MOVE drops following Movement mainnet beta
Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche says its approach affords “all the benefits of Move combined with Ethereum’s liquidity”
Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche | Permissionless III by Mike Lawrence for Blockworks
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One of the more hotly anticipated airdrops is happening today, with the MOVE Token Generation Event (TGE). Movement Labs’ Movement mainnet beta went live on Dec. 5 ahead of today’s “MoveDrop.”
The Movement chain’s big idea is to provide the MoveVM execution environment, but settle to Ethereum, with a focus on the scalability and security sides of the typical blockchain trilemma.
Movement’s approach parallels the Eclipse chain’s use of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) to extend Ethereum’s capabilities. Just as Eclipse allows Solana developers to interact seamlessly with Ethereum without abandoning the SVM’s advantages, Movement Labs enables Move developers to branch out from Sui and Aptos, while still taking advantage of Move’s safety-focus and a high-throughput environment, according to Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs.
“We are the first and only Move-based Ethereum scaling solution,” Manche, who comes from an Aptos background, told Blockworks. “So, if you think of it, all the benefits of Move combined with Ethereum’s liquidity.”
The TGE distributes up to 10% of the MOVE token supply, designed to reward community contributions and participation. On the first day of trading, MOVE is seeing an $8 billion fully diluted valuation (FDV) down from a high of about $9 billion. That puts it in the vicinity of Celestia (TIA) and Mantle Network (MNT) on an FDV basis.
Movement’s token plays a role in the network operations, as “attestants” must stake MOVE tokens to offer finality guarantees for transactions.
Movement Labs has undergone significant architectural changes during its development. Initially, the project was designed as a standard optimistic rollup on Ethereum. However, optimistic rollups typically have a seven-day period to fully settle on Ethereum.
Unlike rollups, Movement does not need to wait for Ethereum finality, thanks to its “post-confirmation” mechanism. This system, akin to a pre-confirmation, provides a better user experience given a one-second finality, though at the expense of some security guarantees. While Movement does not inherit Ethereum’s security, the economic collateral from stakers is subject to slashing — closer to the Polygon PoS sidechain than to a zk-rollup.
“We need to have an economic stake built up ahead of time, such that if someone’s malicious or transactions go wrong, we have something to slash,” Manche said, in justifying the launch of the token before the production version of the Movement mainnet.
Developers stand to benefit from Movement’s architecture. A high-throughput execution environment and improvements to smart contract security are at the core of the Move programming language, which is widely regarded as being safer than Solidity. Some examples of applications already building on the network include the Meridian DEX, lending market Echelon, and Bracket, which offers innovative prediction market tools.
Movement’s competitive strategy is focused on community and developer engagement.
“The moat is in each community, which is something that you can’t fork,” Manche said, noting their approach avoids unsustainable practices like incentivized liquidity programs.
Manche says Movement is more closely-aligned with other Move-based chains than it is to Ethereum.
“Obviously, we’re an odd duck in the EVM and Ethereum community, given the fact that we’re doing alternative VMs, we have an alternative rollup framework and the architecture of the token design as well,” Manche said.
But there’s room for the full-range of experimentation in the Ethereum design space to compete with high-throughput chains like Solana, he said.
Disclosure: Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz is an angel investor in Movement Labs.
Updated March 13, 2025 at 10:18 am ET: Added disclosure.
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