Pantera Capital Partner: How does Mysten Labs enhance the scalability of Web3 infrastructure?

Original Author: Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital

Compiled by: Kyle, DeFi Dao

Mysten Labs is a new web3 infrastructure company that is building countless services to enhance the scalability and programmability of modern blockchain infrastructure, with the ultimate goal of accelerating the adoption and development of decentralized technology. The team collaborates with existing blockchain platforms to enhance their infrastructure and builds independent, novel decentralized networks and services around specific emerging use cases.

In terms of scalability, Mysten has established two core innovations:

• Narwhal: A high-performance transaction mempool that increases transaction throughput by separating transaction propagation tasks from transaction ordering.
• Tusk: An asynchronous consensus protocol that, when combined with Narwhal, has been shown to achieve an initial throughput of over 160,000 transactions per second (tps).

In terms of programmability, Mysten is integrating its highly expressive, type-safe Move programming language with multiple blockchains to popularize a secure general-purpose language for cross-platform smart contract development.

The team has announced partnerships with Celo and Sommelier networks to integrate Narwhal, Tusk, and Move with their networks, aiming to enable both blockchains to achieve unparalleled throughput of over 100,000 tps.

Mysten is also building a standalone blockchain specifically designed to support highly composable dynamic NFTs. This new blockchain will offer unparalleled scalability, utilizing Byzantine consensus broadcasting and integrated storage for NFT assets, as well as intuitive programmability around various NFT functionalities, including mutable NFTs, atomic transactions of multiple NFTs, and customizable NFT structures and metadata.

Previously, the Mysten team led Meta's (formerly Facebook) Novi research team, where they built various groundbreaking technologies, including the Diem blockchain, the Move programming language, and several cryptographic primitives to enhance blockchain scalability and usability. The team is backed by Andreesen Horowitz (A16z), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Ultimately, by building the next generation of robust, highly available web3 infrastructure, Mysten significantly enhances the scalability and programmability of the modern crypto ecosystem, paving the way for a more composable, scalable, and decentralized internet than ever before.

Building the Scaffold for Web3

The explosive growth of web2 applications (including websites and mobile apps) was driven by the development and adoption of highly complex, robust, and usable infrastructure layers for application development. Infrastructure components like cloud service providers have made it easier than ever for developers to create custom, fast web applications, allowing users to effortlessly access these applications from their personal devices. Programming frameworks like React or software development kits (SDKs) have significantly lowered the knowledge barrier for building web services, enabling more people to develop applications around specific use cases. Internet-wide protocols (such as the Domain Name System (DNS)) have spawned a universal method for publishing and using online resources, ultimately helping to connect billions of people.

The modern landscape of web3 is constrained by a lack of complex infrastructure to support widespread dapp development and usage. Scalability issues such as high transaction fees and low transaction speeds present significant barriers to entry for new users of decentralized applications. The unintuitive and unfamiliar paradigms of smart contract development can lead to unknown vulnerabilities, making developers hesitant to build decentralized applications and posing significant risks to users' online assets and data.

To achieve adoption levels similar to web2, the crypto ecosystem must build more complex core infrastructure to support large-scale scalable applications, better dapp development frameworks, and broader functionalities around emerging use cases.

What is Mysten Labs?

Mysten Labs is a new web3 infrastructure company that builds countless services to accelerate the development and adoption of decentralized technology.

Mysten is currently addressing two key gaps in existing blockchain infrastructure:

• Scalability, including low transaction throughput, high dapp latency, and limited on-chain storage.
• Programmability, including niche, unintuitive languages for smart contract development and limited tools for smart contract verification and ensuring secure contract execution.

The team is working with existing blockchain platforms to enhance their technical capabilities in these areas and to establish their own efficient, usable decentralized networks and services.

Who are the Driving Forces Behind the Project?

The founding team of Mysten previously led Meta's (formerly Facebook) crypto R&D department, Novi Research. At Novi, the team built various highly innovative mission-critical projects, including the Diem blockchain, the Move programming language, high-performance consensus algorithms, verifiable smart contract execution technologies, and solvency cryptographic proofs. In addition to this groundbreaking work, the team's experience spans several leading technology and financial companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and JPMorgan Chase.

The Mysten team has also raised over $36 million in Series A funding from institutions such as Andreesen Horowitz (A16z), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Electric Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.

How Does Mysten Enhance the Infrastructure of Existing Blockchain Platforms?

