Interviewed: Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon, co-founders of Movement Labs
Interview and compilation: Wendy, Luffy, Foresight News
In the past two years, the competition between new L1 public chains and Ethereum L2 has undoubtedly been the core arena of the entire crypto world. The L2 track has produced star representatives such as Optimism and Arbitrum; and the most eye-catching among the L1 public chains are Aptos and Sui, both of which use the Move language, which is different from Solidity.
The Move language originated from Meta (formerly known as Facebook)'s blockchain project Libra. After Libra was terminated due to regulatory reasons, Move was reborn. This new development language is making great strides in the crypto world, and its ecosystem is booming, with a number of high-quality potential stocks emerging. One of them is Move ment Labs, which is committed to promoting Move and making "Move ubiquitous."
In April this year, Movement received a $38 million Series A funding led by Polychain Capital, with the ambition to bring the Move language to the world of Ethereum EVM. This is a new story that is full of imagination, but you may not know that the two protagonists behind this story, Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon (the two co-founders of Movement), are only in their early 20s. Foresight News recently talked with these two young founders, who shared their entrepreneurial journey, financing, project vision and current plans.
1. As Vanderbilt University alumni, you two co-founded Movement Labs despite a 3-year age difference (Rushi Manche, 21, Cooper Scanlon, 24). How did you meet? And when did you decide to start Movement Labs together?
Rushi: As you mentioned, we met during college. When I met Cooper, I was a freelancer using Solidity as a programming language. We wanted to build applications with something more secure than Solidity, and then the Move language caught our attention. We knew we needed to build on Ethereum because it was where users and real liquidity gathered in the crypto world, and so Movement Labs was born.
2. Can you briefly describe the vision of Movement Labs? What is your current focus? How is your team structured? Please briefly introduce the current product line of Movement Labs.
Cooper: Movement Labs' vision is to create a more secure and unified Web3 ecosystem that breaks down liquidity silos and enables seamless interoperability between different blockchains. Our goal is to provide developers with an easily accessible, high-performance network that enables the entire blockchain space to operate as a cohesive, Internet-like service.
Our current focus is on developing our flagship products, the M1 and M2 networks, and a powerful set of tools to support them. We are about to launch the M2 mainnet, which will be the first Layer 2 solution based on the Move language on Ethereum. It will support multiple Move implementations, including Sui Move and Aptos Move, as well as our embedded EVM interpreter MEVM. This will enable developers from a variety of ecosystems (including Sui, Aptos, and EVM-based platforms) to take advantage of our L2 solutions.
One of the key features of M2 is its EVM parallelization capabilities. By leveraging the Move language and Sui's parallelization model, we can achieve high throughput and low latency for EVM transactions. This is achieved through object-centric storage and the ability to execute transactions in parallel.
Our approach to EVM parallelization involves converting EVM bytecode into Move bytecode, which is then executed in parallel. This conversion process preserves the semantics of the original EVM code while enabling it to take advantage of the parallelization provided by the Move language and Sui execution model.
To help grow and promote adoption of our network, we are also developing the Movement SDK, Movement CLI, Fractal, and Hyperlane messaging infrastructure. These tools will provide developers with the resources they need to easily build and deploy applications on our platform.
We have a team of engineers, researchers, and business developers who work together to turn our vision into reality.
3. Move ment is Ethereum Layer 2 based on the Move language. Some people may think that this story is not "sexy" enough, or call it "micro-innovation". Moreover, both of you are very young, only 21 and 24 years old respectively. Some people, including potential investors, may ask "Why you?" How would you respond to such doubts?
Rushi: The Move language is designed to emphasize ownership and security, which are the cornerstones of security. Assets in Move are represented as resources, and because of Move's powerful ownership model and obvious resource handling capabilities, it can simplify the development of secure smart contracts. This includes everyday blockchain functions such as asset ownership transfer, minting, and destruction, all of which form the basis of DApp activities.
As for why people should trust Movement Labs, it all goes back to our years of experience building Web3 applications and developing blockchain execution environments. For example, I have been working as a smart contract engineer in the Ethereum DeFi space for many years and have worked closely with multiple Cosmos ecosystem protocols. In addition, Cooper's financial and technical expertise and insights into economic systems will help guide Movement Labs in the right strategic and cultural direction.
4. How did you convince Polychain to lead the recent round? What was the decisive moment? Any interesting stories to share?
Rushi: Polychain (like other investors) recognizes the huge potential of the product Movement Labs is building. They share our vision of creating a more secure, interoperable blockchain ecosystem powered by Move.
