Movement Labs to close $100M VC round: Report

Movement Labs, a Web3 startup building an Ethereum layer-2 (L2) network, is preparing to close a venture financing round expected to raise $100 million, according to a Jan. 8 report by Fortune. 

The venture round would reportedly value Movement at approximately $3 billion. 

The deal will establish Movement as the latest blockchain developer to attain “unicorn” status by being valued at more than $1 billion. Other recently minted unicorns include Celestia and Story Protocol, according to Crunchbase.

Web3 projects raised roughly $1.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024. This is significantly lower than early-2022 quarterly highs of nearly $11 billion but higher than during the 2023 bear market, the data shows. 

In 2024, Movement raised a $38 million Series A led by Polychain Capital, according to Fortune.

A network on the MOVE

In December, Movement’s L2 completed its mainnet launch and distributed its native token, MOVE. The “beta” launch focuses on onboarding infrastructure providers such as nodes and indexers before progressing to general users. 

Movement aims to differentiate itself with a new mechanism for quickly settling transactions directly on L2s, Rushi Manche, Movement’s co-founder, told Cointelegraph in a September interview.

Fast finality ‘postconfirmations’ are an alternative to existing methods for settling Ethereum L2 transactions — such as zero-knowledge (ZK) and fraud proofs — with the potential to cut confirmation times to less than 1 second, Movement said in a Sept. 2 blog post. 

Fraud proofs on optimistic rollups such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Base “can take seven days for finality, and zk-rollups can be expensive,” Manche said.

With postconfirmations, applications building on Movement’s L2 can optionally route transactions to a network of validators secured by its native MOVE token, Manche said. 

“You can launch a custom rollup using a set of validators, accept L2 security, and still post call data to Ethereum. This allows you to maintain high throughput while settling on Ethereum when necessary,” Manche said. 

Movement is among several Web3 developers — including Aptos and Sui — building blockchains on Move, a Rust-based programming language. 

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