Polychain Capital leads $38 million round for Movement Labs to bring Facebook's Move to Ethereum

San Francisco-based blockchain development firm Movement Labs has raised $38 million in a Series A round led by Polychain Capital.

Venture capital firms Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5 and Aptos Labs also participated in the round for the Move programming language-based project.

Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche could not disclose a valuation or the structure of the round but told The Block that “the substantial capital raised speaks volumes about the immense potential our investors see in our ability to revolutionize the Ethereum ecosystem.”

According to a statement shared with The Block, the funding will support Movement Labs’ mission to bring Facebook's Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum. This project aims to address smart contract vulnerabilities and enhance transaction throughput via the Movement zero-knowledge Layer 2 blockchain.

“This Series A funding enables us to aggressively hire top talent in engineering, research, product, business development and other key functions to execute our roadmap. [It] allows us to significantly scale our 40+ person team,” Manche said.

More specifically, Manche told The Block, Movement Labs would be expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region and making significant investments in building out its formal verification and security research team. “We are also doubling down on our zero-knowledge proof engineering capabilities to push the boundaries of scalability and privacy,” Manche added.

Movement’s Layer 2 would expand the usage of the Move programming language beyond the well-known Aptos and Sui Layer 1 blockchains. Move was originally developed at Meta by a team composed of people from Facebook’s now-defunct Diem stablecoin project.

In terms of the timescale for its rollout, Movement is launching its public testnet, Parthenon, in the coming weeks and is aiming for a mainnet launch by the end of the year, Manche said.

How Movement's Layer 2 works

The project's team explained that Movement introduces a new, novel execution environment designed for over 30,000 transactions per second and leverages a fully EVM-compatible bytecode interpreter and Ethereum for settlement to bring parallelization and smart contract security to users who wish to remain within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Reentrancy attacks — enabling malicious parties to repeatedly drain funds from smart contracts by exploiting the code execution order — are one of the most common vulnerabilities in DeFi, according to web3 bug bounty platform Immunefi. Movement's Move-EVM aims to prevent attack vectors like reentrancy from executing, allowing developers to deploy code that is fully verified at runtime, the team added.

“The two biggest issues in blockchain infrastructure at the moment are poor user experience and smart contract exploits,” Manche said. “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 [the Ethereum programming language] Solidity and we are bringing it to market in a crypto-native way.”

Movement Labs is also developing the Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with rollups like Optimism, Polygon and Arbitrum. The Movement Labs team said that it intends to collaborate with projects across the Ethereum ecosystem “to scale smart contract execution for users on all networks and unify them with a shared sequencer implementation.”

Movement Labs previously announced in September it had raised $3.4 million in a pre-seed funding round, with investors including dao5, Varys Capital, Blizzard Fund and Borderless Capital. Angel investors, including Eigenlayer’s Calvin Liu, Berachain’s Smokey The Bera and Avail’s Anurag Arjun, also participated in the round.