Move Anywhere

Our Investment in Movement Labs

In a world where blockchains are growing in economic value, so are the cost of exploits and hacks. Originally developed by leading engineers at Meta / Diem, the Move language prioritizes safety for programming smart contracts with more explicit security guarantees and less attack surfaces than Solidity, the current standard. However, programming with Move is currently limited to a few nascent L1s (e.g. Aptos, Sui). In order for Move to become the standard, it needs to be far more accessible to the vast majority of blockchain developers.

Today, Borderless is excited to announce our investment in Movement Labs, a company developing a cross-chain solution to give developers on any L1 or L2 the ability to build Move applications securely and seamlessly anywhere, without leaving their chain.

We believe the future of blockchains depends on addressing its security risks and over-fragmentation. Movement Labs is creating a more secure and interoperable foundation for developers building in any ecosystem that will ultimately provide safer and better products, assets and services to all users — Alpen Sheth, Senior Partner, Borderless Capital

Other investors in this pre-seed round include: Varys Capital, dao5, Blizzard Fund, Wormhole Cross Chain Fund by Borderless, Serafund, Colony, Interop Ventures, Elixir Capital, BENQI, and top angels such as dao5’s George Lampeth, Eigenlayer’s Calvin Liu, Berachain’s Smokey The Bera, Avail’s Anurag Arjun, GMX’s CoinFlipCanada, and the co-founders of Ankr, among others.

Movement Labs has built the Movement SDK, a framework that combines horizontal interoperability through high-throughput modular Move Virtual Machines (MVM) that can be plugged into any blockchain network with vertical composability via Fractal: a translator that facilitates the compilation from smart contract languages like Solidity to Move, providing native re-entrancy attack protection with no technical lift.

Move: A step change in secure programming for digital assets

Move is a developer-friendly language that allows contract developers to focus more on business logic and less on security vulnerabilities. Move is a mature smart contract language that optimizes for safety:

1. Move solves many of the inherent security and performance flaws of Solidity, including reentrancy attacks, DoS attacks, resource inefficiencies, and bugs introduced during the compiling process
2. Move defines a new Resource type for digital assets and abstracts two basic properties: resources should satisfy both scarcity and access control.
3. Move implements account permission control through a Module system with strong data abstraction.
4. Move inherits Rust’s ownership system to achieve the transfer of asset ownership. In addition, the introduction of mechanisms such as static invocation, formal verification, and bytecode checker also jointly provide multiple guarantees for the security of digital assets.

First Move: Avalanche

Movement Labs is launching a series of Move-based virtual machines across different blockchains including Avalanche, Ethereum, Cosmos and more to broaden the adoption of Move. Its first product, M1, is a virtual machine environment for writing Move smart contracts on the Avalanche network, which currently has a larger volume of assets, users and developers than Aptos and Sui, with an established interoperable ecosystem powered by Ethereum compatibility (Avalanche C-Chain). We believe Movement will onboard more developers and users to safe and resilient Move-based applications.

Movement’s M1 supports modular and native interoperability in two ways:

1. Cross-chain interoperability via a canonical integration with Wormhole. M1 will be natively interoperable with all the major L1s including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui and more via Wormhole further reducing barriers for users and developers to have access to cross-chain liquidity, users and assets. Going forward, any application deployed using Movement’s CLI and SDK will be a native Cross-Chain application that can share liquidity, users and assets on any chain.
2. Cross-VM interoperability. M1 will also launch multiple Avalanche subnets, scaling horizontally (via L2 subnets) as usage and applications grows, while leveraging Warp Messaging and HyperVM with cross-VM interoperability, to scale more efficiently and effectively.

Cultivating a secure future for mass adoption

Movement makes it possible for existing protocols to benefit from the security of the Move language by providing Move smart contract functionality–potentially eliminating the billions of dollars lost in hacking attacks prone to Solidity platforms.

The movement team brings deep talent in engineering and comes directly from the blockchain industry with experience at various Defi and infrastructure companies. The co-founders were some of the first adopters of the Move language and are rooted in the community. By enabling frictionless access for Move developers horizontally across various ecosystems we believe that Movement will help make the Web3 ecosystem to become more secure, interoperable and bring a new wave of adoption.

You can read more about their announcement on The Block.