Movement Labs Completes $38 Million Series A Funding, Led by Polychain Capital

On April 25, San Francisco-based blockchain development team Movement Labs received $38 million in a Series A round led by Polychain Capital. The funds will support the company's mission to bring Facebook's Move virtual machine to Ethereum, solve smart contract vulnerabilities and increase transaction throughput.

This round of investment attracted participation from well-known venture capital firms including Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao5 and Aptos Labs, demonstrating the industry's strong confidence in this vision.

Founded in 2022, Movement Labs aims to solve prevalent smart contract vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem while introducing a novel execution environment designed for more than 30,000 transactions per second (TPS). By leveraging a fully EVM-compatible bytecode interpreter and Ethereum for settlement, the Move Zk Layer 2 blockchain (Movement zero-knowledge Layer 2) hopes to bring parallelization and smart contract security to users who want to stay in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Between 2022 and 2023, hackers exploited smart contract vulnerabilities to steal more than $5.4 billion worth of crypto assets, affecting major protocols such as Curve and KyberSwap through common reentrancy attacks. Movement's Move-EVM allows Move and Solidity developers to deploy code that is fully verified at runtime, preventing attack vectors such as execution reentrancy. The team calls it the "Integrated Approach," where multiple modular elements such as shared ordering, embedded formal verification provers, alternative data availability, and Ethereum settlement can be combined to power a blockchain, enhancing security and performance.

Rush Manche, co-founder of Movement, said: "The two biggest problems in blockchain infrastructure right now are poor user experience and smart contract vulnerabilities. So my other co-founder Cooper Scanlon started building Movement to increase the speed of innovation in the crypto space, so that developers without large development team resources and expensive auditors can build the next Facebook on the chain. Move solves the shortcomings of Solidity, and we are bringing it to market in a crypto-native way."

In addition to its flagship product, Movement L2, Movement Labs will launch Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with many Rollup frameworks from companies such as Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum. The team’s vision is to work with other Ethereum participants to scale the execution of smart contracts for users on all networks and unify them with a shared sorter.

Polychain partner Bobby Beniers said: “While the core focus of most other Rollup teams is scalability, Movement’s key insight is that scalability alone is not the reason why we haven’t seen mass adoption yet. MoveVM provides developers with an intuitive, error-proof, and highly scalable experience. By combining these advantages with the network effects and base-layer security guarantees of the Ethereum ecosystem, we believe Movement can build a thriving ecosystem that will become home to a new generation of mainstream applications.”

The team completed a $3.4 million Pre-Seed round of financing in September 2023 and will provide users with the opportunity to use the Movement Network this summer.

About Movement Labs

Co-founders Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon, early builders of the Move ecosystem, founded Movement Labs in 2022 as the first integrated blockchain network to power the fastest and most secure Layer 2 on Ethereum. Movement aims to combine smart contract security and parallelization with EVM liquidity and user base, bringing MoveVM to Ethereum via its flagship L2, connecting Rollups with the Move Stack.

For more information on Movement Labs and a guide to participating in the devnet, visit: movementlabs.xyz, follow the official X account @movementlabsxyz, and Discord.

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