"If We Do Our Job Well, We’ll 5x The Number Of Developers In Crypto In 24 Months." - How Sam Blackshear Built Move To Fix Blockchain’s Core Flaws In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Sam Blackshear, Co-founder and CTO of @Mysten_Labs, to discuss the creation of the Move programming language and why Ethereum and Bitcoin got some fundamentals wrong. From his roots in programming language research to building large-scale systems at Facebook, @b1ackd0g's journey shows that deep technical insight and problem-driven thinking may be exactly what blockchain developers need. Starting Out… Sam didn’t set out to work in blockchain. In fact, for much of his youth, he pictured himself on an NBA roster. Growing up, sports were his main passion, and he carried that competitive drive into running at the collegiate level. Alongside athletics, he had a family that backed his curiosity wholeheartedly. Whether it was skateboarding ramps in the backyard or other short-lived fascinations, his parents created an environment where he felt free to explore new interests without judgment. That openness eventually led Sam toward the world of programming languages. He spent the early part of his career immersed in academic research, pursuing a PhD in programming languages and program analysis. The latter is the discipline of building tools that can automatically detect bugs and security issues in code. His academic work led to an internship at Facebook, where he learned how to scale those tools for thousands of developers, finding hundreds of bugs in real-time. It was a revelation: the same core research he’d been working on could have massive, immediate impact when deployed in the right environment. That environment changed dramatically in 2018, when a senior engineer pulled him into a room to share an ambitious, secret project: Libra. Facebook wanted to build a global payments network on blockchain rails, complete with a stablecoin and programmable smart contracts. For Sam, this was the chance to design a language from the ground up — a dream for someone who had spent years studying them. Why Move Was Necessary Sam had followed smart contract research from a distance and was unimpressed by the safety of existing languages like Solidity. Studying Bitcoin and Ethereum, he noticed something fundamental: “These languages have no primitives for assets and no primitives for exchange,” he says. The very concepts they were built to serve i.e., digital scarcity and transfer, had to be recreated manually by developers each time, creating fertile ground for bugs and exploits. Move was designed to fix that. Sam focused on a small, specific set of problems: representing inherently scarce assets in code, enforcing ownership rules, and enabling safe transfer. “It’s a language for programming with money,” he explains, but more importantly, a language with built-in security and fail-safes. Before deciding on a new language, the team considered adapting existing languages or the EVM. But the compromises required, such as stripping out irrelevant features while focusing on asset safety, led to complexity. A clean-slate design was the only way to keep it small, focused, and secure. From Libra to Sui Libra never launched as intended, but the work on Move didn’t end. Sam and other former Facebook engineers went on to found Mysten Labs, building the Sui Network to showcase what was possible with Move. @SuiNetwork's goal: become the most developer-friendly blockchain, combining high speed, strong security, and features that expand what’s possible in decentralized applications. One of those features is Walrus, Sui’s decentralized storage layer. Sam likens it to giving blockchains the “disk” they’ve always lacked in the form of a persistent storage that opens the door to entirely new application categories. Imagine a blogging platform where payments, identity, storage, and encryption are all handled natively on-chain. Without a storage layer like Walrus, that’s impossible. The Discipline of Problem-Driven Innovation Throughout the conversation, Sam comes back to a simple framework: great ideas come from solving important problems. That means deeply understanding why a problem is hard, why previous attempts failed, and what constraints actually matter. “Once you’ve done that work, the solution is almost the easy part,” he says. It’s an approach that guards against one of crypto’s recurring mistakes — building “solutions” in search of a problem, fueled only by speculation. For Sam, problem-driven thinking is especially critical in crypto, where the noise of market hype can obscure whether real utility is being created. Leadership, Energy, and the Long Game As CTO of a company that has raised hundreds of millions, Sam faces the challenge of sustaining energy over a multi-year journey. His strategy: keep the work portfolio weighted toward what he enjoys most, accept that some balls will be dropped, and make peace with incremental progress. “You have to learn to take satisfaction in dropping the right balls,” he notes — a mindset shift from the typical all-boxes-checked satisfaction of being an individual contributor. It’s a philosophy shaped not only by trial and error but also by the example of mentors throughout his career. From his father, a cardiologist who chose work he loved so much he came out of retirement to keep doing it, to seasoned leaders at Facebook who taught him to balance high-impact projects with personal interest, Sam has carried forward a leadership style that blends curiosity, trust, and strategic prioritisation. Outside of work, activities like running and surfing provide him with balance and unexpected clarity. Running offers “unstructured thinking” — long stretches without distractions where ideas and solutions emerge naturally, while surfing demands focus, but the moments between waves create a different rhythm for reflection. Looking Ahead: Scaling Developers Sam’s biggest prediction for the next 24 months is ambitious: a 5x increase in crypto developers, with most building on Move and Sui. Achieving that means lowering the barrier to entry for non-crypto developers, giving them APIs and SDKs that let them integrate blockchain-powered features without going all-in from day one. Once they see value, Sam believes, they’ll dive deeper. The philosophy remains simple: start from what’s familiar, see the potential, and then commit fully when the problem is worth solving. “Safety is the most important thing about smart contracts, and Move is the safest language,” he says. If Sui succeeds in showing that safety and developer experience can coexist without compromise, it could redefine what builders expect from a blockchain platform. 👉If you enjoyed reading the summary, head over to When Shift Happens on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to access the full convo.