Movement Launches Public Mainnet Beta, Bringing Move Language o Ethereum Layer 2s

The Movement Network Foundation today launched its Movement Public Mainnet Beta, aiming to bring the Move programming language to Ethereum via a Layer 2 scaling solution.

Movement’s mainnet beta launched with Movement Cornucopia, a liquidity initiative that has accumulated $223 million in total value locked (TVL) to seed decentralized finance activities.

Securing that level of day-one funding “is a clear validation of the market's confidence in Movement,” said Cooper Scanlon, co-founder of Movement Labs.

It gives Movement, its builders and the community a big advantage, Scanlon said in an interview.

“It allows us to skip the months-long bootstrapping phase and immediately provide the foundation needed for meaningful DeFi adoption and utility,” he said.

Cornucopia has four categories of vaults, managed by Concrete and Veda Labs, that accept wBTC, wETH, stablecoins USDT and USDC, and its native MOVE gas token.

“We're really excited to be seeding liquidity as well to make this a very, very good trading environment, whether you want to trade, move BTC and other assets, or even if you want to launch your own or participate in new coin launches,” Scanlon told The Defiant. “We're super excited to see a lot of onchain culture coming to the forefront as well. There's already dog tokens. There's already people who have created really active Beam accounts.”

Key Features

With the new Public Mainnet Beta, “developers can now deploy smart contracts without approval, and users can freely engage with the Movement ecosystem,” said Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs. “This marks the beginning of a new chapter for Move-based technology, combining robust security and better performance with Ethereum's network effects.”

Among its features are permissionless smart contract deployment and full user onboarding and engagement. It will also feature a native, cross-chain bridge for transferring assets to and from other blockchains via LayerZero and Wormhole.

Attestations of block states, a critical part of the consensus mechanism, will be committed to the Ethereum blockchain as part of Movement’s Fast Finality Settlement.

Among the partners coming with the Public Mainnet Beta are borrow/lend market Echelon, decentralized exchange (DEX) Meridian, prediction market BRKT, stablecoin Arche, and MMORPG Laniakea.

A Safer Language

There are a few key things better about Move, Scanlon told The Defiant.

“One, performance. Two, security. And three, being a modern language,” he said.

That means native parallel processing “baked in from the start,” he said. “From a security perspective, it solves reentrancy attacks, as well as being able to define modules for each part of your code. That means you're essentially creating hard coded pipelines of where assets or information can flow to and from, and who has access to it.”

If someone were to hack into a Move vault, Scanlon said, they would have to gain access to the wallet or authorized smart contract in order to actually move funds out of the vault.

“Even if you were able to do that, what you would find that you can only move the funds to certain places,” he said. “You can't withdraw them to an external wallet.”

Facebook Roots

Movement’s roots are in Meta’s doomed Diem stablecoin project for Facebook, which designed its own smart contract language, said Scanlon.

Instead of Ethereum’s Solidity, Move is based on Rust. That’s a big plus, Scanlon said, arguing that while Solidity was the first smart contract language and proved what could be done, it’s out of date.

“It was created before DeFi. It was created before GameFi, SocialFi, all the things that we do and use today,” Scanlon said. “So having a language that was built with this in mind, being significantly more modern… it’s more intuitive to build what you want to build, it’s easier to write your code, cheaper to audit your code, significantly safer, it just accelerates the go-to-market for any application.”

Bringing the Move Virtual Machine to Ethereum by making Movement an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution was a way to accelerate the go-to-market problem that was hindering Move’s adoption, he added.

That’s not to say that Movement is the first network using the Move Virtual Machine (VM). There is Sui, with $1.12 billion in total value locked (TVL), and there is Aptos, with $959 million TVL, according to DeFiLlama.

What About an Airdrop?

So far, there’s nothing official about a Movement airdrop, but some of Scanlon’s comments about his own experiences with Meta suggest that one is likely in the cards sooner rather than later.

Scanlon and fellow co-founder Manche were two of the earliest developers on Move back when it was still under the Facebook’s Diem umbrella, he said.

Having dropped out of college and recruited friends to join them, the pair were “all in” on Diem, Scanlon told The Defiant.

“Our own experience in building is that they did a tremendous job following the Web2 playbook in which you're able to do very, very well by your team, very, very well by your investors, raise huge sums of money, be able to mobilize a gigantic developer talent base to build and ship incredible products,” he said. “But what was missing in our experience was that trickle-down effect. As builders, if you can believe it, we didn't have any piece of the network in the sense that when mainnet launched, we didn't get an airdrop, we didn't get any recognition.”