Movement Labs raises $38M to add Facebook’s Move to Ethereum blockchain – Business
San Francisco-based blockchain development team Movement Labs announced Thursday it has raised $38 million in Series A funding to support the company’s work to bring Facebook’s Move language virtual machine to Ethereum, which will help address security and scaling issues.
Led by Polychain Capital, the investment round attracted participation from venture capital firms including Hack VC, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and others. It also drew support from Aptos Labs, an early adopter of the Move programming language.
Founded in 2022, Movement Labs looks to deal with vulnerabilities in smart contracts within the Ethereum ecosystem, the second-largest blockchain network by usage and market cap only to Bitcoin. It also intends to introduce a superior execution environment capable of supporting up to 30,000 transaction executions per second, which greatly scales up Ethereum’s current average of 20 to 30 transactions per second.
Move is a programming language developed by Facebook, owned by Meta Platforms Inc., to power the company’s doomed Diem blockchain crypto payment project that became defunct in 2022. The language, based on Rust, was designed to be platform-agnostic and provide a framework for writing safe smart contracts, which are used for self-executing contracts that can describe cryptocurrencies, tokens, other digital assets and decentralized applications.
A fundamental problem with smart contracts is that a minor vulnerability in one can lead to massive losses. Between 2022 and 2023, hackers exploited smart contracts in blockchain applications for almost $4 billion in token and crypto thefts, according to Chainalysis. By integrating Move along with a fully verified code runtime, the Movement team said, developers can be more certain that their code is secure.
“The two biggest issues in blockchain infrastructure at the moment are poor user experience and smart contract exploits,” said Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche. “My co-founder, Cooper Scanlon and I started building Movement to increase the velocity of innovation in crypto where the next Facebook can be built on-chain by developers who do not have the resources for large development teams and expensive auditors.”
Move is best known for its association with the Aptos blockchain, developed by the startup Aptos Labs, which resurrected the code from the ill-fated Diem blockchain. The company was founded by former Meta employees who didn’t want to see the technology languish, so they built an open-source layer 1 blockchain project based on it.
A layer 1 blockchain is the foundational layer where transactions are confirmed. Movement Labs is building a layer 2 blockchain for Ethereum that will interpret the Move language and parallelize transactions using a “rollup framework.” It will do so by processing transactions off-chain to improve speed and throughput before submitting them to the Ethereum blockchain. The company said it’s introducing the “Move Stack,” an execution environment compatible with rollup frameworks from companies such as Optimism, Polygon and Arbitrum.
“While the core focus of most other rollup teams is scalability, Movement’s key insight is that scalability alone is not why we are yet to see mass adoption,” Polychain’s Bobby Beniers said in a statement. “The Move virtual machine offers a developer experience that is intuitive and bug-resistant as well as highly scalable. By marrying these benefits with the network effects and base-layer security guarantees of the Ethereum ecosystem, we believe Movement can build a flourishing ecosystem that is home to a new generation of mainstream applications.”