Written by: TechFlow

Are you tired of today's L1/L2 narrative?

According to L2BEAT data, as of July 10, there are 61 Ethereum L2s in the entire crypto market, and 79 L2s are waiting to be launched.

However, most L2 technical solutions tend to be similar and lack innovation. Under the traditional EVM model, hacker attacks occur frequently, and each new chain has gradually become a paradise for hackers.

Is there a L2 that combines speed and security?

Movement stepped forward and is committed to introducing the Move language into the EVM ecosystem, thereby solving the security issues that have plagued the EVM ecosystem for a long time.

In April 2024, Movement Labs announced the completion of a $38 million Series A financing round, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Hack VC, Placeholder, OKX Ventures, dao5 and Aptos Labs. In May, Binance Labs said it had made a strategic investment in Movement.

Among the many Ethereum L2s, what is the difference between Movement and others?

Introducing Move into the EVM ecosystem

Movement represents a movement to introduce the Move language into the EVM ecosystem.

Why Move?

A security practitioner in the Move ecosystem once told me that the technical potential of MOVE is greatly underestimated, especially in the field of security.

As a new smart contract language developed and designed by Facebook (now META), Move has been designed specifically for encrypted assets since its inception.

Compared with programming languages ​​such as Solidity commonly used in the Ethereum ecosystem, Move highlights the two points of "security" and "high performance" in its logical design.

Without the need for L2, MOVE reduces the storage space and computing costs of blockchain transactions through an optimization technology called "module packaging". Module packaging reduces storage and indexing costs by packaging multiple smart contracts into one module, and increases execution speed by reducing the steps of bytecode execution. This also allows the TPS of the Move public chain to often exceed tens of thousands, and can even continue to expand to the 100,000 level.

Security issues are currently a problem plaguing the entire Ethereum ecosystem. In 2023, the losses caused by on-chain hacker attacks amounted to more than 7 billion US dollars, which is largely due to the mechanism loopholes in Solidity itself.

For example, in the dynamic calling process of languages ​​such as Solidity, malicious users can create malicious contracts and call the project party's functions to complete the attack. In comparison, the Move language uses static calling, which means that when program A calls program B, the calling object is determined before running, and the calling object is not changed during the operation process, which solves the problems of dynamic calling and enhances the stability of network operation.

The Move language is designed with a greater emphasis on security, aiming to avoid scenarios that have harmed many Web3.0 users, including but not limited to re-entrancy vulnerabilities, poison tokens, and spoofed token approvals.

This is also the original intention when Movement Labs was founded in 2022: to solve the widespread smart contract vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem, while introducing a novel execution environment designed for more than 30,000 transactions per second (TPS).

However, in the real crypto market, technological advantages alone cannot change the situation.

The vast majority of high-performance public chains with the claim of being “Ethereum killers” have gradually been submerged in the sand of history. An L1 must not only have security and performance, but more importantly, it must build an ecosystem - users, developers, applications, assets, liquidity... Otherwise, it will only become a ghost town with gorgeous decorations.

This is the advantage and barrier of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Is there a way to link the security and performance of the MOVE language itself with the huge user base and liquidity of the Ethereum ecosystem?

This is Movement, which created the MOVE language for the EVM ecosystem and is committed to connecting the security and high-performance advantages of the Move language with the liquidity and huge user base of the EVM system to achieve a combination of advantages.

For example, with the Movement SDK, developers do not need to write Move code. They can automatically convert Solidity scripts into opcodes that Move can understand, start on M2, and obtain interoperability compatible with Ethereum and other EVM networks.

Movement has built a bridge connecting MOVE and EVM, and built a city in the middle of the bridge, where EVM users and funds gather to build a more secure and efficient blockchain city-state.

Two flagship products: M1+M2

According to official documents, Movement Labs has currently developed two public chain architectures, M1 and M2.

M1 is a community-first blockchain network that provides high TPS, instant finality, and modular customization through Move.

According to the previous announcement, M1 is designed with modularity as the focus. It will gradually evolve from the original Move-EVM blockchain into a decentralized sorter, providing technical support for M2 and other Rollups built using Move Stack.

In addition, in M1's economic model, all transaction fees are distributed to the token staking validator network, creating a flywheel effect that incentivizes more validators to join the network to obtain better returns.

Overall, M1 currently plays the role of "shared sorter" and "consensus layer" components in the entire Movement ecosystem and any other blockchain network.

M2 is the main network in the current Movement ecosystem. It is an Ethereum L2 based on M1 and ZK-Rollup. It combines the performance and security advantages of the Move language and integrates EVM so that DApps compatible with Ethereum can run on M2.

At the consensus layer, M2 adopts the shared-order Snowman consensus, which is M1; in terms of data availability, M2 integrates Celestia; and the execution layer uses MoveVM.

