Evan Cheng, the co-founder and CEO of the company building the Sui blockchain, discussed the company’s upcoming SuiPlay0X1 handheld gaming device and other topics in an interview at the Mainnet conference.
Cheng said the SuiPlay0X1 is a “software play,” rather than a hardware play, and counts “disruptive developers” among Sui’s most important assets.
In May, Evan Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs, the company building the Sui blockchain, told The Block that crypto's “ChatGPT moment” could come any day.
In a recent interview from the Mainnet conference, Cheng reiterated that the moment hasn't arrived yet, but is still just beyond the horizon.
"Consumers know what they don't like and what they like, but they are not always going to be able to tell you what they want, otherwise we'd have faster horses," Cheng said, echoing a quote often attributed to Henry Ford.
As for Cheng's plan to have $SUI usher in that breakthrough, his view was that by catering to "disruptive developers" and experimenting widely, his blockchain has the best potential to achieve that breakthrough.
"We have an authentic voice. The most disruptive builders tend to think very differently; they're attracted to an authentic voice, our tech, who we are," said Cheng. "From the very beginning [we] would really resist taking shortcuts, resist doing something like, 'Oh, let's just launch an EVM L2…fork some existing project, do something iterative.'"
One of Sui's notable upcoming experiments is the SuiPlay0X1 handheld gaming device, which is now accepting preorders ahead of a planned 2025 launch. While some may see the device as a hardware play, similar to Solana's web3-enabled phones, Cheng sees the device as a software play.
"It's a gaming device that can play all the Windows games,” said Cheng. “What makes it better than other [devices]? The deep software integration and operating system integration. Even serving the existing web3 gamer, it's a superior product, because of the software."
”Hardware is almost like a commodity; it's the software experience that's the magic, that's how you win," said Cheng.
While some gamers and gaming companies have been resistant to web3 integrations in the past, Cheng, who's a gamer with a fondness for Soulslike games himself, said the right game will highlight the benefits of blockchain technology to gamers.
"You have to understand what blockchain offers [gamers]: convenience, capturing the provenance [of items], authenticity, anti-cheat: a lot of these things together, all these properties allow you to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish much more easily…turn your imagination into a real product, a real experience," Cheng said.
Rather than focusing just on gaming, Sui's partnerships have varied widely, from TikTok owner ByteDance to MoviePass, which relaunched in 2023 under its original CEO. Cheng said Sui searches for partners with similar mindsets, regardless of which particular industry they represent.
"We're pretty much in everything, talking to everybody. We're seeking the like-minded partner that wants to do something better and different and challenges the status quo. That's what we're looking for, not 'Oh, we're in this industry or that industry,'" said Cheng. "It really comes down to, do we have the capacity to do as much as we want? As a startup, we always have to worry about that."
As for being a relatively new L1 at a time when other projects choose to join an existing ecosystem, such as Optimism's Superchain, Cheng doesn't feel like Sui is missing out by developing its own platform and community.
"We do believe this space will go 10x, 100x…we believe we have an authentic voice, and we're going to stick with it," Cheng said. "The way we win is not just about taking market share from an existing player; we want to grow the pie."
