Author: Hack VC; Compiler: 0xjs@黄金财经
Note: On October 9, 2024, Move-EVM L2 Movement announced the issuance of coins. On the same day, first-tier exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Upbit launched its token MOVE. MOVE performed well after opening, and the price of MOVE rose all the way to break through $1, which means that Movement's FDV exceeded $10 billion as soon as it opened.
Movemnt's performance made other project parties envious. Therefore, it also triggered doubts from some industry insiders, "The top capital bureau, the king capital bureau of the three major exchanges at the same time, the market pull has its own great scholars to debate for me, the Z generation's attention trendsetter, I saw that it issued an ERC20 on Ethereum..".
Why did Movement start with a market value of 10 billion? Is Movement's market value of 10 billion US dollars high? On December 10, 2024, Hack VC, the lead investor in Movement’s Series A round, published an article discussing its investment logic for Movement.
Today is an important milestone for Movement Labs, one of Hack VC’s portfolio companies, which today launched its mainnet beta and native token. At Hack VC, we co-led its Series A round. This article shares Hack VC’s investment philosophy for Movement.
The Problem
Smart contract hacking has been a major problem since the early days of Web3, and it remains largely unsolved. In 2022, smart contract hackers lost more than $3 billion.
Solving the smart contract hacking problem is a key factor in the success and mainstreaming of Web3 and DeFi. In traditional finance, systems are behind firewalls and code bases are private, so catastrophic events rarely occur. If you perform a Stripe transaction, a wire transfer, or a Venmo payment, you typically don’t think about the code that performed those transactions. This is because people don’t have to worry about the code behind those transactions being compromised.
Unfortunately, in the current state of Web3, you do have to worry about this, and until these issues are resolved, this will continue to limit mainstream adoption. Web3 systems exist on the open web, and the codebase is open source and public. This is essentially the treasure map we’re handing to criminals. The treasure is on the ground, and the size and contents of the treasure chest are clearly visible.
In the current state of Web3 dApp development, this will continue to be the case. Ethereum dApps are typically written in Solidity, which we consider to be an unsafe language for developers. Because the language is not type-safe, memory-safe, or formally verifiable, it is easy for developers to make mistakes. This leads to reentrancy attacks, which were the primary cause of the $3 billion smart contract hack mentioned earlier.
Here Hear directly from Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche at our AGM, where he will discuss the above issues and how next-generation virtual machines like Move can pave the way for more scalable, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain solutions.
Background: Move Language
The Move programming language helps address these challenges and is a significant improvement over the status quo for building Web3 dApps. The language is strongly typed (fewer bugs). It is also formally verifiable, making smart contracts less vulnerable to hacks and making it easier for developers to find and fix bugs.
Sui and Aptos are pioneering Move in Web3. They are trying to disrupt Ethereum and certain 2018-era blockchains like Avalanche, Hashgraph, Polkadot, etc. Sui and the Aptos team have built slightly different versions of the virtual machine using Move.
Movement's Vision
Movement Labs is creating a modular chain network based on the Move programming language. Its goal is to improve the security, performance, and user experience of Web3. Its first product is Ethereum L2 based on Move, allowing dApps in the Ethereum ecosystem to leverage the Move language and use Celestia for data availability. Movement supports Sui's Move variant and Aptos' Move variant, and also has a traditional EVM interpreter for backward compatibility.
This has several interesting value propositions:
1. New Move-based dApps can be built from scratch on Ethereum L2 using Move instead of Solidity. This is an improvement over EVM-native dApps, as Solidity is not type-safe or formally verifiable and is prone to errors and attacks. Move solves these problems by providing a safer environment for Ethereum ecosystem smart contracts.
2. Existing dApps currently running on Sui or Aptos can be cross-deployed to Ethereum. This is significant because it enables these dApps to access higher liquidity/TVL on Ethereum while still existing on their original chain.
3. This "expands Move's share". In theory, the above Move dApps can be easily ported to Aptos or Sui, giving these dApps access to users on multiple chains and giving Aptos and Sui access to other dApps.