A complete on-chain path is that transactions on M2 will be packaged and sent back to Ethereum through the M1 sorter network, and the finality of the validity proof will be carried out through the zk-provers network of the Prover Marketplace. The results of the ZK proof will be placed on the Ethereum mainnet, and the detailed transaction data will be published to Celestia, thereby achieving data status synchronization between the two. With the help of Blobstream technology, Celestia's modular data availability layer can also be transmitted to Ethereum.

In addition, one of the key features of M2 is its EVM parallelization function. By converting EVM bytecode into Move bytecode and then executing it in parallel, EVM transactions can achieve high throughput and low latency.

In summary, M1 is responsible for the consensus layer and transaction ordering, M2 is responsible for Solidity-Move conversion and transaction execution, and Celestia/Ethereum is responsible for the final data availability and state security.

Movement SDK: MOVE-EVM Bridge

The hero behind M2, the core development tool that truly introduced Move to EVM, is Movement SDK.

This is a modular framework that combines the security and resource management features of MoveVM with the flexibility and adaptability of Solidity, enabling developers to build and deploy Move-based infrastructure and applications in any distributed environment.

Movement SDK mainly consists of three core components: MoveVM, Fractal, and custom adapters for sorter networks and DA services.

MoveVM is the core execution engine of Movement SDK, providing a resource-oriented and strictly controlled environment to run smart contracts.

A little-known fact is that although both are written in the MOVE language, Sui Move and Aptos Move are two independent blockchain systems, each with its own virtual machine (VM) and toolkit, with huge differences. With the release of new features, these differences are still expanding, almost like different programming languages.

No project has attempted to bridge this gap, and Movement's modular MoveVM is a multi-purpose virtual machine designed to be fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and the rest of the Move ecosystem. It now supports the deployment of Aptos and EVM code, and will soon support the Sui ecosystem as well.

This means that in the future, developers will not need to learn new programming languages, and can quickly deploy decentralized applications (DApps) from EVM ecosystems such as Aptos, SUI, and Ethereum to new platforms, easily achieving multi-chain deployment of applications.

Fractal is a compiler that allows developers to seamlessly deploy existing Solidity smart contracts to MoveVM. This bridging function not only provides Solidity developers with a safer and more efficient execution environment, but also retains the original logic and functionality of the Solidity contract.

The final core component of the Movement SDK is the custom adapter, which is designed to provide seamless integration with the sorter network and data availability (DA) service, ensuring secure connections with various blockchain networks and services.

Team and Financing

The two founders of Movement Labs are Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon. Rushi is 21 years old and Cooper is 24 years old. Both of them studied at Vanderbilt University.

Rushi started programming at the age of 14, initially working in database and system security engineering. He founded an AI-driven test tutoring platform, ensemble, which provides free test preparation materials for high school students.

Later, he turned his attention to the field of cryptocurrency and became a Solidity development engineer. After entering college, he started freelancing. He also worked closely with some Cosmos protocols and developed a decentralized file storage system within Cosmos.

In 2022, Rushi joined Aptos as a software engineer and personally participated in the development of Move language smart contracts. He made outstanding contributions to the core DEX in the ecosystem. It was this experience that made him realize the huge potential of the MOVE language.

Cooper Scanlon is another co-founder of Movement Labs. Prior to founding Movement Labs, he built and audited the first yield aggregator using the Move language.

In November 2022, two Vanderbilt University alumni, Rushi and Cooper, decided to drop out of school and co-founded Movement Labs.

In September 2023, Movement Labs announced the completion of a $3.4 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Varys Capital, dao5, Blizzard The Avalanche Fund, Borderless Capital and its cross-chain fund focused on the Wormhole ecosystem, with participation from Colony, Interop Ventures, Elixir Capital, BENQI, as well as George Lampeth of dao5, Calvin Liu of Eigenlayer, Smokey The Bera of Berachain, Anurag Arjun of Avail, CoinFlipCanada of GMX and the co-founder of Ankr.

From this list of investors, it is not difficult to see that there are a large number of funds and projects in the Avalanche ecosystem. In the early stages of the development of Movement Labs, it received support from Avalanche, and its first flagship product M1 was built based on the Avalanche Subnet technology stack.

In April 2024, Movement Labs completed a $38 million Series A financing round led by Polychain Capital. Other participating investors included Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, dao 5 and Aptos Labs.

In May 2024, Binance Labs announced an investment in Movement Labs, the amount of which has not been disclosed.

Summarize

In general, in the boring Ethereum L2 track, Movement Labs has gained more attention from the market with its unique innovation and a strong lineup of investment institutions, but as an emerging L2 project, Movement Labs' ecosystem needs further improvement, which involves the completeness of development tools, the thoroughness of documentation, and the developer support system.

A great city-state not only needs strong walls and convenient and fast road traffic, but also needs a sound system and a soil suitable for everyone's equal development, so as to attract more people and capital to flow in and jointly create a glorious crypto-commercial city.