What is Move Language

Move is a programming language based on Rust, developed for Meta's Diem blockchain project. Move was created to address the limitations of existing smart contract languages by offering scarcity, determinism, and verifiability. Unlike traditional programming languages, Move is tailored for blockchain applications, emphasizing security and efficiency. The language's platform-agnostic nature supports cross-blockchain libraries, tools, and a developer community.

Advantages of Move Language

Move offers multiple advantages over existing blockchain languages. Its resource-oriented programming model and built-in security features make it ideal for building secure, high-performance blockchain applications. Move's design emphasizes security, aiming to avoid many common Web3 issues such as re-entrancy vulnerabilities, poison tokens, and spoofed token approvals. Digital assets are treated as resources, meaning they cannot be arbitrarily duplicated or destroyed.

Object-Oriented and Asset-Based Programming

Move is designed as an object-oriented and asset-based programming language. In Sui Move, objects are central, allowing for fine-grained access control. The global storage structure maps object IDs to objects, enabling efficient transaction handling and precise access representation. Move's capabilities model ensures that objects have specific permissions, preventing unauthorized actions like copying or deleting objects.

Formal Verification with Move Prover

Move Prover is a verification tool that helps developers write formal specifications for their applications' critical features and check code execution correctness within 30 seconds. This tool is essential for preventing common smart contract errors, allowing for the specification of preconditions, postconditions, and data invariants. Move Prover integrates with the Move build system, enabling developers to verify their code easily.

Governance and Community Tools

Initially developed at Facebook without formal governance, Move's evolution now involves a diverse team from various institutions, including academia and the security community. The language's design principles focus on simplicity and cross-platform applicability, ensuring that it remains flexible and accessible to both experienced smart contract developers and newcomers from Web2. Move's governance approach aims to avoid controversial decisions by focusing on core principles and expanding the language only when necessary.

Early Move Ecosystems

Sui

Early Move Ecosystems

Sui

Sui is a decentralized proof-of-stake blockchain with horizontally scalable throughput and storage, developed by Mysten Labs. The team behind it comes from Novi Research, Meta's advanced blockchain R&D division dedicated to the Diem blockchain and Move programming language. The founding team includes CEO Evan Cheng, CPO Adeniyi Abiodun, CTO Sam Blackshear (founder of Move), Chief Scientist George Danezis, and Chief Cryptographer Kostas Chalkais.

Sui is expected to handle over 120,000 TPS, process independent transactions in sub-seconds, and handle more complex transactions (shared objects) in 3 seconds. Transaction dependencies are mapped out before execution, allowing independent transactions to be processed via Byzantine consistent broadcast, while transactions involving shared objects are handled by a consensus protocol called Narwhal & Tusk.

Sui has made certain changes to Move's core functionalities, especially regarding global storage operators and key capabilities. These changes retain Move's security and flexibility while optimizing storage and addressing mechanisms, improving network performance and reducing transaction confirmation times.

Aptos

Aptos is a Layer 1 blockchain with the mission of creating universal and fair access to decentralized assets for billions of people. It was co-founded by CEO Mo Shaik and former Meta lead blockchain solutions engineer CTO Avery Ching. Before Meta, Mo worked at ConsenSys, BlackRock, and the Boston Consulting Group, while Avery worked at Yahoo. The Aptos team comprises PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers, and strategists with experience at Meta, Novi, Amazon, VMware, and more.

Aptos currently achieves up to 10,000 TPS, with a theoretical maximum throughput of 160,000 TPS. Most transactions are validated after two network broadcasts, with a finality time of 250 milliseconds. The high throughput is enabled by decoupling the transaction execution layer from the consensus protocol, achieving parallel execution through Block-STM and sub-second latency through state synchronization. The consensus engine is adapted from Diem's HotStuff and its fourth iteration by the team.

Aptos extends the core MoveVM with additional features via an adapter layer, including parallelism through Block-STM, enabling concurrent transaction execution without user input, large-scale storage tables in accounts, and fine-grained storage decoupling, where data volume in accounts affects related transaction GAS fees.

