Kevin Boon Named Mysten Labs CEO as Evan Cheng Moves to CTO to Lead New AI Unit

Mysten Labs co-founder Evan Cheng is handing the chief executive role to Kevin Boon, the company's President, and will lead a newly formalized AI business unit as Chief Technology Officer. Cheng disclosed the change on October 16 in "Letters from the CEO," the first installment of a new quarterly update series from Mysten Labs leadership, published on the company's blog.

"I have asked Kevin Boon, President of Mysten Labs, to step into the role of Chief Executive Officer as I add leading the AI BU to my list of responsibilities as Chief Technology Officer, and he has graciously accepted," Cheng wrote.

Mysten Labs is the core developer behind Sui and Walrus. The letter did not give an effective date for the transition.

Two internal changes

Cheng described the leadership change as one of two internal moves meant to give the company the time and bandwidth to focus on what he called agentic trust.

The first is the formal creation of an AI business unit "solely dedicated to developments of agentic trust products and AI native infrastructures." Cheng said the unit will be self-contained, with its own engineering and product functions, and will run in a similar way to the onchain finance business unit Mysten Labs set up earlier this summer.

The second is the CEO handover. Cheng said the narrower scope frees him "to return to what I know I do best," which he described as setting the technical vision and leading engineering teams.

Who is Kevin Boon

"Kevin has been here since the beginning, first as our lawyer, then as our President," Cheng wrote. Mysten Labs named Boon President in January 2025, promoting him from Chief Legal Officer. As President he has overseen strategy and day-to-day operations alongside Cheng; as Chief Legal Officer he oversaw legal, business development, corporate development and strategic communications.

Before Mysten Labs, Boon was general counsel at Picsart, led product, regulatory, commercial and international legal teams at Block, and served as lead counsel for retail teams and subsidiaries at Amazon, according to the company's 2025 announcement.

Why it matters

The letter makes AI agents the center of Mysten Labs' strategy. Cheng wrote that the company is "now building the products and services that let people and businesses trust agents, and let agents trust each other," and that "everything we're building will be anchored to Sui and Walrus."

He pointed to the Verifiable Agent Arbiter, an evidence layer for enterprise agents that Mysten Labs announced with Google Cloud at Sui Basecamp in Singapore earlier this month, as an example of that direction.

With Boon running the company and Cheng leading the AI unit, Mysten Labs will have separate business units for onchain finance and AI.