architects of the Diem blockchain and Move programming language. The mission of Mysten Labs is to create foundational infrastructure for Web3.
Learn more: https://mystenlabs.com
About Sui
Sui is the first Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater for the next billion users in crypto. Developed by Mysten Labs, Sui is horizontally scalable to support a wide range of dApp development with unrivaled speed at low cost. The first-of-its-kind platform brings users a general-purpose blockchain with high throughput, instant settlement speeds, rich on-chain assets, and user-friendly web3 experiences. Sui is a step-function advancement in blockchain, designed from bottom up to meet the needs of the next billion users in crypto.
Learn more: https://sui.io
About NCSOFT
NCSOFT, headquartered in Pangyo, Korea, is the world's premier publisher and developer of massively multiplayer online games, including the critically acclaimed Lineage®, AION®, Blade & Soul®, Guild Wars® franchises as well as numerous casual games. With approximately 5,000 employees worldwide, NCSOFT aims at providing fun to everyone, everywhere in the world. More information can be found at www.ncsoft.com.
