Mysten Labs, which is developing the Sui blockchain, raised a $300M Series B led by FTX at a $2B+ valuation; all five founders worked at Meta's crypto unit
- Mysten's Series B round values the company at over $2 billion, giving investors equity and token warrants.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mysten Labs has closed the round it was shopping all summer: after sources reported in July that it was in talks for a $200M-plus Series B led by FTX Ventures at a $2B valuation, the deal landed larger — $300M from FTX itself, at over $2B, with investors taking both equity and token warrants. That is a steep climb from the $36M Series A Andreessen Horowitz led less than a year earlier, and it lands on a team where all five founders came out of Meta's crypto unit.
The lead investor matters as much as the size: FTX raised its own $400M Series C at a $32B valuation in January and is now recycling that capital into the infrastructure layer, taking warrants on Sui tokens alongside its equity stake.
First-order effects
- Mysten Labs gets a $300M war chest and a $2B+ valuation roughly nine months after its $36M Series A, funding development of the Sui blockchain by an all-ex-Meta-crypto founding team.
- FTX becomes Mysten's lead investor with both equity and Sui token warrants, directly tying the exchange's returns to the token it will likely trade.
Second-order effects
- Rival exchanges face pressure to copy the FTX playbook — taking token warrants in the chains they list — because a venue holding pre-launch exposure to a token captures upside that pure listing fees never will.
- The equity-plus-warrant structure sets a pricing template for other L1 startups: valuations now get set partly on expected token demand through exchange distribution, not just protocol technology.
Third-order effects
- If exchanges keep leading infrastructure rounds, trading venues evolve into kingmakers of the L1 ecosystem — deciding which chains get capital, liquidity, and listing priority — concentrating power that was previously spread across VCs and foundations.
- Token warrants inside equity rounds blur the line between venture investing and token pre-sales, a structure regulators have not yet clearly adjudicated.
The trend: Crypto exchanges are converting their own mega-rounds into strategic infrastructure stakes, binding trading venues to the blockchains whose tokens they list.