Ethereum
Movement Labs raises $38 million to build a layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum with Facebook technology
The blockchain race is about to get even more crowded: Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based software development team building a layer 2 Ethereum blockchain, closed a $38 million funding round, learned Fortune exclusively.
Polychain Capitalthe crypto VC mega-firm led by Coinbase Alumnus Olaf Carlson-Wee led the Series A, with participation from other digital asset-focused investors including Hack VC, dao5 and Robot Ventures.
Movement’s raise follows larger funding rounds for other companies building new blockchains, including Monad Laboratorieswhich raised $225 million to build layer 1, and Bérachainanother layer 1 developer that recently announced a $100 million Series B round.
While the wave of fundraising reflects a return to crypto-focused venture capital investments, the concentration of capital around blockchains also indicates an increasingly competitive landscape for companies hoping to build the next one. Bitcoin Or Ethereum.
In an interview with Fortune, Movement co-founders Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon said they hope to differentiate Movement by building the first layer 2 blockchain on top of Ethereum that uses Move, a programming language originally built by Facebook for Diem, it is unfortunate stable currency project.
“We’re delivering Move to the front door of Ethereum, and that’s the ecosystem we serve,” Scanlon said. “Many people who never wanted to leave Ethereum will, for the first time, be able to benefit from the security performance of a next-generation virtual machine.”
According to Scanlon and Manche, Movement Labs will announce its devnet soon and aims to launch its mainnet in late summer or early fall. The company also plans to launch its own token, tentatively named Move.
The Ethereum movement
To outside observers, the proliferation of new blockchains may seem exaggerated – a view often shared by industry players. The first, Bitcoin, created the concept of cryptocurrency in 2009; the next major breakthrough came in 2015 with the launch of Ethereum, which introduced smart contracts and the ability to create decentralized applications ranging from exchanges to money lending protocols.
Since then, developers have been frustrated by the speed and cost of blockchains, with a series of layer 2s built on top of Ethereum, as well as new layer 1s such as Solana, promising faster and cheaper transactions. As evidenced by recent congestion issues tormenting Solana, amid her memecoin mania, problems remain.
Two recently launched blockchains, Aptos and Sui, presented a new value proposition: each had teams of Facebook developers who helped create the crypto-focused programming language called Move. They also created Move Virtual Machine, a kind of computer program underlying a blockchain that would represent a next-generation update of the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
As Manche and Scanlon explain, even though Move and its new virtual machine would offer greater security and capabilities than EVM, most developers were still building for Ethereum, which had much stronger community support. Even if Sui and Aptos could boast better performance, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to build a thriving new ecosystem.
“Aptos and Sui raised a lot of money,” Manche told Fortune. “But they failed to implement the community aspect.”
Movement, on the other hand, builds its Layer 2 on top of Ethereum, but using the Move programming language and MVM. It is also building a tool called Move Stack, which will allow the Move Virtual Machine to be adoptable by other blockchain networks outside of Ethereum. Scanlon said he has been contacted by “a number” of different blockchains, including Avalanche and Binance Smart Chain.
Their thesis is that developers will want to build using Move, which they say is more intuitive than other languages, such as Solidity, while still being part of the Ethereum community. “Everyone is trying to chain Facebook,” Manche said. “We are bringing the language created by Facebook to Ethereum.”