Original Author: Hack VC
Compiled | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Translator | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Editor's Note: Movement (MOVE), which landed on Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, OKX and other top exchanges on its first day of launch, has become the hottest project at the moment. OKX's real-time market data shows that MOVE reached a high price of 1.156 USDT on the exchange (it had even higher premiums on Korean exchanges like Upbit), and is currently trading around 1 USDT, corresponding to a circulating market cap of about $2.24 billion and a fully diluted valuation of about $10 billion.
Why has Movement been so well-received by the market? In the following text, Hack VC, the co-lead investor of Movement's $38 million Series A round, shares the firm's investment rationale. The firm believes that Movement's vision, which combines security improvements, performance enhancements, and user experience optimizations, is a very comprehensive vision that has the potential to fundamentally change the state of Web3.
The following is the full text from Hack VC, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.
Today, Movement, one of Hack VC's portfolio companies, has reached an important milestone - the launch of its mainnet testnet and native token MOVE. Hack VC was a co-lead investor in Movement's Series A round. In the following text, we share our investment rationale.
Industry Challenges
Since the inception of Web3, smart contract attacks have been a major problem, and this problem has largely remained unresolved to this day. In 2022, smart contract attacks resulted in losses exceeding $3 billion.
Solving smart contract attacks is key to the success and mainstream adoption of Web3 and DeFi. In traditional finance, systems are behind firewalls, and codebases are private, so catastrophic events rarely occur. When making remittances or payments through platforms like Stripe or Venmo, people generally don't need to worry about the code executing those transactions, as they don't need to be concerned about the code behind those transactions being exposed.
Unfortunately, in the current Web3 environment, users do need to worry about this, and these issues will continue to hinder the mainstream adoption of Web3 until they are effectively resolved. Web3 systems exist on open networks, with open-source and public codebases. It's like we've given criminals a treasure map, with the treasure lying on the ground and the size and contents of the treasure chest clearly visible.
This situation will continue to exist in the current state of Web3 decentralized application (DApp) development. Ethereum DApps typically use Solidity, which we believe is an unsafe language for developers. Due to the lack of "type-safe", "memory-safe", and "formally verifiable" features, developers are prone to making mistakes, often leading to re-entrancy attacks and the $3 billion in losses mentioned earlier.
At our annual shareholder meeting, you can hear directly from Movement co-founder Rushi Manche (click here to access the video), where he will discuss the above issues and how next-generation virtual machines like Move are paving the way for more scalable, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain solutions.
The Move Language
The new programming language Move helps to solve this problem. Compared to the current state, it is a significant improvement in Web3 DApp development. Move is a "strongly typed" language (reducing errors) and supports "formal verifiability", which reduces the likelihood of smart contracts being hacked, making it easier for developers to find and fix bugs.
Sui and Aptos were the first to use the Move language in Web3 development. They are trying to disrupt Ethereum and other 2018-era blockchains like Avalanche, Hashgraph, and Polkadot. The Sui team and Aptos team have slightly different versions of the Move virtual machine.
The Vision of Movement
Movement is creating a modular chain network based on the Move programming language, with the goal of improving the security, performance, and user experience of Web3.
Movement's first product is an Ethereum Layer 2 based on the Move language, allowing DApps in the Ethereum ecosystem to use the Move language for development and adopting Celestia's data availability (DA) solution. Movement supports both the Sui variant of Move and the Aptos variant of Move, as well as a traditional EVM compiler, to achieve backwards compatibility.
This creates some entirely new possibilities.
New DApps can be built from scratch on the Ethereum Layer 2 using the Move language, rather than using Solidity. Compared to EVM-native DApps, the Move language can solve security issues by providing a safer environment for Ethereum ecosystem smart contracts.
Existing DApps on Sui or Aptos can be cross-chain deployed to the Ethereum ecosystem. This is very important because it allows these DApps to access the massive liquidity/total value locked (TVL) within the Ethereum ecosystem, while still being able to exist on their original chains.
This can "grow the Move pie". The DApps developed based on the Move language can also be easily ported to Aptos or Sui, allowing these DApps to reach users across multiple chains and allowing Aptos and Sui to onboard more DApps.
This will generally increase the usage of the Move language, which is very important for Move, which is still in the early stages of adoption, and will benefit the development of all Move-based blockchains.
