Quick take:
- Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and Aptos Labs also joined the round.
- The fundraising is part of Movement Lab’s vision to address smart contract vulnerabilities within the Ethereum ecosystem.
- The company is introducing a novel execution environment capable of handling more than 30,000 transactions per second.
Movement Labs has completed a $38 million Series A round to bring the Move Virtual Machine (MoveVM) to the Ethereum ecosystem, the company said in a press release on Thursday.
Web3 venture firm Polychain Capital led the round with participation from Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5, and Aptos Labs.
Movement Labs is building an integrated blockchain network capable of handling more than 30,000 transactions per second. The company is bringing the MoveVM to Ethereum through its flagship L2 and connected rollups with the Move Stack.
This fundraising follows Movement Labs’ $3.4 million pre-seed round announced in September 2023 and ahead of the network release this summer.
Movement Labs is leveraging a fully EVM-compatible bytecode interpreter and Ethereum for settlement to build the Movement Zero-Knowledge Layer 2 blockchain, which it says brings parallelization and smart contract security to users who wish to remain within the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to the announcement, the Movement Labs team is using what it calls an “Integrated Approach”, which deploys code that is fully verified at runtime, preventing attack vectors like reentrancy from executing, thus addressing smart contract vulnerabilities and enhancing transaction throughput.
Explaining his company’s goals in the announcement, Movement Co-Founder, Rushi Manche said in a statement: “The two biggest issues in blockchain infrastructure at the moment are poor user experience and smart contract exploits.” The company points to the more than $5.4 billion lost through smart contract exploits between 2022 and 2023.
According to Manche, he and fellow co-founder Cooper Scanlon “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,” Manche added.
Movement Labs is also introducing Move Stack, a multi-chain execution layer framework compatible with Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum. Move Stack is part of the company’s long-term plan of scaling smart contract execution for users on all networks and unifying them with a shared sequencer implementation.
Commenting on his company’s leading role in the fundraising, Polychain Capital’s Bobby Beniers said in a statement: “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.”
According to Beniers, by marrying MoveVM’s benefits with the base-layer security guarantees of the Ethereum ecosystem, Movement Labs “can build a flourishing ecosystem that is home to a new generation of mainstream applications.”
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