A San Francisco-based blockchain developer called Movement Labs recently secured $38 million in a Series A funding round, with Polychain Capital leading the investment. The company plans to use this funding to integrate Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine into Ethereum (ETH), aiming to enhance smart contract security and transaction speed.
Various prominent venture capital firms, including Hack VC, Placeholder, Figment Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Aptos Labs, participated in this funding round. According to Movement Labs, the Ethereum ecosystem suffered losses exceeding $5.4 billion between 2022 and 2023 due to smart contract vulnerabilities.
To combat such exploits, Movement Labs developed the Move-EVM product, which enables developers to deploy code that undergoes real-time verification to prevent attacks like reentrancy. Move is a Rust-based programming language initially created by Facebook for its Diem blockchain crypto payment project, which was discontinued in 2022. It offers a secure framework for writing smart contracts used in cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and decentralized apps.
Since securing a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023, Movement Labs has been actively promoting the adoption of Move. Key contributors to this pre-seed funding included Varys Capital, the Avalanche Fund by Blizzard, dao5, Borderless Capital, and other players in the Wormhole developer ecosystem. Notable angel investors involved in the pre-seed round were Chandler Song, Ryan Fang, Stanley Wu from Ankr, George Lampeth from dao5, and Calvin Liu from Eigenlayer.
The pre-seed funding was also intended to introduce the Movement SDK, a tool designed to simplify the creation of secure and high-performance Move environments for established blockchains. Additionally, earlier this year, Movement Labs partnered with Covalent (CQT), a multichain indexer with integration across 225 chains, to incorporate real-time data indexing and deployment tools, including Covalent’s Unified API and GoldRush Kit, into the Movement ecosystem.
Covalent’s Unified API allows seamless access to real-time and historical blockchain data, making it crucial for AI in the web3 space. The GoldRush Kit enhances user experience by providing a user-friendly interface for accessing and visualizing historical blockchain data within the Movement Labs ecosystem.