SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2024 – Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain development team, has secured $38 million in a Series A financing round led by Polychain Capital. The funding will support the company’s mission to bring Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum, addressing smart contract vulnerabilities and enhancing transaction throughput.
The investment round saw participation from prominent 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.
Founded 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). By leveraging 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 who wish to remain within the Ethereum ecosystem.
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’s Move-EVM allows Move and Solidity developers to deploy code that is fully verified at runtime, preventing attack vectors like reentrancy from executing. The team calls this the “Integrated Approach”, where multiple modular elements such as shared sequencing, embedded formal verification provers, alternative data availability, and Ethereum settlement can combine to power one blockchain, enhancing security and performance.
“The two biggest issues in blockchain infrastructure at the moment are poor user experience and smart contract exploits,” said Movement Co-Founder, Rushi Manche. “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.”
In addition to the flagship Movement L2, Movement Labs will introduce Move Stack, an execution layer framework that is compatible with many of the rollup frameworks from companies like 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.
“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 in a statement.
The team had previously announced a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023. Users will be able to interact with its network this Summer.
