Evan Cheng interview: How Mysten Labs hopes to bring scale to blockchain games
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Blockchain games and crypto projects don’t have the best reputations. They’ve been dismissed as scams, money-laundering schemes, rug pulls, and environmentally damaging. Hardcore gamers have rebelled against game developers and publishers who are using blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to authenticate unique digital items in games.
But the blockchain faithful believe that blockchain game companies can create something of value that will enable players to earn a return on the investments of time or money in games and let them resell it to others for a profit. This requires the creation of high-quality games with blockchain attributes and an ecosystem of supporters and players.
It could take years for these kinds of projects to launch and convince fans that all of the effort is worth it. And that’s where companies like Mysten Labs hope to make a difference. Founded late last year by former Apple and Facebook technologist Evan Cheng, the San Francisco company hopes to bring good engineering and infrastructure to blockchain Games. Cheng has assembled a team of veterans including Koh Kim, a former Google Play leader who is serving as the head of ecosystem development for Mysten Labs.
“The opportunity he was offering me, being able to create an ecosystem, that was very interesting for me,” Kim said in an interview. “Why are there only 20,000 web 3 developers when there are millions of Web 2.0 developers? How do we bring 5 million developers into web 3? What are the tools, the services, or the framework they need to be able to build?”
The company is trying to address is how to build a better, faster, more
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