Michaël van de Poppe

Halting Network to Protect Funds: Design, Not Failure

Every system fails eventually. What separates the serious ones is what happens in the first hour. I sat down with Kostas Kryptos Chalkias, co-founder and Chief Cryptographer of Mysten Labs, the team behind Sui Foundation, to talk about something most founders would rather avoid discussing publicly: the day their network went down. What struck me wasn't the incident itself. Edge cases happen in any system at scale. It was the framing. Kostas argues that halting the network was not a failure, it was the system working as designed. The alternative to stopping was allowing the possibility of lost funds, and that trade-off was made deliberately. No user lost money. A few things from our conversation worth sitting with: → Why "halt and protect" beats "stay live and risk it" when real money is on the line and why that choice runs counter to most of tech's instincts. → The difference between a decentralized recovery and a single company flipping a switch. One is slower. One is also far harder to corrupt. → Why the Silicon Valley motto "move fast and break things", which Kostas knows firsthand coming from that world, is precisely the wrong philosophy for  financial infrastructure. → What the response revealed about team quality, and why Kostas believes the depth of engineering talent is what actually determines which networks survive a crisis. I pushed him on the gap between what his team knew and what the community saw in real time, because transparency in a crisis is its own test, separate from the technical fix. The full conversation is on New Era Finance.