Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain developer, secured a $38 million Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital to advance its mission of integrating Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine into Ethereum (ETH). This integration aims to enhance smart contract security and transaction speed.

The funding round attracted investments from prominent venture capital firms such as Hack VC, Placeholder, Figment Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Aptos Labs. Movement Labs highlighted that the Ethereum ecosystem suffered losses exceeding $5.4 billion between 2022 and 2023 due to smart contract exploits.

Move-EVM, a product developed by Movement Labs, aims to mitigate such vulnerabilities by enabling developers to deploy code that undergoes real-time verification, thereby thwarting attack vectors like reentrancy. Move is a Rust-based programming language initially created by Facebook for its Diem blockchain project, later repurposed for various platforms to facilitate writing secure smart contracts for cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and decentralized apps.

In a bid to drive Move adoption, Movement Labs secured a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023, with contributions from Varys Capital, Avalanche Fund by Blizzard, dao5, Borderless Capital, and other stakeholders within the Wormhole developer ecosystem. Notable angel investors like Chandler Song, Ryan Fang, Stanley Wu from Ankr, George Lampeth from dao5, and Calvin Liu from Eigenlayer also participated.

Aside from introducing the Movement SDK to streamline the development of secure Move environments for established blockchains, Movement Labs also partnered with Covalent (CQT) earlier this year. This collaboration aims to integrate real-time data indexing and deployment tools, including Covalent’s Unified API and GoldRush Kit, into the Movement ecosystem.

Covalent’s Unified API provides seamless access to real-time and historical blockchain data, crucial for AI applications in the web3 space. On the other hand, the GoldRush Kit enhances user experience by offering a user-friendly interface for accessing and visualizing historical blockchain data within the Movement Labs ecosystem.