To achieve backwards compatibility, Movement also supports Solidity to accommodate legacy codebases.
Movement's Security Advantages
Movement has the following security advantages.
Built-in security mechanisms (bytecode verifier): This mechanism can check whether the transaction data complies with "resource safety", "type safety", and "memory safety". It uses a borrowing check scheme that only allows one mutable reference to a value at any given time.
The bytecode compiler only executes transactions if all security measures are met.
A set of permissions can be defined for accessing modules and accounts, so that immutable (i.e. unchangeable) smart contracts can exist beyond the predefined methods. This is also crucial for security.
The platform has "type safety" and "memory safety" built-in, which helps prevent re-entrancy attacks common in Solidity.
Verification tools can precisely locate the target call state and use it to discern the effects of the process calls.
Other Advantages of Movement Beyond Security
In addition to security, Movement's stack can also deliver other advantages.
Fractal EVM Compiler: Movement has created Fractal, an EVM compiler. Fractal allows legacy Solidity code to be transpiled (converted) into the latest Move VM environment, achieving backwards compatibility with existing codebases. This is an important innovation (compared to other Move environments like Aptos or Sui) because developers can access the liquidity on EVM while being compatible with their existing DApp codebases. Since the code runs through the Move VM, it is still formally verifiable, as the code ultimately gets converted to the Move language through the transpilation process.
M1 Decentralized Shared Sequencer: M1 is Movement's own decentralized shared sequencer. M1 can integrate with Movement's Ethereum Layer 2, providing reordering protection and liveness guarantees through fast finality ordering. It also opens the door to "parallel processing", potentially increasing network throughput 10-100x. These performance improvements will make Movement very suitable for high-performance use cases like gaming and other low-latency DeFi applications. Low transaction costs also support fine-grained transactions, such as rapid Non-Fungible Token minting.
Built-in BTC Bridge: Accessing additional liquidity through a BTC bridge built with Snowman.
IBC Interoperability: Cosmos interoperability supported through IBC.
Dual Staking Model: Financial incentives for decentralized ordering.
Atomic Swap: The built-in atomic composability between the Movement ecosystem Rollups allows for atomic swap transactions.
Support for Typescript: (a variant of JavaScript, which is the most popular language in Web2 development), this provides Web2 developers with an easy-to-use development environment to build in Web3.
There are now more than 5 Move tech stack networks: Lumio, Up Network, Lync, Nexio, and io.net (the latter is another Hack VC investment project).
Over 7 teams natively built on Movement have completed fundraising.
Over $150 million in TVL committed.
Has 1.2 million Galxe followers (ranked 20th globally).
Has over 1 million active addresses.
Has over 52 regional Movement Twitter and Telegram groups.
Movement meetups span the five continents.
Over 30 million transactions occurred in the second week of the testnet.
Movement has raised over $30 million to ensure long-term financial stability.
Startups that have graduated from its Movement Accelerator program, Move Collective, have raised over $10 million to date.
Data Progress
As of the writing of this article, Movement has achieved a series of impressive key data metrics.
Over 200 teams are building using the Movement tech stack.
The Future Development of Movement
Movement's vision is to achieve massive scalability, with the goal of creating an execution environment where the Move language can run on any chain, any Rollup framework, and any DA layer.
The key to realizing this goal is that Movement has a fully decentralized shared sequencer (M1), which ensures these integrations can share a unified settlement layer. Through this vision, developers can customize their own application chains for their specific use cases.
Additionally, chains like Avalanche, Polkadot, and Hashgraph will also be able to leverage the Move language, which will allow Move-based DApp developers to access a wider user base and more liquidity.
Nevertheless, Movement may still face some unforeseen challenges, including execution complexity, performance issues, competitive pressures, and other potential obstacles.
Conclusion
For Hack VC, we believe that security is crucial for the development and mainstream adoption of Web3. Movement has a fairly comprehensive vision, which we believe can reduce, and potentially eliminate, smart contract attacks. While it starts with the Move language, Movement's roadmap also plans to integrate other security innovations into their service to build a robust and comprehensive security solution.
Movement's vision combines improvements in security, performance enhancements, and user experience optimization. Hack VC believes this is a very compelling vision that can fundamentally transform the state of Web3. We are excited to have led Movement's Series A financing round and congratulate the team on their successful token launch today, and we look forward to embarking on this journey with them.
