Monolithic Blockchain firm Movement Labs secured $38 million in Series A funding from Polychain Capital on April 25. The investment will support Movement Labs’ mission to introduce Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine to the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to co-founder Rushi Manche, the $38 million capital raise underscores the immense potential investors see in Movement Labs’ ability to improve the Ethereum ecosystem.
Movement Labs aims to tackle two critical challenges facing blockchain infrastructure: smart contract vulnerabilities and transaction processing limitations.
Addressing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities and Scalability Issues
What is Movement? pic.twitter.com/XdUNh5FtAI
— Movement (@movementlabsxyz) April 25, 2024
The funding round saw participation from prominent venture capital firms like Hack VC, OKX Ventures, Placeholder, Robot Ventures, and Nomad Capital.
gmove world.
Today we are thrilled to announce our $38M Series A led by @polychain pic.twitter.com/ZNe5XiMxAn
— Movement (@movementlabsxyz) April 25, 2024
Integrating Facebook’s Move programming language to Ethereum will enable the team to enhance smart contract security and enable over 30,000 transactions per second(TPS) through its new zero-knowledge Layer 2 blockchain solution.
The Move-EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatibility layer introduced by Movement is designed to prevent common attack vectors, such as reentrancy exploits, which enable malicious parties to drain funds from smart contracts.
Movement’s approach would empower developers to deploy these verified codes fully at runtime to help mitigate vulnerabilities.
The Ethereum Layer-2 firm also plans to expand its personnel by hiring top talent across engineering, research, product development, and other key functions.
Additionally, the company will double down on its zero-knowledge-proof engineering capabilities to push the boundaries of scalability and privacy within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Movement Labs’ Roadmap and Integrated Approach
This Series A funding will accelerate Movement Labs’ work in addressing the pressing issues of smart contract vulnerabilities and user experience limitations within the blockchain ecosystem.
Notably, hackers exploited smart contracts between 2022 and 2023. This resulted in huge losses, targeting major protocols like Curve and KyberSwap through common reentrancy attacks.
Movement’s Move-EVM solution empowers both Move and Solidity developers to deploy code that undergoes verification at runtime to mitigate these common exploits effectively.
“The two biggest issues in blockchain infrastructure are the poor user experience and smart contract exploits,” Rushi Manche acknowledged. “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 Labs had secured $3.4 million in a pre-seed funding round in September 2022.
The company is gearing up for a public testnet launch, Parthenon, in the coming weeks. It plans to roll out mainnet by the end of 2024.
Users can expect to interact with the Movement network this summer, marking a projected milestone in the company’s roadmap.