Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain development team, has raised $38 million in a Series A financing round led by Polychain Capital. The funding will be utilised in the company’s aim to bring Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum. The investment round observed 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.
Movement Labs plans to address contract issues in Ethereum and create a new system for faster transactions. They’ll use a setup to handle over 30,000 transactions per second. Their blockchain, Movement, will work with Ethereum offering security and faster processing for smart contracts.
Movement’s Move-EVM allows Move and Solidity developers to deploy code that is verified at runtime, preventing attack vectors like re-entrancy from executing. The team calls this the “Integrated Approach”, where multiple modular elements such as shared sequencing, embedded formal verification provers, alternative data availability, and Ethereum settlement can combine to power one blockchain, enhancing security and performance.
“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,” said Rushi Manche, Movement co-founder.
Movement Labs will introduce Move Stack, an execution layer framework that is compatible with companies like Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum as stated by the company. The team had previously announced a $3.4 million pre-seed round and will be launching its public testnet, Parthenon, in the coming weeks.
(Inputs from BL intern Meghna Barik)