Dealflow Podcast
[Ep#6] Unpacking @movementlabsxyz and Its ecosystem ft. @rushimanche
In this episode, we explore Movement's integration with Ethereum, advantages of Move-VM over EVM, and Rushi's vision for Movement’s L2.
We also cover Aptos Labs' role, founder priorities, Movement's culture, and its vibrant ecosystem of projects.
0:00 Intro
02:30 what is Movement Labs and it’s origin
5:30 What movement offers that Sui and aptos doesn’t
8:00 Firewall Importance and Permission less
10:07 Move versions (Aptos & Sui) how it works ?
13:00 End Vision of Movement Labs
15:24 Movement: Hype and Community Building
19:13 Funding in Bear VS Bull
22:39 Rushi on Community Pitfalls
25:00 3 important factors of a blockchain project
32:57 Movement Ecosystem Overview
34:43 Movement’s Growth In Each Verticals
37:22 Strategy Behind The Traction
39:35 Movements labs : Core Concept
41:14 Outro
[Disclaimer: It's important to note that the information provided here does not constitute financial advice. The views and opinions expressed herein are purely personal and do not in any way represent or reflect the official stance or viewpoints of the individuals company]
In this episode, we explore Movement's integration with Ethereum, advantages of Move-VM over EVM, and Rushi's vision for Movement’s L2.
We also cover Aptos Labs' role, founder priorities, Movement's culture, and its vibrant ecosystem of projects.
0:00 Intro
02:30 what is Movement Labs and it’s origin
5:30 What movement offers that Sui and aptos doesn’t
8:00 Firewall Importance and Permission less
10:07 Move versions (Aptos & Sui) how it works ?
13:00 End Vision of Movement Labs
15:24 Movement: Hype and Community Building
19:13 Funding in Bear VS Bull
22:39 Rushi on Community Pitfalls
25:00 3 important factors of a blockchain project
32:57 Movement Ecosystem Overview
34:43 Movement’s Growth In Each Verticals
37:22 Strategy Behind The Traction
39:35 Movements labs : Core Concept
41:14 Outro
[Disclaimer: It's important to note that the information provided here does not constitute financial advice. The views and opinions expressed herein are purely personal and do not in any way represent or reflect the official stance or viewpoints of the individuals company]
Welcome to another episode of the DealFlow podcast. I'm your every week host Mixed Race Magic Chief Editor at BSCN. So before we kick things off, before we get into the interesting parts, just a quick word to say today is a podcast in every sense of the word. We're going to give opinions, subjectivity, discussion of all kinds of stuff. Nothing in this podcast is in any way intended to constitute financial, legal advice, or advice in any way for that matter purely for entertainment purposes. So please keep that in mind. With me today are guests that I'm guessing you're probably already familiar with, in the form of KDOT, who is the general partner at MH Ventures, and also Mehdi, who heads up investment and partnerships at the one and only Animoca Brands. However, we do have, in addition to our regular guests, a very, very special guest today in the form of Rishi. Rishi, maybe you want to introduce yourself just a little bit before we kick things off.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, I'm Rushi, co-founder of Movement. My background is engineering. I was always a nerd throughout my entire life and kind of got into crypto around three and a half years ago. I was super into distributed systems and cyber security and eventually found myself in the Move language and here we are building Movement. The first Move EVM layered 2.0 theorem.
Speaker 1:Amazing. We're very, very proud, very privileged to have you here today. Our topic today, I mean we could certainly put our heads together and think of some sort of fancy punchy one-liner for the topic, and I'm sure we'll do that. But really the topic today is Movement Labs itself, and it's a project that I mean I probably won't go into too much detail right now, but it's had some very, very exciting updates over the last sort of month month and a half, I think it's fair to say and is a project that you know, probably doesn't take a genius to guess is in some way related to, to the move ecosystem, the move programming language, but it's one that I've been really, really excited to see popping up and sort of rising to prevalence within the space.
Speaker 1:Right, I think it's not controversial to say that up until today, the move ecosystem has really meant two layer one blockchains, which is aptos, and sui to a certain extent, like some definitely some exciting stuff going on around that. But the idea that we were going to have, you know, we are going to have um, you know, an ethereum native layer two that is dedicated to this specific ecosystem and its advantages is, I think, in a lot of ways, really, really exciting. Actually, um, don't know what it means for aptos and sui. We can definitely get into that, that's for sure. But you know, maybe, before we dive into some more specific questions, rushi, if you want to give an overview of movement labs, what it is, the origins behind it, so on and so forth so me and my co-founder, cooper, were early builders in aptos august 2022.
Speaker 2:I was building a DEX and Cooper was building a yield aggregator. Back then and early on we kind of recognized how exciting it was. Right, this was Facebook's programming language that they released, put a lot of resources, they put over a billion dollars in research into developing this language and then they spun up to Appleton and SUI, which were two of the main leader ones post the regulation from the United States government and then when I was in college, I was really looking at this moving system. I was really excited about it. I had written code like Cosmos and Solidity for a while and it was actually a pain to write code. For example, writing account checks and move took around 10 lines, while in the EVM it took like three pages and even like the SVM took like 50 to 70 lines to write account checks. So even to the basic security checks in a move was a 10x experience and I realized that early on, especially as like a broke college kid who didn't have the ability to pay tens of thousand dollars auditing fees and didn't have the ability to do tens of tens of thousands of hours even in manual labor. So post ftx, we really took a step back and realized this move language was powerful, right, um, it was the most secure and fastest game in the market. Um, but need liquidity. It was very difficult to acquire liquidity, especially in appleton sui, and what better way to do that than ethereum liquidity?
