Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain development team, has received a $38 million boost in Series A funding for its vision of building a network of blockchains using Facebook’s Move programming language. The funding was led by Polychain Capital and supported by Aptos Labs, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and other venture capital firms.
The goal of Movement Labs is to enhance smart contract security and transaction throughput within the Ethereum ecosystem by using Move-based Ethereum virtual machines (EVMs). According to Rushi Manche, the co-founder of Movement Labs, common vulnerabilities in smart contracts include reentrancy attacks, arithmetic errors, and faulty input verification.
Move-EVM, developed by Movement Labs, can help protocols defend against reentrancy attacks, which have previously affected major protocols like Curve and KyberSwap. Smart contract exploits alone have resulted in losses of over $5.4 billion between 2022 and 2023. In November 2023, Movement Labs launched M2, a Move VM-based layer-2 for Ethereum, which provides an execution environment capable of handling over 30,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs, aims to create an ecosystem where developers can build “the next Facebook” on-chain using Move-EVMs. The company also plans to introduce Move Stack, a cross-compatible execution layer framework that allows interaction with rollup frameworks from companies like Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum.
MoveVM also supports localized fee markets to mitigate gas spikes and reduce resource expenditure, with the aim of delivering the speed and affordability needed for mass adoption of Web3 applications.
The funding will be used for global hiring efforts and investment in Move developer tooling and education. Prior to the Series A funding, Movement Labs raised $3.4 million in a pre-seed round for the upcoming launch of its public testnet, Parthenon.
Degen Chain, a new Ethereum layer-3 network, recently achieved the highest TPS count in the Ethereum ecosystem. On April 19, Degen’s TPS count reached 35.7, surpassing the blockchain it was built on, Base, which had a TPS count of 29.7, according to L2BEAT. This means that Degen processed 3.08 million transactions in a day.
Overall, Movement Labs is making significant strides in improving blockchain technology and advancing the capabilities of smart contracts within the Ethereum ecosystem.