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Movement Labs raises $38 million for rollup based on Facebook’s Move Language

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Movement Labs, a blockchain company aiming to bring Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum, has secured $38 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital.

The company was founded by Vanderbilt college dropouts Rushi Manche, 21, and Cooper Scanlon, 24, who say they are on a mission to “make blockchain security sexy” with the launch of Movement L2, their new Ethereum layer-2 blockchain based on Shifting the programming paradigm.

Manche said he became interested in Move after reading an article a few years ago, when he was still in college, about Facebook’s efforts in the blockchain space.

“Safety has never been a priority for the industry,” Manche said in an interview. “It’s always ‘$100 million hack,’ ’20 million dollar attack’ — we’re so succumbed and numb to the problem of the attack when in reality it’s a big problem for retail.”

Move is today best known for its association with Aptos and Sui, layer 1 blockchains with a focus on low fees and high throughput. By extending the technology to a layer 2 of Ethereum – a blockchain that writes data to Ethereum but offers faster and cheaper transactions – the Movement team hopes to achieve greater security and transaction speed than layer 2 incumbents.

Movement’s funding round saw participation from venture capital firms including Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5 and Aptos Labs, the company behind Aptos.

“Between 2022 and 2023, hackers exploited more than $5.4 billion in smart contracts, targeting major protocols like Curve and KyberSwap through common reentry attacks,” Movement explained in a statement. “Movement’s EVM allows Move and Solidity developers to deploy fully verified code at runtime, preventing attack vectors such as reentry from occurring.”

“With the built-in firmware application runtime, we can stop 90% of attack vectors or more,” Manche told CoinDesk. Move also uses parallelization, a method of processing multiple streams of tasks at the same time used by Solana and Move-based chains to achieve higher transaction throughput. “This combination of speed and security makes the VM really powerful,” Manche said.

Move is the flagship product of Meta’s ill-fated foray into blockchain technology. Back then it was still called Facebook, the company created a great success in 2019 with the announcement of the launch of a cryptocurrency called “Libra” (later renamed “Diem”). Diem’s ​​blockchain was supposed to use Move, a new open source programming language based on Rust which Meta designed to make the entire process of coding a blockchain more secure and efficient.

“In August 2022, I was in college with my co-founder at Vanderbilt and I read this article, ‘Facebook is building a new programming language,’” Manche recalled. “I would use Cosmos and the [Ethereum Virtual Machine]but there weren’t many users and there wasn’t much volume.”

“For me it was like, okay, Facebook, the biggest consumer app, they’re all trying to get on chain. They’re doing this new initiative, new language, new VM. So I started digging,” Manche said.

Although Meta’s virtual currency plans were eventually demolished Under regulatory pressure, some company employees jumped ship to found the Move-based blockchain companies Aptos and Sui.

Before discovering Move, Manche says he experimented with cryptocurrencies in college, primarily in the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem. Cooper was the first of the pair to use Move, creating a yield aggregator for Aptos.

Barely old enough to drink, Manche says he and his co-founder’s ages were initially a big question for investors as the pair were navigating the fundraising circuit. “When we started, we asked ourselves, ‘Who are these guys? What are they doing? How can we trust them?'” Manche said.

“I think over time, especially Cooper and I, we’ve built a lot of trust because we’re category leaders. We’ve shown a lot of traction in terms of development, traction in terms of the community ecosystem,” Manche said. “The age issue has always been a sticking point, but I think everyone is pretty optimistic now.”

Aptos and Sui were the first to put Move to the test in the real world, and Movement Labs is the first to bring Meta’s Move technology to a layer-2 network on Ethereum. The network will support programs developed using Move or Solidity, Ethereum’s native programming language.

In addition to the Movement L2, the company is introducing the Move Stack, a blockchain execution environment that can be used to build other chains and is designed to be compatible with popular blockchain building frameworks such as OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit. It is also building a shared sequencermeaning that the method used to communicate between the L1 and L2 chains will have elements of decentralization.

The L2 Movement will be “one of the first L2 flagships that will prioritize decentralization and decentralized sequencers” right from the start, Manche said.

L2 Movement will enter its testnet phase this summer.

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