Movement Labs

Movement Labs, a blockchain development team, is at the forefront of integrating blockchain networks to support the fastest and most secure Layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. Their mission is to combine smart contract security and parallelization with EVM liquidity and user base. Through their flagship L2, they connect Rollup with the Move Stack, introducing the MoveVM to Ethereum. This article delves into the innovations brought by Movement Labs and the potential of the Move programming language in the blockchain ecosystem.

Background

Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs, has been passionate about distributed systems and network security from a young age. At 14, he began working in engineering and later freelanced using Solidity during college. During this period, he met Cooper Scanlon, and together they joined the early development of the Move ecosystem.

Identifying poor user experiences and smart contract vulnerabilities as major issues in current blockchain infrastructure, Rushi and Cooper founded Movement Labs in 2022. Their goal was to accelerate innovation in the crypto space, enabling developers, even those without large teams and expensive auditors, to build the next big applications on-chain.

Addressing Security Concerns

Between 2022 and 2023, hackers exploited smart contract vulnerabilities, stealing over $5.4 billion worth of crypto assets through common reentrancy attacks affecting major protocols like Curve and KyberSwap. To solve these problems, Movement Labs aims to build a modular blockchain ecosystem based on Move, starting with M2, Ethereum's first MoveVM Layer 2. They also introduce a new execution environment designed for over 30,000 transactions per second (TPS).

The Move-EVM allows developers to deploy verified code at runtime, preventing reentrancy and other attack vectors. This "Integrated Approach" combines shared ordering, embedded formal verification, alternative data availability, and Ethereum settlement to enhance security and performance. Additionally, Movement Labs will launch the Move Stack, an execution layer framework compatible with Rollup frameworks from companies like Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum.

Integrating Move with Modularity

Integrating modularity is central to Movement Labs' design philosophy. By breaking the blockchain stack into modular components with clear interfaces, seamless integration, customization, and upgrades are achievable. Developers can mix and match modules to customize their stacks. This integrated modular architecture offers significant advantages in scalability, security, and innovation over monolithic designs.

Parallel EVM and Move

Parallel EVM is an exciting development for improving Ethereum's scalability and performance. Move and Solidity serve different purposes and can coexist and complement each other. Move's focus on security and expressiveness makes it suitable for building complex smart contracts and high-performance applications. Meanwhile, Solidity has a large ecosystem and developer community. At Movement Labs, developers can choose the language that best meets their needs. By implementing the MoveVM in the Ethereum execution environment, significant increases in throughput are achievable, enabling developers to create new types of Ethereum applications.

Decentralized Sequencer

Movement is a modular L2 where M1 is the chain's execution layer, and M2 has an integrated decentralized sequencer node mechanism, providing a free gas market for the Movement network.

Compatibility between Move and Solidity

Solidity's programming logic differs significantly from Move's. Movement has designed a translator for Solidity, allowing smart contracts written in Solidity to adopt OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) principles on Movement in the future. However, translated contracts may encounter engineering challenges, such as differences in token and NFT standards or limited access to some Move objects when using Solidity.

Funding

On April 25, Movement Labs completed a $38 million Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, Robot Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, Binance Labs, dao5, and Aptos Labs.

Move, a programming language initially created by Facebook for the Diem project, is gaining attention in the crypto space. Placeholder explained the significance of Move in their article "From Solidity to Move."

Future Roadmap

In the short term, developers can expect the first Move smart contract deployments on the Ethereum testnet. Movement Labs will also release a suite of Move tools and resources to support developers. In the long term, they aim for a full rollup launch on the mainnet, bringing the power of Move to the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

As part of their global expansion strategy, Movement Labs places great importance on the Asia-Pacific region. Recognizing the immense potential and talent within the Move development community, they will continue to support Asian Move developers by providing the necessary resources, education, and opportunities to showcase their outstanding work and contribute to the growth of the Move ecosystem.