They understand our technical strength and the strength of our team. We demonstrated how the M1 and M2 networks are built on Move and deeply integrated with Ethereum, enabling new levels of security, scalability, and cross-chain liquidity. We are thrilled that Polychain has chosen to support us.
5. You have repeatedly emphasized the security of the Move language. In what aspects is this security mainly reflected? Compared with the Solidity language, what is the biggest advantage of Move? For example, how does it solve the problem of reentrancy attacks?
Rushi: Although Move and Solidity have somewhat different purposes, they can coexist and even complement each other. Move focuses on security and performance. This makes it more suitable for building complex smart contracts designed for high-performance applications. At the same time, Solidity already has a huge ecosystem and developer community behind it, and it will always exist. As for the reentrancy attack problem, Move eliminates the typical path of reentrancy attacks by ensuring that resource access is unique.
6. What challenges did you encounter in integrating Move with Ethereum? Are there any potential challenges?
Cooper: It is complex to seamlessly integrate Move and Ethereum into one network. On the technical side, ensuring secure cross-chain messaging, data availability, and unified liquidity requires careful engineering. We have to pioneer new approaches to address these challenges.
Moving forward, our focus will be on creating intuitive developer experiences to drive adoption of the tools and networks we support with Move. Fortunately, we have an amazing team with a proven ability to navigate complexity and deliver great products. Our experience building for both the Move and EVM ecosystems gives us an advantage in orchestrating both. At the same time, our investors provide resources and strategic advice to help us scale.
7. How do you plan to increase adoption of the Move language (which may be beyond the capacity of a single project)? What is your specific strategy? What are the biggest challenges in this regard?
Cooper: Move's resource-oriented programming model and built-in security features make it even more attractive for building truly high-performance blockchain applications. Our goal is to make "Move everywhere" through broad adoption and bringing it to other networks and environments through interoperable developer tools. By providing an open source framework and protocol, we believe we can accelerate the adoption of Move and unlock its full potential for developers.
8. Which projects will Move ment focus on supporting at the Layer 2 level? The Move community is quite active in China. What do you think of the Asian market? Apart from Asia, where are Move developers mainly concentrated? How to motivate more developers to learn Move?
Cooper: We already have a growing ecosystem of projects built on Movement, including oracles, automated market makers, wallets, and more. We can provide all the services needed for a functioning Web3 world.
Additionally, as part of our global strategy, we place a lot of emphasis on the Asia Pacific region. This is because we know there is a lot of talent and great potential in the Move development community there, and it is home to many of Move's earliest builders and believers. We support all of the Asian Move developers and are excited to provide them with the resources, education, and opportunities they need to do great things in our ecosystem.
That being said, we believe the best way to incentivize developers in any region is to build a developer-centric platform, which will naturally attract talent to the features that Move has to offer. We are working hard to spread the word through social and community channels like X and Discord to let developers from all networks know that there is now a set of tools designed specifically for them.
9. Like Move ment, Aptos and Sui are also based on the Move language, but they chose Layer 1 projects, while you chose Ethereum Layer 2. At present, how do you view the development prospects of these different paths?
Cooper: Ethereum is the place where the vast majority of blockchain developers today share ideas, and where tools, liquidity, and network effects are strongest. It is the cultural center of Web3. By building a Layer 2 framework powered by Move on Ethereum, we can leverage the rich resources of the Ethereum ecosystem while leveraging the advanced security, scalability, and performance of the Move language to enhance the ecosystem.
This enables us to offer developers the best of both worlds: the security and rich functionality of Move, with seamless access to Ethereum’s vibrant DApp ecosystem and early liquidity. We believe this is the secret sauce to boost Move adoption and the success of the next generation of DApps.
10. Similar to Aptos and Sui, Movement Labs was born out of Facebook’s blockchain vision. However, Facebook faced huge regulatory pressure at the time, which led to it abandoning the plan. Now, regulatory challenges still exist. We have seen that from Coinbase to Uniswap, and now Consensys, they are all involved in lawsuits/disputes with different regulators. As entrepreneurs in the blockchain field, how do you view the current regulatory situation? How will this affect your decision-making on some major issues?
Rushi: We are constantly monitoring regulatory developments in multiple jurisdictions, and we want to proceed with caution and adhere to the legal framework. That being said, this space is still evolving and changing. We want to do our best to address any developments and changes in the regulatory landscape while remaining compliant, and we will address new issues as they arise.