- With the help of Polychain Capital, Movement Labs has received $38 million in a Series A investment.
- The money will be used to add Ethereum support for Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine.
In a Series A round headed by Polychain Capital, San Francisco-based blockchain development company Movement Labs has raised $38 million.
Participating in the Move programming language-based project round were venture capital firms Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and Aptos Labs.
Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs, told The Block that the significant amount of money raised shows how much our investors believe we can transform the Ethereum ecosystem, but he was unable to provide a valuation or the details of the funding round.
The financing will help Movement Labs in its endeavor to transfer Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum. Through the Movement zero-knowledge Layer 2 blockchain, this project seeks to improve transaction throughput and mitigate vulnerabilities in smart contracts.
We can now aggressively hire top personnel in engineering, research, product, business development, and other critical areas to carry out our vision thanks to this Series A funding. According to Manche, “it allows us to significantly scale our 40+ person team.”
Manche revealed that Movement Labs would be investing heavily in strengthening its formal verification and security research teams, as well as increasing its footprint in the Asia-Pacific area. “To push the boundaries of scalability and privacy, we are also doubling down on our zero-knowledge proof engineering capabilities,” Manche continued.
The popular Aptos and Sui Layer 1 blockchains would not be the only blockchains where the Move programming language would be used thanks to Movement’s Layer 2. A group of developers from Facebook’s now-defunct Diem stablecoin project first worked on Move at Meta.
Regarding the timeline for its rollout, Manche stated that Movement plans to launch its mainnet by the end of the year after launching its public testnet, Parthenon, in the upcoming weeks.
How Layer 2 of Movement functions
According to the project team, Movement offers users who want to stay in the Ethereum ecosystem parallelization and smart contract security by introducing a new and innovative execution environment that can handle over 30,000 transactions per second. It also makes use of Ethereum for settlement and a bytecode interpreter that is fully compatible with the EVM.
Reentrancy attacks are among the most prevalent vulnerabilities in DeFi, according to web3 bug bounty site Immunefi. These attacks allow malicious parties to continuously drain cash from smart contracts by taking advantage of the code execution order. According to the company, Movement’s Move-EVM attempts to stop attack vectors like reentrancy from working, enabling developers to release code that is completely tested at runtime.
According to Manche, the two main problems with blockchain infrastructure at the moment are smart contract attacks and subpar user experience. Cooper Scanlon, my co-founder, and I founded Movement with the goal of accelerating innovation in the cryptocurrency space so that developers without the financial means to hire costly auditors and establish massive development teams could create the next Facebook on-chain.
Move is a crypto-native programming language that we are bringing to market to overcome the inadequacies of Solidity, the Ethereum programming language.
Additionally, Movement Labs is working on the Move Stack, an execution layer architecture that works with rollups such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism. According to the Movement Labs team, their goal is “to scale smart contract execution for users on all networks and unify them with a shared sequencer implementation.” They plan to work with projects from all around the Ethereum ecosystem.
In September, Movement Labs had earlier declared that company had completed a pre-seed investment round, raising $3.4 million from investors such as dao5, Varys Capital, Blizzard Fund, and Borderless Capital. Anurag Arjun of Avail, Smokey The Bera of Berachain, and Calvin Liu of Eigenlayer were among the angel investors who took part in the round.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
