Movement

Organization Name – Movement

Category – Services

About

powered by irmaAI

Movement Labs, founded in 2022 by Vanderbilt dropouts Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon, describes itself as a San‑Francisco‑based “infrastructure studio” intent on making the Move p…rogramming language—originally created for Meta’s ill‑fated Diem project—the standard for safer smart contracts, and it pursues that goal through M2, a Layer‑2 that runs the Move Virtual Machine yet settles to Ethereum while outsourcing data availability to Celestia’s Blobstream and piggy‑backing on EigenLayer restaked security; they claim this architecture yields deterministic parallel execution, formal‑verification‑friendly bytecode and throughput “beyond 145,000 transactions per second,” a performance figure that remains unverified by independent testers, although marketing materials routinely compare it with Ethereum’s sub‑20 TPS ceiling. The company pitches M2 as merely the gateway to a wider Movement Network of modular, interoperable Move‑based rollups and sovereign chains that can mix‑and‑match settlement, DA and sequencing modules through what it calls the “Move Stack” toolkit, which bundles a CLI, SDK, Move Prover integrations and a turnkey audit pipeline; observers have noted that this vision resembles Cosmos or Polygon’s CDK but swaps Solidity for a resource‑oriented language that theoretically prevents double‑spends and re‑entrancy at compile time. Polychain Capital led a $38 million Series A in April 2024, and outlets such as Fortune later reported that the team is courting $100 million in Series B financing at a valuation near $3 billion, a leap that—if closed—would place the still‑pre‑mainnet venture in the same valuation band as long‑running rollup incumbents. Movement has since disclosed an undisclosed strategic cheque from Binance Labs, while data tracker Tracxn tallies total funding at roughly $41 million.

Technically, Move borrows ideas from Rust and linear‑type theory so that every token is treated as a first‑class “resource” that cannot be duplicated or lost; Movement touts this as an answer to the $5.4 billion in DeFi exploits recorded between 2022 and 2023 and argues that pairing Move’s compile‑time guarantees with Ethereum liquidity removes entire classes of attacks common to Solidity. To lure developers across that language divide, the firm runs a Move Collective accelerator, hackathons with up to $2 million in prizes, and a global road‑show that, they claim, has seeded an unverified community of “10,000‑plus” Move builders—figures echoed in APAC‑focused press releases but not corroborated by GitHub statistics.  A developer‑only mainnet went live in January 2025, giving teams a sandbox ahead of a promised public beta, and documentation says future chains spun up with the Move Stack will support Celestia, EigenLayer, AltLayer or other modules “out of the box,” though the multichain bridge that must connect them remains under audit.

Economically, the ecosystem revolves around the MOVE token, first airdropped in December 2024 and used for gas, delegated sequencer staking and governance; Binance listed the asset at launch, but on May 1 2025 Coinbase announced it will suspend MOVE trading on May 15, triggering a 14 % slide. That news landed alongside Movement’s own revelation that co‑founder Manche had been suspended pending an external probe into allegations that a market maker tied to Web3Port secretly amassed and dumped over 5 % of supply, a scandal the team insists did not touch treasury funds yet one that critics say underscores governance gaps in a firm selling itself on risk reduction. Road‑maps circulated on Discord still target an M2 mainnet in Q3 2025 followed by a MoveVM upgrade that grafts zero‑knowledge proofs onto parallel execution for faster bridge finality and a third wave of ecosystem grants worth up to $20 million in early 2026, but prior milestones have slipped and crucial components such as the Celestia integration and canonical bridge have only just entered testing; until those pieces harden—and until the company substantiates its unverified claims of developer traction, throughput and security—Movement Labs remains a heavily funded, technically ambitious project whose ultimate impact hinges on timely delivery, transparent governance and demonstrable real‑world performance. Read More