Movement opened with a bang, and Hack VC, the lead investor in the A round, explained its investment logic

Original author: Hack VC

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Translated by Azuma ( @azuma_eth )

Editors note: Movement (MOVE), which was listed on Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, OKX and other major exchanges on the first day of its launch, has become the hottest project at the moment. OKX real-time market data shows that MOVEs highest offer on the exchange is 1.156 USDT (Upbit and other Korean exchanges have had higher premiums), and is currently quoted at around 1 USDT, corresponding to a circulating market value of approximately US$2.24 billion and a full circulation valuation of approximately US$10 billion.

Why is Movement so popular in the market? In the following, Hack VC, the co-lead investor of Movements previous $38 million Series A financing, gives the investment logic of the institution. The institution believes that Movements vision combines security improvements, performance improvements, and user experience optimization. This is a very comprehensive vision that is expected to completely change the status quo of Web3.

The following is the full text of Hack VC, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.

Today, Movement, one of Hack VC’s portfolio companies, has reached an important milestone – launching its mainnet beta and native token MOVE. Hack VC co-led Movement’s Series A round. Below, we share our investment logic.

Industry-specific problems

Smart contract attacks have been a big problem since the beginning of Web3, and this problem remains largely unsolved to this day. In 2022, the amount of losses caused by smart contract attacks exceeded $3 billion.

Solving smart contract attacks is the key to Web3 and DeFis success and mainstream expansion. In traditional finance, the system is behind a firewall and the code base is private, so catastrophic events rarely occur. When making remittances and payments through Stripe, Venmo, etc., people generally dont think about the code that executes these transactions. This is because people dont need to worry about the code behind these transactions being leaked.

Unfortunately, in the current Web3 environment, users do need to worry about this issue, and these issues will continue to hinder the mainstream adoption of Web3 until they are effectively resolved. Web3s system exists in the open network, and its code base is open source and public. Its like we gave criminals a treasure map, the treasure is on the ground, and the size and contents of the treasure box are clear at a glance.

This will continue to be the case in the current state of Web3 decentralized application (DApp) development. Ethereum DApps are typically written in Solidity, which we believe is an unsafe language for developers. Since the language is not type-safe, memory-safe, or formally verifiable, it is easy for developers to make mistakes. This often leads to reentrancy attacks, resulting in the $3 billion loss mentioned above.

At our AGM, you can hear directly from Movement co-founder Rushi Manche ( click here to jump to the video) as he discusses the above issues and how next-generation virtual machines like Move can pave the way for more scalable, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain solutions.

Move language

The new programming language Move helps solve this problem. It is a major improvement in Web3 DApp development compared to the status quo. The Move language is strongly typed (which reduces errors) and supports formally verifiable, which reduces the possibility of smart contracts being hacked and makes it easier for developers to find and fix errors.

Sui and Aptos pioneered the use of the Move language in Web3 development. They are trying to disrupt Ethereum and some other 2018-era blockchains, such as Avalanche, Hashgraph, Polkadot, etc. The versions of the virtual machines built by the Sui team and the Aptos team using Move are slightly different.

Move’s Vision

Movement is creating a blockchain network based on the Move programming language with the goal of improving the security, performance, and user experience of Web3.

Movements first product is a Move-based Layer 2 on Ethereum, which allows DApps in the Ethereum ecosystem to be developed using the Move language and adopt Celestias Data Availability (DA) solution. Movement supports both Suis Move variant and Aptos Move variant, and supports traditional EVM compilers for backward compatibility.

This creates some entirely new possibilities.

• Instead of using Solidity, new DApps based on the Move language can be built from scratch on Ethereum Layer 2. Compared with EVM native DApps, the Move language class solves security issues by providing a more secure environment for smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem.

• Existing DApps that currently exist on Sui or Aptos can be deployed cross-chain to the Ethereum ecosystem. This is very important because it allows these DApps to access the huge liquidity/total locked value (TVL) that exists in the Ethereum ecosystem, while they can continue to exist on their original chain.

• This can “expand the Move pie.” The aforementioned DApps developed based on the Move language can also be easily ported to Aptos or Sui, allowing these DApps to reach users on multiple chains and allowing Aptos and Sui to accommodate more DApps.

• This will increase the use of the Move language in general, which is important as the Move language is still in the early stages of adoption and will help the development of all Move-based blockchains.

