Movement Labs, a pioneering team based in San Francisco, has announced a significant Series A funding of $38 million, led by Polychain Capital, for their ambitious goal of integrating Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine onto the Ethereum blockchain.
A move that aims to revolutionize the application of smart contracts by mitigating vulnerabilities and increasing transaction capacity.
Summary
A solid investment context led by Polychain with the goal of bringing Facebook’s Move to Ethereum
The investment round saw the contribution of a number of notable venture capital entities, including Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and Aptos Labs.
This broad support base underlines the strong industry confidence in the vision and technological proposals of Movement Labs.
Founded in 2022 by Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon, Movement Labs seeks to address the pervasive vulnerabilities that have plagued the smart contracts of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Their innovative solution involves the implementation of a new execution environment capable of handling over 30,000 transactions per second (TPS).
The introduction of a bytecode interpreter fully compatible with EVM, combined with Ethereum for settlement purposes, paves the way for a zero-knowledge Layer Two blockchain.
This development promises to bring parallelization and increased security to Ethereum users, addressing the crucial issues of scalability and security without requiring a detachment from the Ethereum ecosystem.
The urgency of Movement Labs’ mission is highlighted by recent statistics revealing that between 2022 and 2023, hackers exploited smart contracts for a total of over $5.4 billion.
Such violations have affected important protocols through prevalent attack vectors such as reentrancy attacks.
Move-EVM by Movement aims to strengthen smart contracts by allowing Move and Solidity developers to deploy fully verified code at runtime, thus preventing potential exploits.
Vision for a unified blockchain ecosystem
The vision of the co-founders goes beyond simple technological advancement; they aim to democratize blockchain development. “The two biggest problems in blockchain infrastructure at the moment are the poor user experience and smart contract exploits,” said Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs.
He emphasized the team’s commitment to accelerating innovation in the crypto space, enabling the emergence of new revolutionary platforms similar to Facebook but built on blockchain, accessible even to developers with limited resources.
In line with their expansive vision, Movement Labs also plans to launch Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with various leading companies’ rollup frameworks such as Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum.
This strategy aims to improve the execution of smart contracts across multiple networks, promoting a unified blockchain environment through the implementation of shared sequencers and other modular technologies.
After a pre-seed round of 3.4 million dollars, Movement Labs is getting ready to launch its public testnet, Parthenon, in the coming weeks. This will offer developers and users the opportunity to interact and contribute to the evolution of this revolutionary project.
The Serie A round of Movement Labs not only fuels their technological initiatives but also strengthens their position in the blockchain community as innovators and visionaries.
As they progress, the potential impact of their work on the Ethereum ecosystem and the broader blockchain community remains a highly anticipated development.
Conclusions
The funding obtained from Movement Labs represents not only a significant financial support but also a recognition of the innovation they are bringing to the blockchain world.
With their commitment to overcoming technical challenges and democratizing blockchain development, Movement Labs is destined to leave a lasting impact.
This phase of growth and development could very well mark the beginning of a new era in the security and effectiveness of smart contracts, envisioning a safer and more scalable future for the global blockchain ecosystem.
