Mysten Labs, the initial developer of the Sui layer 1 blockchain, signed a memorandum of understanding with Alibaba Cloud, an arm of Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba Group (BABA), which has a $235 billion market cap. Alibaba Cloud will provide archival node services and secure cloud infrastructure for validators for Sui’s testnet to help create more user-friendly experiences – widely seen as a key factor in attracting more Web2 people into the Web3 space.

The two companies will also collaborate on developing sustainable Web3 ecosystems and explore potential opportunities in the e-commerce and payment sectors.

“We are excited to work with Mysten Labs to bring our secure technology and proven solutions to this nascent space to enable more user-friendly, immersive Web3 experiences,” said Daniel Jiang, general manager of the Middle East, Turkey and Africa for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “By leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s trusted and world-class security and global compliance capability and strong infrastructure coverage across the globe, we are in a strong position to facilitate the growth of the Web3 ecosystem to better serve customers with scalable, highly efficient and secure infrastructure.”

Alibaba Cloud offers a suite of cloud computing services, including elastic computing, database, storage, large-scale computing and application services. In December, Alibaba Cloud announced its Blockchain Node Service, which provides Web3 developers with scalable, efficient and secure infrastructure

Mysten Labs was launched by former executives of Meta Platforms (Facebook), who were working on the stalled Diem blockchain project. Sui is an advanced proof-of-stake blockchain that uses the consensus mechanism and novel data structures to offer high performance while maintaining low costs.