4. This generally increases the use of Move across the board, which is important because developer adoption of Move is still in its infancy and helps all Move-based chains.
For backward compatibility, Movement also supports Solidity so that legacy code bases can be accepted.
Security benefits brought by Movement
Movement has the following security advantages:
1. Movement has a built-in security mechanism - "Bytecode Verifier". It checks the resource safety, type safety, and memory safety of transaction data. It uses a borrow checking scheme that only allows one mutable reference to a value at any given time.
2. The bytecode interpreter will execute transactions only when all security measures are met.
3. You can define a set of permissions to access modules and accounts, which allows people to have immutable (i.e., unchangeable) smart contracts outside of the expected methods. This is also critical for security.
4. The platform has type safety and memory safety built in. This helps prevent common reentrancy attacks in Solidity.
5. Verification tools can pinpoint the target call state and use it to discern the impact of procedure calls.
Other benefits besides security
Movement's stack provides many benefits in addition to security:
1. Movement created the EVM interpreter Fractal. This allows legacy Solidity code to be transpiled (converted) to the modern Move VM environment, enabling backward compatibility with existing code bases. This is an important innovation (relative to other Move environments like Aptos or Sui) because developers can access liquidity on the EVM and achieve backward compatibility with their existing dApp codebases. Since the code runs through the Move VM, it is still formally verifiable because the code is (eventually) converted to Move through the translation process.
2. Movement has its own decentralized shared sorter, which they call M1. M1 is integrated with Movement's Ethereum L2. This provides reorganization protection and uptime guarantees through fast final sorting. This opens the door to parallel processing, resulting in 10-100 times higher throughput. These performance improvements make Movement a good fit for high-performance use cases such as games and low-latency DeFi. Low transaction costs also support fine-grained transactions, such as fast NFT minting.
3. Additional liquidity is available through Snowman with a built-in BTC bridge.
4. Cosmos interoperability is achieved through IBC support.
5. Movement has a dual staking model to provide financial incentives for decentralized sorting.
6. Rollups in the Movement ecosystem have built-in atomic composability, allowing transactions such as atomic swaps.
7. Movement supports Typescript (a variant of JavaScript, the most popular language in Web2 development), further expanding the developer community. This provides Web2 developers with an easy entry mechanism to build in Web3.
Highlights
At the time of writing, Movement’s KPIs at launch are impressive:
Movement has over 200 teams building with its stack
There are 5+ Move Stack Networks: Lumio, Up Network, Lync, Nexio, and io.net (the latter is another Hack VC portfolio company)
7+ teams building natively on Movement have raised funding
TVL commitments exceed $150M
1.2M Galxe followers (#20 globally)
1M active addresses
52+ regional Movement Twitter and Telegram Groups
Movement meetups across five continents
Over 30 million transactions in second week of testnet
Movement has raised over $30 million to achieve long-term financial stability
Graduates of its own startup accelerator, called the “Move Collective,” have raised over $10 million to date
Where Movement is headed
The ultimate goal of Movement is to take its vision to something much bigger. The goal is to have an execution environment that supports Move on any chain, any Rollup framework, and any DA layer. This is possible because Movement has a fully decentralized shared sorter (M1). These integrations will share a unified settlement layer. With this vision, developers can have their own dApp chains for their use cases. Additionally, chains like Avalanche, Polkadot, Hashgraph, and more will have access to the higher-level Move language. In this way, dApp developers building on Move will have access to a much larger user base and TVL.
Movement may encounter unforeseen challenges that could hinder its growth, including execution, performance, competition, and other unforeseen challenges.
Conclusion
At Hack VC, we believe security is critical to the scaling and mainstream development of Web3. Movement has a comprehensive vision that we believe can reduce or even eliminate smart contract hacks. While it starts with the Move language, the roadmap also includes plans to incorporate other security innovations into the final powerful and comprehensive product.
Movement combines mission-critical security advantages with enhanced performance and user experience, which we believe is the complete vision to transform 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 the journey together.
JinseFinance
Future
Cointelegraph