On April 24, Movement Labs, a blockchain development team based in San Francisco, announced that it had received $38 million in Series A funding, led by Polychain Capital. The funds will be used to introduce the Move virtual machine (MoveVM), a smart contract development language originated from the Facebook blockchain project, into Ethereum, resolve smart contract vulnerabilities and increase transaction throughput.
This round of investment attracted participation from well-known venture capital firms, including Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao 5 and Aptos Labs.
Founded in 2022, Movement Labs aims to address widespread smart contract vulnerabilities within the Ethereum ecosystem while introducing a new execution environment that enables the system to process more than 30,000 transactions per second. By leveraging a fully EVM-compatible bytecode interpreter and Ethereum as a settlement method, Movement, as a ZK Layer 2, will enhance the parallelization capabilities and smart contract security of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Between 2022 and 2023, hackers used smart contracts to steal more than $5.4 billion, affecting major protocols such as Curve and KyberSwap, using a common reentrancy attack. Movements Move-EVM allows Move and Solidity developers to deploy code that is fully verified at runtime, preventing reentrancy attacks from executing. The team calls it the Integrated Approach, where multiple modular elements such as shared ordering, embedded formal verification provers, alternative data availability, and Ethereum settlement can be integrated into one blockchain to enhance security and performance.
“Two of the biggest problems with current blockchain infrastructure are poor user experience and smart contract vulnerabilities,” said Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement. “My co-founder Cooper Scanlon and I founded Movement to accelerate innovation in crypto and enable developers without large development teams or expensive audit fees to build the next Facebook on-chain. Move solves the shortcomings of Solidity and we are bringing it to market in a crypto-native way.”
In addition to its flagship product, Movement L2, Movement Labs will also launch Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with many Rollup frameworks on public chains such as Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum. The teams vision is to work with other Ethereum builders to scale smart contract execution for users on all networks and unify through a shared sorter.
“While scalability is a core focus for most other Rollup teams, Movement believes that scalability alone will not achieve mass adoption of blockchains. MoveVM provides an intuitive and fault-tolerant developer experience while being highly scalable. By combining these advantages with the network effects and base-layer security guarantees of the Ethereum ecosystem, we believe Movement can build a thriving ecosystem that will be home to a new generation of mainstream applications,” said Bobby Beniers of Polychain in a statement.
The team previously announced that it had completed a $3.4 million pre-seed round of financing in September 2023 and will provide users with the opportunity to use Movement L2 this summer.
For more information on Movement Labs and guidelines for participating in the development network, visit: movementlabs.xyz, follow @movementlabsxyz on X and join the Discord.
About Movement Labs
Movement Labs co-founders Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon are early builders of the Move ecosystem and founded the high-speed, secure Ethereum L2 Movement Labs in 2022. Movement aims to combine smart contract security and parallelization with EVM liquidity and user base, introducing MoveVM to Ethereum through its flagship L2 and Rollup connected to Move Stack.
