Mysten Labs, the development company behind the Sui Layer 1 blockchain, said president Kevinon will succeed Evan Cheng as chief executive officer. Cheng will remain chief technology officer and personally lead a new in-house AI business unit.

In an Oct. 16 letter, Cheng said Boon had accepted the position. Boon previously served as chief legal officer before becoming president, Cheng said in his announcement on X.

"I planned for this day when I made him President," Cheng wrote on X.

The new AI unit will maintain its own engineering, product development, and other functions to reduce dependencies, Cheng wrote. It will follow the model of Mysten's onchain finance business unit, established over the summer, and focus on agent-trust products and AI-native infrastructure. That makes it the second business unit Mysten has organized under this standalone model this year, after the onchain finance group formed over the summer.

Cheng framed the leadership change as a way to free up time for technical leadership while continuing to support the Sui and Walrus ecosystems. "This makes my scope more manageable," he wrote in the letter.

The aim of the AI effort is to let agents carry out tasks autonomously while staying within limits set by their users, Cheng wrote. He said the products and services built by the unit would be anchored to Sui and Walrus. That autonomy-within-limits principle is the same one underpinning Verifiable Agent Arbiter, the evidence-layer project Mysten announced earlier this month.

Walrus is Mysten's decentralized storage protocol. It launched its mainnet in March 2025, as The Defiant previously reported.

One project Cheng highlighted is Verifiable Agent Arbiter, which Mysten announced on Oct. 6 as an evidence layer being co-developed with Google Cloud. The project is designed to let businesses prove that their AI agents acted within the authority they were granted.

Under the planned design, detailed agent records remain in customer-controlled Google Cloud Storage, while cryptographic proofs are stored on Walrus and coordinated on Sui. Mysten said initial enterprise deployments are planned before broader availability.

The two announcements landed ten days apart: Verifiable Agent Arbiter on Oct. 6 and the leadership change on Oct. 16. Near-term markers for the new unit include the initial enterprise deployments Mysten said are planned for Verifiable Agent Arbiter before broader availability, and how the group's products take shape anchored to Sui and Walrus under Cheng's technical direction.