Movement Labs, an integrated blockchain network, has successfully raised $38 million in Series A funding led by Polychain Capital.
The funds will support the integration of Facebook's Move Virtual Machine into Ethereum, focusing on improving smart contract security and boosting transaction speeds.
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This investment round drew participation from several other high-profile venture capital firms, including Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, and OKX.
Founded in 2022 by Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon, Movement Labs aims to address vulnerabilities in Ethereum's smart contracts and create a high-capacity execution environment capable of processing over 30,000 transactions per second.
The need for such innovations has been underscored by the $5.4 billion lost to smart contract exploits in 2022 and 2023, affecting major protocols like Curve and KyberSwap. Movement's Move-EVM platform is designed to allow developers to deploy code that is fully verified at runtime, reducing the risk of such attacks.
Manche identified the problem:
The two biggest issues in blockchain infrastructure at the moment are poor user experience and smart contract exploits.
He highlighted that the company's mission is to accelerate innovation within crypto, enabling the development of large-scale applications like Facebook on the blockchain.
Moreover, Movement Labs is working on Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with various rollup frameworks from companies such as Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum. This initiative aims to enhance collaboration among Ethereum developers and standardize smart contract execution across networks through a shared sequencer.
Bobby Beniers from Polychain Capital highlighted the unique aspects of Movement Labs' approach:
The MoveVM offers a developer experience that is intuitive and bug-resistant as well as highly scalable. By marrying these benefits with the network effects and base-layer security guarantees of the Ethereum ecosystem, we believe Movement can build a flourishing ecosystem that is home to a new generation of mainstream applications.
The company plans to open its network to users this Summer, marking a step toward setting new blockchain efficiency and security standards with its innovative technology.
This funding round comes during a period of increased venture capital interest in Web3 companies. On-chain analysis data from the first quarter of 2024 indicates a 55% surge in total Web3 investment volume.
