Led by Polychain Capital, Movement Labs is a blockchain startup that wants to transfer Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum. The business has raised $38 million in initial capital.With the debut of Movement L2, their new layer-2 Ethereum blockchain based on the Move programming paradigm, Rushi Manche, 21, and Cooper Scanlon, 24, who dropped out of Vanderbilt college, launched the company. They claim to be on a mission to “make blockchain security sexy”.
Manche claimed that while still in college a few years ago, he read a piece about Facebook’s blockchain initiatives, which piqued his interest in Move.
“Security has never been a priority for the industry,” Manche said in an interview. “It’s always, like, ‘$100 million hack,’ ‘$20 million attack’ – we’re so succumbed and numb to the attack issue when in reality, that’s a huge issue for retail.”
These days, Move is most recognized for its connections to layer-1 blockchains, like as Aptos and Sui, which prioritize cheap costs and high throughput.The Movement team intends to outperform layer-2 incumbents in terms of security and transaction speed by expanding the technology to an Ethereum layer-2, which is a blockchain that writes data to Ethereum but provides quicker and less expensive transactions.
Participating in Movement’s funding round were venture capital firms Aptos Labs, which is the company that created Aptos, Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and others.
“Between 2022 and 2023, hackers exploited smart contracts for over $5.4 billion, affecting major protocols like Curve and KyberSwap through common reentrancy attacks,” Movement explained in a statement. “Movement’s EVM allows Move and Solidity developers to deploy code that is fully verified at runtime, preventing attack vectors like reentrancy from executing.”
“With embedded firmware application runtime, we can stop 90% of attack vectors or more,” Manche told CoinDesk. Move also uses parallelization – a method for processing multiple streams of activity at once that’s used by Solana and Move-based chains to achieve greater transaction throughput. “This combination of speed and security makes for a really powerful VM,” said Manche.
The most notable outcome of Meta’s disastrous venture into blockchain technology is Move.The business, which was still known as Facebook, made headlines in 2019 when it revealed that it was introducing a cryptocurrency called “Libra” (later dubbed “Diem”).Move, a brand-new open-source Rust-based programming language that Meta created to improve the security and efficiency of the blockchain scripting process overall, was intended to be used with Diem’s blockchain.
“In August 2022, I was in college with my co-founder at Vanderbilt and I read this article, ‘Facebook is building a new programming language,'” recalled Manche. “I would use Cosmos and the [Ethereum Virtual Machine], but there weren’t a lot of users – wasn’t a lot of volume.”
“To me, it was like, okay, Facebook, the biggest consumer app, they’re all trying to get on-chain. They’re doing this new initiative, new language, new VM. So I started digging,” said Manche.
Despite regulatory pressure forcing Meta to abandon its aspirations for virtual money, several of its staff left the company to form the Move-based blockchain startups Aptos and Sui.
Manche claims that he dabbled in cryptocurrency while in college, primarily in the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem, before learning about Move.Cooper was the first of the two to use Move in a build, producing an Aptos yield aggregator.Manche, who is hardly old enough to drink, claims that when he and his co-founder were first traversing the fundraising circuit, investors were somewhat curious about their ages.“We were thinking, ‘Who are these kids?’ when we first started out. How do they proceed?“How can we trust them?” Manche exclaimed.
“I think over time, especially me and Cooper, we’ve built a lot of trust up because we’re category leaders. We showed a lot of traction in terms of development, traction in terms of the community ecosystem,” said Manche. “The age question was always a sticking point, but I think now everyone’s pretty bullish.”
Movement Labs is the first to implement Meta’s Move technology on an Ethereum layer-2 network, while Aptos and Sui were the first to test Move in a real-world setting.The native programming languages of Ethereum, Move or Solidity, will be supported by the network for applications created with them.The company is also launching the Move Stack, a blockchain execution environment that can be used to create other chains and is compatible with well-known blockchain-building frameworks like Arbitrum Orbit and OP Stack. This is in addition to the Movement L2.It is also developing a shared sequencer, which means that some decentralization will be present in the way it communicates with the L1 and L2 chains.
Movement L2 will be “one of the first main flagship L2s prioritizing decentralization and decentralized sequencers” from the start, said Manche.
The Movement L2 will enter its testnet phase this summer.