The blockchain race is about to get even more crowded. Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based software development team building the layer-2 Ethereum blockchain, has closed a $38 million funding round. luck I have been studying exclusively.
Cryptocurrency VC giant Polychain Capital, led by Coinbase alum Olaf Karlsson Wie, led the Series A, along with other digital asset-focused investors including Hack VC, dao5, and Robot Ventures. Participated.
Movement's funding will help build new blockchains, including Monad Labs, which raised $225 million to build Layer 1, and Berachain, another Layer 1 developer that recently announced a $100 million Series B. It followed larger rounds by other companies.
While the flurry of funding reflects a return to cryptocurrency-focused venture investing, the concentration of funding into blockchain also represents an increasingly competitive environment for companies looking to build the next Bitcoin or Ethereum. It shows.
In an interview with luckMovement co-founders Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon are building the first layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum to utilize Move, a programming language originally built by Facebook for its ill-fated stablecoin project Diem. He said he wants to differentiate Movement by building on top of that.
“We are bringing Move to the front door of Ethereum, and what we are delivering is this ecosystem,” Scanlon said. “For the first time, many people who previously did not want to leave Ethereum will be able to benefit from the security performance of next-generation virtual machines.”
According to Scanlon and Manche, Movement Labs aims to announce a devnet soon and launch the mainnet in late summer or early fall. The company also plans to launch its own token, tentatively named “Move.”
Ethereum movement
To outside observers, the proliferation of new blockchains may seem like overkill. This is a view often shared by industry participants. The first Bitcoin gave rise to the concept of cryptocurrencies in 2009, and the next big breakthrough was the launch of Ethereum in 2015, making it possible to build smart contracts and decentralized applications ranging from exchanges to money-lending protocols. Feature introduced.
Since then, developers have struggled with the speed and cost of blockchain, with the emergence of a series of Layer 2s built on Ethereum and new Layer 1s such as Solana, which promise faster and cheaper transactions. Problems remain, as evidenced by recent congestion issues plaguing Solana amidst the memecoin craze.
Two recently launched blockchains, Aptos and Sui, came with new value propositions. Both boasted a team of Facebook developers who helped build a cryptography-focused programming language called Move. They also created the Move Virtual Machine, a type of blockchain-based computer program that is the next generation update to the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
As Manche and Scanlon explained, while Move and its new virtual machines have better security and features than EVM, most developers still prefer Ethereum, which has much stronger community support. It was built for. Even if Sui and Aptos can boast better performance, that doesn't necessarily mean they will be able to build a thriving new ecosystem.
“Aptos and Sui raised a lot of money,” Munsch said. luck. “But they couldn’t execute on the community aspect.”
In contrast, Movement is building Layer 2 on top of Ethereum while using the Move programming language and MVM. We're also building a tool called Move Stack. This allows Move Virtual Machine to be adopted by other blockchain networks besides Ethereum. Scanlon said he has been contacted by “quite a few” different blockchains, including Avalanche and Binance Smart Chain.
Their argument is that developers will want to build with Move, which is more intuitive than other languages such as Solidity, but is still part of the Ethereum community. “Everyone is trying to bring Facebook on-chain,” Munsch said. “We are bringing the language that Facebook built to Ethereum.”
