Investing in Movement Labs
We’re pleased to announce today our investment into the Series A financing round for Movement Labs. Movement Labs is creating a network of modular chains based on the Move programming language. The goal is to increase the security, performance, and user experience in web3.
Background – the Move language
To understand Movement, let’s first discuss the Move programming language. Move is a radical improvement for building web3 dApps compared to the status quo. The language is strongly typed (leading to fewer errors). It’s also formally verifiable, reducing the potential for smart contract hacks and making it easier for developers to find bugs and fix them.
Sui and Aptos pioneered the usage of Move in web3. They are attempts to disrupt Ethereum, as well as certain 2018-era chains, such as Avalanche, Hashgraph, Polkadot, and more. The Sui and Aptos teams have built slightly different versions of virtual machines built in Move.
Movement’s vision
Movement is building a technology layer that brings the Move language to other chains. Their product today is a Move-based L2 on Ethereum, allowing dApps in the Ethereum ecosystem to leverage the Move language, using Celestia for data availability.
This has a few interesting value propositions:
- New Move-based dApps can be built from scratch on an Ethereum L2 using Move, rather than Solidity. This is an improvement in comparison to EVM-native dApps, because Solidity isn’t type-safe or formally verifiable and is prone to bugs and attacks. Move shores up those issues by providing a safer environment for Ethereum ecosystem smart contracts.
- Those same Move dApps above can be easily ported to Aptos or Sui, giving those dApps access to users on multiple chains, and giving Aptos and Sui access to additional dApps.
- Existing dApps that live today on Sui or Aptos can cross-deploy to Ethereum. This is huge since it gives those dApps access to higher liquidity/TVL that exists on Ethereum, while still existing on their original chains.
- This generally grows the usage of Move across the board, which is important since developer adoption of Move is still in its infancy and helps all Move-based chains.
Movement also supports Solidity as well, for backwards compatibility, so that legacy codebases can be embraced.
Where Movement is headed in the future
Movement ultimately aims to go much larger with their vision. The goal is to have an execution environment that supports Move on any chain, with any rollup framework, and any DA layer. These integrations would share a unified settlement layer. Through this vision, chains such as Avalanche, Polkadot, Hashgraph, and more would have access to the superior Move language. Through this, developers of Move-based dApps would have access to an even larger userbase and TVL.
Summary
At Hack VC, we believe that security is critical for web3 to thrive. Billions of dollars have been lost in recent years due to smart contract hacks. We believe web3 needs to do better to hit the mainstream. Movement has a comprehensive vision that reduces (and potentially eliminates) smart contract hacks. It starts with the Move language, but it goes beyond that as well—Movement plans to incorporate other security innovations into their offering to make their offering even more robust. Combined with the performance and user experience gains noted above, we think Movement has a complete vision for transforming web3, and we’re grateful to be partnering on their journey.
--
The information herein is for general information purposes only and does not, and is not intended to, constitute investment advice and should not be used in the evaluation of any investment decision. Such information should not be relied upon for accounting, legal, tax, business, investment, or other relevant advice. You should consult your own advisers, including your own counsel, for accounting, legal, tax, business, investment, or other relevant advice, including with respect to anything discussed herein.
This post reflects the current opinions of the author(s) and is not made on behalf of Hack VC or its affiliates, including any funds managed by Hack VC, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hack VC, its affiliates, including its general partner affiliates, or any other individuals associated with Hack VC. Certain information contained herein has been obtained from published sources and/or prepared by third parties and in certain cases has not been updated through the date hereof. While such sources are believed to be reliable, neither Hack VC, its affiliates, including its general partner affiliates, or any other individuals associated with Hack VC are making representations as to their accuracy or completeness, and they should not be relied on as such or be the basis for an accounting, legal, tax, business, investment, or other decision. The information herein does not purport to be complete and is subject to change and Hack VC does not have any obligation to update such information or make any notification if such information becomes inaccurate.
Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Any forward-looking statements made herein are based on certain assumptions and analyses made by the author(s) in light of his experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions, and expected future developments, as well as other factors they believe are appropriate under the circumstances. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict.