This war of words caused by technical discussions also attracted the community's attention to the two ecosystems.
Written by: Pzai, Foresight News
In the blockchain field, friction between different projects often occurs due to many factors such as technology and community.
On November 27, Movement co-founder Rushi Manche fired at former Scroll employee Toghrul Maharramov on X (Toghrul once directly called users "e-baggor" in some tweets, which even became a MEME in the Scroll community.) and pointed out that "almost no one wants to be identified as EVM L2 because of the work you do." This verbal battle caused by technical discussions also attracted the community's attention to the two ecosystems. This article sorts out the whole story of the incident and strives to make readers understand the ins and outs.
Technical term "definition rights"
It all started with a discussion on "post-confirmation" on November 26. In a blockchain network, post-confirmation means that after a new block is created, the validator quickly confirms the correctness of the block. This process occurs in the confirmation phase of the blockchain, with the purpose of speeding up the confirmation of transactions and providing a certain degree of security. As a modular Move framework, Movement's "post-confirmation" mechanism is to first obtain L2 instant confirmation through the economic guarantee of L2 MOVE token staking, and then update the status after the proof on L1. The validator network verifies the new block, submits the signed proof, and confirms or rejects the new block of the staking contract on L1.
Toghrul questioned the "post-confirmation" of Movement transactions and communicated with Movement researchers Andreas and Franck. The point of contention between the two parties was whether "post-confirmation" itself was another form of pre-confirmation. Toghrul insisted that this mechanism was only part of the overall confirmation process, and he questioned that "post-confirmation" did not actually minimize trust bridging, which was essentially equivalent to the Polygon side chain and could not be called an L2. Monad's DevRel ZenLlama also favored the view of pre-confirmation. Before the final outbreak, all of the above exchanges remained at the definition of technical terms.
War breaks out
In another tweet, Rushi also criticized that "only Uniswap or Flashbot's Ethereum-aligned protocols can get attention now", and he said that thousands of terms were created for the "useless" Ethereum L2. And Toghrul had just finished his argument with Movement researchers, so it was natural for him to fire at Rushi. Toghrul pointed out that Movement directly forked from Aptos and used some infrastructure of what he called "useless L2", and finally left a sentence: "Please put down your arrogance."
Perhaps it was the last arrogant sentence that angered Rushi, who then responded with a long tweet, "I have nothing but respect for some members of your team, but Scroll and you may be one of the worst projects in this field, so much so that at least 6 of your colleagues (half of whom are no longer on the team) came to me to apologize for your behavior." He criticized his former employer Scroll and exposed team behaviors including "predatory" airdrop distribution, the team's dumping behavior (secondary market share and high-valuation takeovers within the team) and airdrop rat warehouses, and left a message: "Technical debates are one thing, and I'm sure we can improve. If you want to jump ship with Franck, then come on. Otherwise improve your own damn chain so it's not a blatant scam."
On November 27, when the MoveDrop airdrop opened for registration, criticism of Scroll gained more support from community users, and the debate sparked by the technical discussion also became part of the project’s marketing.
Interestingly, Rushi also said that a quarter of the Scroll team had applied for positions at Movement in the past two months. Toghrul also responded quickly and said that he had left the Scroll team. But at the time of the reply, he still hadn't removed the Scroll badge on his X, which Rushi also commented: "Even he is ashamed of Scroll."
Community Response
After Rushi opened fire, Toghrul also officially stated that he had withdrawn from the Scroll team. One user jokingly said, "Thank you for your "later confirmation"." Some users also asked whether Toghrul would join Solana. Solana founder Toly also said, "We are already reckless enough."
In this incident, a large number of community users condemned Toghrul and even the Scroll team. He also responded to some users, "If you reply to my tweet, you will definitely get a bigger MOVE airdrop, right?"
This war of words started with a technical discussion, but behind it also emerged the conflict between the new public chains built with new architectures such as Move and the traditional EVM L2 ecosystem.
For Movement, Rushi’s tweet has wide community support, while Scroll is known for its ZK technology. Toghrul later posted a message lamenting that “I still haven’t heard the final answer on whether Movement is a sidechain or L2.” As Toly commented: “As long as the cross-chain bridge has multiple signatures, it can be L2.”