For backward compatibility, Movement also supports Solidity so that legacy code bases can be accommodated.

Movements safety advantages

Movement has the following safety advantages.

• Built-in safety mechanism (bytecode verifier): This mechanism checks whether transaction data complies with resource safety, type safety and memory safety. It uses a borrow checking scheme that allows only one mutable reference to a value at any time.

• The bytecode compiler executes transactions only if all safeguards are met.

• A set of permissions can be defined for accessing modules and accounts, so that it is possible to have smart contracts that are immutable (i.e. cannot be changed) outside of predetermined methods. This is also crucial for security.

• Type safety and memory safety are built into the platform, which helps prevent reentrancy attacks that are common in Solidity.

• Verification tools can pinpoint the target call state and use it to discern the effects of the procedure call.

Movement Benefits Beyond Safety

In addition to security, Movement’s stack enables several other benefits.

• Fractal EVM Compiler: Movement created Fractal, an EVM compiler. Fractal allows legacy Solidity code to be transpiled (converted) to the latest Move VM environment, achieving backward compatibility with existing code bases. This is an important innovation (relative to other Move environments, such as Aptos or Sui) because developers can simultaneously access liquidity on the EVM and achieve compatibility with their existing DApp code base. Since the code runs through the Move VM, it remains formally verifiable because the code is ultimately converted into the Move language through a translation process.

• M1 Decentralized Shared Sequencer: M1 is Movements own decentralized shared sequencer. M1 integrates with Movements Ethereum Layer 2, which provides reorganization protection and normal uptime guarantees through fast finality ordering. This also opens the door to parallel processing, thereby increasing network throughput by 10-100 times. These performance improvements will make Movement a good fit for high-performance use cases such as gaming and other low-latency DeFi businesses. Low transaction costs also enable fine-grained transactions such as fast NFT minting.

• Built-in BTC Bridge: BTC bridge built via Snowman for additional liquidity.
  

• IBC Interoperability: Cosmos interoperability supported via IBC.
  

• Double staking model: providing financial incentives for decentralized sorting.
  

• Atomic Swaps: Built-in atomic composability between Movement ecosystem Rollups, allowing for transactions such as atomic swaps.
  

• Support for Typescript: (a variant of JavaScript, the most popular language in Web2 development), which provides Web2 developers with an easy-to-get-started development experience as they build in Web3.

Data Progress

As of this writing, Movement has achieved an impressive set of key metrics.

Over 200 teams are building on Movements tech stack.

• There are now more than 5 Move technology stack networks: Lumio, Up Network, Lync, Nexio and io.net (the latter is another investment project of Hack VC).

• Over 7 teams building natively on Movement have raised funding.

• Over $150 million TVL committed.

• 1.2 million Galxe followers (#20 in the world).

• It has 1 million active addresses.

• There are more than 52 regional Movement Twitter and Telegram groups.

• Movement meets on five continents.

• Over 30 million transactions occurred in the second week of the testnet.

• Movement has raised more than $30 million to ensure long-term financial stability.

• Startups that have graduated from its Movement accelerator program, Move Collective, have raised more than $10 million to date.

Future directions of Movement

Movements vision is to achieve massive scalability, with the goal of creating an execution environment that supports the Move language on any chain, any Rollup framework, and any DA layer.

The key to achieving this goal is that Movement has a fully decentralized shared sequencer ( M1 ), which ensures that these integrations can share a unified settlement layer. Through this vision, developers can customize their own application chains for their specific use cases.

In addition, chains like Avalanche, Polkadot, Hashgraph, etc. will also be able to utilize the Move language, which will enable DApp developers based on Move to reach a wider user base and more liquidity.

Still, Movement may face some unforeseen challenges, including execution difficulties, performance issues, competitive pressures, and other potential obstacles.

Summarize

At Hack VC, we believe security is critical to the development and mainstream expansion of Web3. Movement has a fairly comprehensive vision that we believe can reduce, and possibly even eliminate, smart contract attacks. While this started with the Move language, Movement has other security innovations planned in their roadmap to integrate into their services to build a robust and comprehensive security solution.

Movement’s vision combines security improvements, performance improvements, and an optimized user experience. Hack VC believes this is a very promising vision that can revolutionize the status quo of Web3. We are excited to lead Movement’s Series A round and congratulate the team on their successful token launch today. We look forward to embarking on this journey with them.