Note: On April 25, 2024, the blockchain development team Movement Labs announced the completion of a $38 million Series A financing. Movement Labs aims to introduce Move VM to Ethereum. Movement Labs launched Ethereum L2 M2 based on Move VM, allowing developers to use Move to write applications running on Ethereum. Movement Labs investor Placeholder wrote an article to interpret Movement Labs.
The original author is Joel Monegro, managing partner of Placeholder, and the translation is by 0xjs of Golden Finance.
Since Ethereum launched nearly a decade ago, the EVM has been the most popular blockchain operating system. Yet few developers enjoy developing in its native programming language, Solidity; some have even likened the experience to “chewing glass.” Still, entrepreneurs have chosen it because it facilitates access to Ethereum’s users, assets, and liquidity. But if we want 10x the number of on-chain applications, we must have 100x the number of developers capable of building them. To do this, we must make it easier for average programmers to write complex smart contracts while improving the security and scalability of the underlying infrastructure. This is the core promise behind the Move programming language and the emerging ecosystem of networks using it.
Solidity developers are stuck because its execution environment does not scale easily, lacks basic security features, and imposes an unintuitive programming paradigm. Smart engineers and thousands of dollars in audits can fix these three issues, but that’s exactly the problem: it takes highly sophisticated developers and lots of money to deliver secure, scalable, and complex smart contract applications on the EVM network.
Move is a smart contract programming language developed by Facebook as part of its Libra blockchain project. Libra died in 2020 due to politics, but they left behind some great open source technology built for global scale. Move was created around three main values: security, functionality, and usability. It provides strong security protections by default and can power highly complex applications while remaining simple and easy to use. If we had to sum up the effect in a provocative sentence, 1x Move developer can deliver a better application than 10x Solidity developers.
Aptos and Sui
Of course, the applications you write in Move ultimately run on top of a blockchain. Both the Aptos and Sui networks were spun off from the Libra project. They are next-generation blockchains that offer ultra-high throughput at low transaction fees, similar to Solana (a more mature ecosystem with many advantages, but with a higher talent requirement for building applications given Rust’s complexity). Aptos and Sui use variations of Move with different underlying network architectures. Aptos Move is closest to the original specification developed by Libra, and the network uses a familiar consensus mechanism. Sui Move introduces an object-oriented programming paradigm in smart contracts that is more familiar to traditional non-crypto developers, and the network uses a DAG-based consensus system architecture instead of a typical blockchain. Each approach has its pros and cons, and a lot has been written about the differences, so we don’t have to repeat the details here. More importantly, developers can choose the one that works best for them.
Despite being both emerging networks, Aptos and Sui stand out as serious contenders for the top echelon of the network wars. Few other chains can offer the same high performance at the lowest cost and provide an uncompromising developer experience that translates into better applications that are easier to create.
Modular Move
While Move as a language directly challenges Solidity, Aptos and Sui compete more with highly integrated networks like Solana than with Ethereum. Given that one of the main selling points of the modular movement is the ability to layer custom execution environments on top of the Ethereum ledger, alternative virtual machines and languages shouldn’t be offensive to Ethereum. So if you like Move but prefer the Ethereum ecosystem, its modularity capabilities might as well let you have your cake and eat it.
This is exactly what Movement Labs is doing with their new Rollup and SDK. Their stack of tools and services includes (1) the public Move VM (MVM) Ethereum layer 2 called M2, (2) the Movement SDK, and (3) a decentralized shared sorter.
M2 is the first Move-based L2 on Ethereum, allowing developers to write applications in Move that run on Ethereum. It can run both Aptos and Sui Move, so developers who need the functionality of both don’t have to compromise. It also includes an EVM proxy that enables developers to mix and match Move and Solidity contracts in the same execution environment. It also allows users to use Move applications through existing Ethereum wallets and pay transaction fees in ETH. Call it “Move-EVM” or MEVM. Think of it as a multi-execution environment that maximizes developer choice without sacrificing access to established EVM infrastructure.
M2 is built using the Movement SDK, an open source framework for deploying custom MEVM Rollups on Ethereum or other EVM networks. The SDK allows developers to launch application-specific Rollups based on Move using the same technology as M2. Due to its architecture, M2 cannot match the absolute performance of Aptos or Sui. However, as a trade-off, M2 can do things that Aptos and Sui cannot, and the Movement SDK provides a path for developers who need this level of scale to deploy their own MEVM environment and combine it with other emerging technologies as needed (for example, M2 uses Celestia for data availability).
Finally, the shared sorter manages the connection between all MEVM rollups (including M2) and Ethereum. Because it is decentralized, it guarantees the security of all MEVM networks. Because it is shared, it reduces costs for everyone using it because it can bundle transactions from multiple parallel Rollups into the same batch, making them interoperable.
The main criticism of modularity is the complexity of managing multiple components, which is true. But this does not detract from the long-term value of modularity. In Movement’s case, it allows them to combine elements of Aptos, Sui, and Ethereum that none of those individual networks could achieve alone. The combination maximizes developer flexibility without sacrificing access to existing EVM resources and infrastructure.
Moving Forward
Lack of scalability and high transaction fees used to be major bottlenecks for Web3. Today, block space is plentiful and transaction fees are low, but building secure smart contracts is still quite difficult for most developers. Most developers are not yet cryptocurrency developers; to change this, we need to relentlessly improve the developer experience until it’s easier to develop on Web3 than on Web2. Our bet on Move comes from the belief that it provides a superior entry point for new developers to build on-chain applications due to its inherent security and scalability features.
This doesn’t mean we’re no longer bullish on any of the ecosystems we support, including Ethereum and Solana (Anza is working to add Move support, but that’s controversial). Tribalism leads many to believe that supporting one option requires opposing a perceived rival, e.g., supporting Solana means opposing Ethereum, or supporting the Move ecosystem means opposing Solana, etc. This diode mindset ignores the broader reality that industries thrive on consumer choice and competition.
It’s also worth emphasizing that despite its limitations, the EVM standard isn’t going away anytime soon, and its continued dominance is a testament to the power of first-mover advantage and network effects. Instead, its limitations will be surpassed by the layers of abstraction built on top of it. In hindsight, the evolution of blockchain operating systems will be similar to the evolution of computers: we start with primitive versions and create increasingly complex, yet more developer- and user-friendly systems on top. Consider the BIOS in a computer, the lowest-level operating system that handles communication between the hardware and the operating system, yet most users never interact with it and few know it exists. Or how Windows was built on top of the even more primitive MS-DOS for its first decade. The EVM is likely to follow a similar path, becoming a lower-level primitive on top of which more powerful systems are built, which is why the inclusion of the EVM in the Movement Labs stack is particularly interesting.
Having lived the journey of Web2, it’s clear that there has been a direct correlation between ease of development and quality of applications over the years. What Aptos, Sui, and Movement bring to the space brings us closer to that vision, and we’re excited to see developers build the future with them.