In terms of scalability, Mysten is developing two key innovations:

• Narwhal: A high-performance transaction mempool that improves transaction throughput by separating the task of propagating transactions (sending transactions to all nodes on the network) from the task of ordering transactions. Most blockchains combine these tasks into a single cohesive protocol, which limits the speed (i.e., throughput) at which the network processes transactions to the speed at which the network reaches consensus on transaction order. By having a transaction propagation protocol (Narwhal) that is independent of the consensus protocol and runs in parallel with it, blockchains can significantly increase their transaction throughput and reduce latency for their applications. Importantly, Narwhal can integrate with any BFT consensus protocol, meaning it can enhance the transaction throughput of many existing blockchain platforms.
• Tusk: A fully asynchronous consensus protocol that can be combined with Narwhal to maintain high performance even in the event of network failures. Tusk employs shared randomness among all nodes on the network to allow each node to determine the total order of transactions without any additional communication, without delving into the technical complexities.

When combined with partially synchronous consensus algorithms like HotStuff, Narwhal enables blockchains to achieve throughput of over 130,000 transactions per second (tps); when combined with Tusk, blockchains can achieve throughput exceeding 160,000 tps. This far surpasses Bitcoin's 7 tps, Ethereum's 15 tps, and Solana's peak of 65,000 tps.

In terms of programmability, Mysten is working to integrate the Move programming language with several existing blockchains to provide a secure, cross-platform general language for smart contract development. Move was originally developed for the Diem blockchain, using a highly complex type system to ensure that resources (i.e., program values) can never be duplicated or implicitly discarded, but can only be moved between storage locations. This ultimately leads to more secure contract execution. The language also possesses high expressiveness, allowing it to support countless use cases in DeFi and beyond. As Move becomes more widely adopted, developers will find it easier to share contracts, tools, and expertise across blockchains with different architectures.

Mysten has announced partnerships to bring these scalability and programmability improvements to Sommelier (an Ethereum transaction processing layer) and Celo (a mobile-first, EVM-compatible network). The combination of Narwhal, Tusk, and Move on these blockchains will elevate their transaction throughput to over 100,000 tps and enable developers to more easily leverage each blockchain's unique features, such as Sommelier's high-performance bi-directional Ethereum bridge and Celo's ultra-light client for resource-constrained mobile devices.

What Independent Platforms is the Team Building?

Mysten is also building a novel, scalable blockchain specifically designed to support highly composable dynamic NFTs. Today, most existing NFT blockchain infrastructures merely add verifiable ownership to general static digital objects (like jpeg images), limiting how digital ownership and non-fungibility can be more broadly utilized in web3 applications.

While more complex use cases around NFTs are beginning to emerge, especially in gaming, the use of such NFTs is often constrained by the dapps that accommodate them due to poor composability; for instance, NFT assets in games are rarely combinable across different games. Furthermore, while the functionalities of most NFT-centric applications today are relatively simple, NFT platforms are still limited by some technical weaknesses, including high minting fees, limited transaction throughput, poor programmability, inability to model complex objects, and lack of on-chain storage for larger assets.

Mysten's NFT-centric blockchain will provide unparalleled scalability by combining an NFT ledger for low-cost, high-throughput NFT issuance, as well as integrated storage capabilities for NFTs and bridges to other L1 blockchains. Specifically, the blockchain will utilize Byzantine consensus broadcasting (where a single node broadcasts to all other nodes, rather than multiple nodes broadcasting to each other) to achieve simple sharding, enabling efficient horizontal scaling.

The new blockchain will also use the Move programming language to support a rich set of NFT operations, including mutable NFTs, locking NFTs for dapp-specific use, atomic operations across multiple NFTs, and customizable NFT structures and metadata to support highly specific urgent use cases. In summary, these improvements in scalability and programmability will enable developers to build highly scalable and customizable NFT applications more easily and efficiently than ever before. The team plans to launch the network later this year.

While Mysten's development work has primarily focused on this NFT-centric standalone blockchain so far, the team is eager to collaborate with the web3 community to further identify and address gaps in existing blockchain infrastructure.

Final Thoughts

Through infrastructure innovations like Narwhal and Tusk, Mysten enables blockchains to support unparalleled levels of transaction throughput—allowing existing dapps to scale faster and reducing barriers to entry for new crypto users (i.e., high latency and fees). With the growing adoption of its powerful, type-safe programming language Move, Mysten also supports safer dapp development through a general framework, making it easier for developers to build and share secure smart contract applications across different blockchain ecosystems.

Additionally, with its new blockchain designed for highly composable and customizable NFT functionalities, along with future developments in collaboration with the web3 community, the Mysten team will greatly enhance technical capabilities and adopt many currently under-resourced use cases in web3.

In conclusion, by building the next generation of robust, highly available web3 infrastructure, Mysten significantly enhances the scalability and programmability of the modern crypto ecosystem, paving the way for a more composable, scalable, and decentralized internet than ever before.