Movement Labs, a blockchain development team, announced it has secured $38 million in a Series A financing round led by Polychain Capital. The funding round will support the company’s goal to bring Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum, address smart contract vulnerabilities, and enhance transaction throughput.
The funding round saw participation from venture capital firms, including Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and Aptos Labs, demonstrating strong industry confidence in the Movement ecosystem.
Launched in 2022, Movement Labs aims to tackle the prevalent smart contract vulnerabilities within the Ethereum ecosystem while introducing a novel execution environment designed for 30,000+ transactions per second (TPS). Utilizing a fully EVM-compatible bytecode interpreter and Ethereum for settlement, the Movement Zero-Knowledge Layer 2 blockchain will bring parallelization and smart contract security to users wishing to remain within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Between 2022 and 2023, hackers exploited smart contracts valued at over $5.4 billion, affecting major protocols like Curve and KyberSwap through common reentrancy attacks. Movement’s Move-EVM enables Move and Solidity developers to deploy fully verified code at runtime, preventing attack vectors like reentrancy from executing.
This is called an “Integrated Approach,” where multiple modular elements like shared sequencing, embedded formal verification provers, alternative data availability, and Ethereum settlement can combine to power one blockchain, enhancing security and performance.
Along with the flagship Movement L2, Movement Labs will introduce Move Stack. This execution layer framework is compatible with many of the rollup frameworks from companies such as Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum. The team’s vision is to collaborate with other Ethereum players to scale smart contract execution for users on all networks and unify them with a shared sequencer implementation.
The team had previously announced a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023. And users will be able to interact with its network this Summer.
KEY QUOTES:
“The two biggest issues in blockchain infrastructure at the moment are poor user experience and smart contract exploits. 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 addresses the shortcomings of Solidity and we are bringing it to market in a crypto-native way.”
– Movement co-founder Rushi Manche
“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. The MoveVM 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,” said
– Polychain’s Bobby Beniers
