Varys Capital is excited to partner with Movement Labs and serve as the lead investor in its pre-seed funding round alongside esteemed backers such as Borderless Capital, Blizzard, Colony, dao5, 32-Bit Ventures, Interop Ventures, Elixir Capital, Serafund, Taureon, Benqi, AlphaCrypto, Merkle Tree Capital, Proof Capital, Phoenix, Silvermine Capital, and Token Metrics. The raise is also supported by top industry angels such as Eigenlayer’s Calvin Liu, Berachain’s Smokey The Bera, Avail’s Anurag Arjun, GMX’s CoinFlipCanada, 4RC’s Nomatic, DeFi Dad, and the cofounders of Ankr.

Movement Labs is developing a network of composable Move-based blockchains, beginning with M1. Combining the high performance of the Move Virtual Machine (MoveVM) and the low latency of Avalanche consensus, M1 will be the highest throughput Layer 1 blockchain in the industry.

“Varys Capital's investment has gone far beyond contributing capital, comprehensively supporting our team every step of the way from the start of Movement.” - Cooper Scanlon, Cofounder and CEO

Problem and Solution

The emergence of smart contracts represents a technological leap, offering an unprecedented opportunity to reshape various industries such as payments, financial services, artificial intelligence, gaming, telecom, and supply chain—eliminating third-party intermediaries and enhancing transparency.

However, despite its disruptive potential and a market cap of $1.1T, crypto remains a nascent industry. Smart contracts, which execute commands on distributed ledgers, are constrained by the architectural limitations of their underlying blockchain network.

Early-generation smart contract platforms have gained significant traction, especially with the advent of DeFi (decentralized finance), GameFi, and emerging enterprise applications, but this adoption often comes with trade-offs in economics, latency, or decentralization. High levels of blockchain activity often lead to network congestion, resulting in prohibitively high gas fees or network degradation and user experience issues.

Additionally, widely used decentralized applications (dApps) become prime targets for malicious actors, who look to exploit security vulnerabilities inherent in popular smart contract programming languages such as Solidity (used by the Ethereum Virtual Machine). According to Chainalysis: in 2022 alone, $3B in assets were stolen due to smart contract exploits, underscoring the vital need for secure blockchain platforms.

To address these issues, Movement Labs is developing Movement, a modular blockchain framework to deploy Move-based dApps and infrastructure, enabling a highly secure, performant, and flexible execution environment for users and developers. M1 is Movement’s first blockchain: a general-purpose, interoperable Layer 1 built with the Avalanche Stack (Fig. 1).

Move vs. Competing Virtual Machines

In 2019, the Move language was created for the Libra blockchain (since rebranded to Diem), a now-retired project developed by Meta. Recognizing the advantages of the Move language, talented developers continued to contribute to its ecosystem, leading to the creation of blockchains that utilize the MoveVM, such as Aptos, Sui, and M1.

Move employs resource-oriented programming, differing from Solidity and the EVM by making it challenging to accidentally or maliciously modify smart contract data. This is achieved through Move's linear type system and other built-in safety features.

Both the MoveVM and the EVM employ bytecode verification to ensure that the code is well-formed and safe to execute, although Move incorporates additional safety checks tailored to its security-focused design goals.

Additionally, Move enables transactions to include user scripts, offering the flexibility to perform multiple actions within a single transaction. These embedded features position Move as an appealing alternative for smart contract development (Fig.2).

Why M1?

Many monolithic blockchains face the cold start issue of attracting liquidity and galvanizing a developer ecosystem. Cooper Scanlon and Rushi Manche, Movement Labs CEO and CTO, respectively, faced these issues as Move dApp developers, leading them to build a new blockchain network with developer-forward tokenomics and built-in composability.

M1 leverages the existing and novel technology of the Avalanche Stack, including Warp Messaging, enabling composable liquidity across all future Movement blockchains, Avalanche networks, and connected blockchains. This architecture taps into existing liquidity on other blockchains, such as the Avalanche C-Chain, solving competing ecosystems' cold start problem while enabling higher transaction throughput and near-instant finality (Fig.3).

As such, M1 is Movement’s first blockchain in a network of interlinked, custom blockchains. Future Movement blockchains may support alternative Move-based virtual machines, custom virtual machines, vertical-specific chains, and app-specific roll-ups—secured by the M1 validator set or launched as a new Movement network.

Movement is uniquely architected to be able to scale horizontally with additional custom blockchains to meet developer demand, with native roll-up support and full vertical composability with their respective primary chains. This process can be replicated across Layer 1 ecosystems to create the unified Movement network.

Movement can seamlessly process traffic across multiple blockchain environments while reducing security vulnerabilities at the smart contract level due to the robustness of MoveVM. With this technology, Movement Labs is ushering in a new generation of blockchain scaling and developer possibilities.

Movement Labs' Builders Program to incubate and accelerate network participation is now accepting applications. Developers can sign up here: https://form.asana.com/?k=V1Tjp1abMmfgHzSp-6jkHg&d=1204965688263751

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About Movement Labs

Movement Labs is the creator of the Movement SDK, a modular framework to build and deploy Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. The team is building a suite of products and services that empower non-Move protocols to leverage the power of the Move Programming Language without writing a single line of Move code. The team’s first release, M1, redefines the L1 as a vertically composable and horizontally scalable Layer 1 Framework that is Solidity compatible, connects EVM and Move liquidity, and lets builders customize modular and interoperable app-chains with a diverse base of users and liquidity accessible out of the box.

About Varys Capital

Varys Capital is a global, multi-strategy digital asset fund and market-maker that invests in and supports early-stage and growth-stage companies building blockchain-enabled businesses. We are a highly differentiated capital partner with a deep understanding of the digital asset ecosystem and a proven track record of success as investors and operators. We provide our portfolio companies with access to capital, expertise, and a network of relationships to help them scale and succeed. Varys Capital was established in 2018 and is headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand with a UAE expansion underway.

SOURCES: CoinGecko, Chainalysis, Move Langauge Github, Movement Labs Documentation, Varys Capital Research.