Author: Hack VC; Compiler: 0xjs@金财经

Note: On October 9, 2024, Move-EVM L2 Movement announced the issuance of currency, and on the same day, Binance, Coinbase, OKX, Upbit and other first-line transactions All exchanges have launched their token MOVE. MOVE performed well after the opening. The price of MOVE rose all the way to exceed 1 US dollar, which means that Movement's FDV exceeded 10 billion US dollars as soon as the market opened.

Movemnt’s performance is the envy of other project developers. This has also caused some industry insiders to question, "The top capital bureau has launched three major exchanges at the same time. The king capital bureau has its own great scholars to debate the scriptures for me. It is the trend of attention in the Z era. I saw an ERC20 issued on Ethereum. .."

Why did Movement have a market value of 10 billion at the beginning? Is Movement’s market capitalization of US$10 billion high? On December 10, 2024, Hack VC, the lead investor in Movement A round, issued an article discussing its investment logic in Movement.

Today marks a major 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 funding round. This article shares Hack VC’s investment philosophy on Movement.

Problem

Smart contract hacking has been a significant problem since the inception of Web3, and it remains a problem that remains largely unsolved. In 2022, smart contract hacks cost over $3 billion.

Solving the smart contract hacking problem is a key factor for Web3 and DeFi to succeed and become mainstream. In traditional finance, systems sit behind firewalls and code bases are private, so catastrophic events are rare. If you perform a Stripe transaction, wire transfer, or Venmo payment, the code that performs those transactions is generally not considered. This is because people don’t have to worry about the code behind these transactions being compromised.

Unfortunately, in the current state of Web3, you really need 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 code base is open source and public. This is actually a treasure map that we hand over 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 often written in Solidity, which we believe is an unsafe language for developers. Because the language is not type-safe, memory-safe, or formally verifiable, developers can easily make mistakes. This will lead toRe-entrancy attacks, which were the primary cause of the $3 billion smart contract hack mentioned earlier.

Hear directly from Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche at our annual shareholder meeting, where he will discuss these issues and how next-generation virtual machines like Move can provide more scalable, secure and developer-friendly blockchain solutions.

Background: The Move Language

The Move programming language helps solve 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, reducing the likelihood of smart contracts being hacked and making it easier for developers to find and fix bugs.

Sui and Aptos were the first to use Move in Web3. They are trying to disrupt Ethereum as well as certain 2018-era blockchains such as Avalanche, Hashgraph, Polkadot, and others. The Sui and Aptos teams built slightly different versions of the virtual machines 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 legacy EVM interpreter for backward compatibility.

This has several interesting value propositions:

1. New Move-based dApps can be built from scratch using Move instead of Solidity on Ethereum L2. This is an improvement over EVM native dApps, as Solidity is not type-safe or formally verifiable and is prone to bugs and attacks. Move solves these problems by providing a more secure environment for smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem.

2. Existing dApps currently running on Sui or Aptos can be cross-deployed to Ethereum. This is significant as it allows 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 could be easily ported to Aptos or Sui, allowing these dApps to access users on multiple chains, and allowing Aptos and Sui to access other dApps.

4. This generally leads to increased use of Move across the board, which is important because developer adoption of Move is still in its infancystages and contributes to 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 transaction data for resource safety, type safety, and memory safety. It uses a borrow checking scheme that allows only one mutable reference to a value at any given time.

2. The bytecode interpreter will execute the transaction 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 intended methods. This is also crucial for safety.

4. The platform has built-in type safety and memory safety. This helps prevent reentrancy attacks common in Solidity.

5. Verification tools can pinpoint the target call state and use it to identify 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) into a 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 sequencer, which they call M1. M1 integrates with Movement’s Ethereum L2. This provides reorganization protection and uptime guarantees with fast final sorting. This opens the door to parallel processing, increasing throughput by a factor of 10-100. These performance improvements make Movement ideal for high-performance use cases such as gaming and low-latency DeFi. Low transaction costs also enable fine-grained transactions, such as fast NFT minting.

3. Snowman has a built-in BTC bridge to obtain additional liquidity.

4. Cosmos interoperability is achieved through IBC support.

5. Movement has a dual pledge model to provide financial incentives for decentralized sorting.

6. Movement ecosystem has built-in atomic composability between Rollups, 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 base. This provides Web2 developers with an easy onboarding mechanism to build in Web3.

Dazzling Data

At the time of writing, Movement’s launch KPIs are impressive:

Movement already 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+ in Movement The team for native development on has completed financing

TVL has committed more than US$150 million

1.2 million Galxe fans (ranked 20th globally)

1 million active Address

52+ regional Movement Twitter and Telegram groups

Movement meetups across five continents

More than 3,000 people participated in the second week of the testnet 10,000 Deals

Movement has raised over $30 million to achieve long-term financial stability

Graduates of its own startup accelerator, called Move Collective, have raised so far Raised over $10 million

Movement’s future direction

Movement’s ultimate goal is to make its vision even 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 sequencer (M1). These integrations will share a unified settlement layer. With this vision, developers can have their own dApp chains specific to their use cases. In addition, chains such as Avalanche, Polkadot, Hashgraph, etc. will be able to use the higher-level Move language. In this way, developers of Move-based dApps will have access to a larger user base and TVL.

Movement may encounter unforeseen challenges that hinder its development, including execution, performance, competition and other unforeseen challenges.

Summary

At Hack VC we believe security is an extension of Web3and mainstream development are crucial. 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 an ultimately robust and comprehensive product.

Movement combines mission-critical security benefits with enhanced performance and user experience, which we believe is the complete vision for transforming Web3. We are excited to lead Movement’s Series A round and congratulate the team on today’s successful token issuance. We look forward to our journey together.