Movement Labs Raises $38 Million in Series A Funding to Bring Facebook’s Move Language to Ethereum

Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain development team, has secured $38 million in Series A funding led by Polychain Capital. The funding will support the company’s efforts to bring Facebook’s Move language virtual machine to Ethereum, addressing security and scaling issues within the blockchain network.

Venture capital firms such as Hack VC, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, and OKX Ventures, among others, participated in the investment round. Additionally, early adopter Aptos Labs showed support for the Move programming language.

Founded in 2022, Movement Labs aims to address vulnerabilities in smart contracts on the Ethereum network, the second-largest blockchain network after Bitcoin. The company plans to introduce an execution environment capable of supporting up to 30,000 transaction executions per second, significantly scaling Ethereum’s current capacity of 20 to 30 transactions per second.

Move, a programming language developed by Facebook for the now-defunct Diem blockchain project, is based on Rust and designed to enhance the security of smart contracts. Smart contracts have been vulnerable to exploitation, leading to significant token and crypto thefts in recent years. By integrating Move with fully verified code runtime, Movement Labs aims to provide developers with greater security assurance.

Co-founder Rushi Manche highlighted the importance of addressing user experience and smart contract exploits in blockchain infrastructure. The company’s focus on innovation aims to empower developers to build decentralized applications securely.

Movement Labs is working on a layer 2 blockchain for Ethereum that will interpret the Move language and parallelize transactions using a rollup framework. This approach aims to enhance transaction speed and throughput before submitting them to the Ethereum blockchain. The company’s Move Stack execution environment is compatible with rollup frameworks from companies like Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum.

Polychain Capital’s Bobby Beniers emphasized the intuitive and bug-resistant developer experience offered by the Move virtual machine. By combining these benefits with Ethereum’s network effects and security guarantees, Movement Labs aims to create a thriving ecosystem for mainstream applications.

The support from investors and industry experts underscores the potential impact of Movement Labs’ efforts to enhance security and scalability in blockchain technology. With the backing of key stakeholders, the company is poised to drive innovation and adoption in the crypto space.