Speaker 2:So movement started as the first move evm layer to eth. It leverages Ethereum for settlement so you can tap into native ETH and all the security benefits of Ethereum. But execution layer it really has full end-to-end BICO compatibility with the EVM. So if you're writing a slowly smart contract, you don't need to write a move smart contract to interact with Movement Network. You can simply deploy your slowly smart contract in a silly code. So it's like a paralyzed EVM with all the benefits of the MoveVert machine and the MoveProver. And yeah, last week we announced our Series A. To date, we've raised around $42 million. I'm excited to be joined with some of the backers here as well.
Speaker 1:And which backers are you most excited to have on the cap table?
Speaker 2:Image Ventures is my favorite, and then Mayday is my favorite, and then maybe he's my favorite.
Speaker 1:That's what I like to hear, really. Oh, because I've heard bad things.
Speaker 3:I've heard you know well, I'm gonna kick you out of this uh podcast what me?
Speaker 1:yeah for saying that I'm the host. I'll kick you out. I'm pretty sure it's your link, so fair enough, I better back off, um, but yeah, so you've actually kind of you've undermined me entirely, rishi, because my next question was actually why does ethereum need, uh, its own sort of l2 move ecosystem, which I think you basically answered, which is, to put it really, really bluntly, move vms have these efficiency shaped advantages for the most part, and ethereum obviously has better liquidity than anywhere else, including a lot of centralized locations as well. Just like, as a side note, so I suppose, to go off from a question there, what you know, could we speak a little bit more specifically about what it is that movement labs offers, that maybe sui and aptos don't yep and therefore does the existence of movement now and going forward impact the eventual sort of trajectory journey, whatever you want to call it for, swe and Aptos?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll answer the question in two parts. I'll say, like, what movement brings to Ethereum is twofold. It's speed and performance. So BlockSTM is the main parallelization engine that was pioneered from the DM program and Aptos kind of took it on mental and even, like Monad, is based off BlockSTM and now future parallelization engines are kind of based based off that parallelization engine. So obviously you're bringing high throughput runtimes and parallelization to Ethereum.
Speaker 2:The second thing which is unique to Move is the security aspect. Formal verification is the most important tool in security. When you go to an auditor they formally verify each line of code, check for resource type in memory, safety, bugs. What move does is in runtime is checking for those bugs. So in web two you have a firewall right. So if there's a virus coming into your laptop, there's a way for the system to detect if there's any issues, if there's memory leaks and stuff. That's not possible in crypto today, because if you're deploying a smart contract and there's an issue in a smart contract, evm simply lets it go by. There's no firewall At the execution level and sequence level it checks for, hey, is this contract exported? Is there ways that it's being manipulated? There's no firewall built in.
Speaker 2:So Move essentially brings the high throughput capacity to Solana, combined with the favorite order at runtime for Ethereum and the AppersonDos and SuiteEq system.
Speaker 2:We actually work pretty closely with AppDos they're actually an investor in Terraround and we work closely with the Eq system building with them and I think the general thesis there is they're very focused on institutional gaming angles and I think the Web3 nativeness is lost in oftentimes. So I think what we're bringing to table is we a Web3 native, we're a degen and also we have Ethereum liquidity right. So if you're an Apdos app or a SWE app, in the past you probably were limited to just Apdos or SWE assets, which aren't the most volatile, aren't the most speculated upon. Now those same apps can deploy on top of us. You have native ETH directly by living on Ethereum. You have EVM assets with topic interoperability and you have full end-to-end IBC compatibility. So you can have all the Cosmos assets like TIA, atom, even USDC from Noble. So the combination of that allows move apps on both AppDisc and Suite to really scale while we're bringing Ethereum liquidity to them.
Speaker 1:So that makes a lot of sense, right, but I guess supposing this wasn't a question that we had planned by any stretch of the imagination. But you talk about how ethereum effectively has no firewall for executing smart contracts, whereas you know, with move, with what you guys are building, that can be offered, does that? And I'm really just, you know, being contrarian here, but obviously part of the ethos of crypto is entirely permissionless. You know, when I hear firewall, I at least think you know preventing malicious or or sort of negative activity, so to speak. Does that sort of, does implementing a firewall like that have implications? For you know what it means to be permissionless and be a permissionless network?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, you can still have a fire, you can still have firewalls to be permissionless, like um, for example, like again, this is concept censorship. Where do you think that a permissionless network should be hack-resistant? Usually for the users. They really care about decentralization, they care about the open network of blockchain, but they don't want to be hacked, right?
Speaker 2:So even if you have runtime verification and even if you have form verification, that doesn't stop the fact that it's decentralized. You still have a Nakamoto coefficient, you still have validators that are censorship-resistant, you just have execution environment that can protect against hacker attacks. So I would say it's a combination of both, where users are embracing the decentralization ethos but also realizing that if you don't have a slight overwatch on top of smart contracts, it's really a negative EV user experience. So I think by combining both the decentralization of Ethereum with the rules that form verification brings to the table, you're able to put the best of both worlds.
Speaker 1:So you guys are basically combining call it, I don't know the ethical approach of Ethereum, in terms of the decentralized ethos and all the rest of it, and marrying it with basically a practical approach and something that prioritizes the end user, kind of above all else Yep Even like if you have a computer that's like decentralized, you're just like running a VPN, you're trying to stay off the grid.
Speaker 2:you can still have a firewall built into your laptop to protect attacker attacks, so you can still embody all the decentralization ethos, but you still don't want to get hacked for four and a half billion dollars every year, which I wouldn't say isn't too crazy.
Speaker 1:No, I think that's fair enough, yeah.
Speaker 4:And Rishi. So in terms of Move, we have two different versions of Move, right, like one with Aptos and one with SWE. Swe one is a bit more object-centric and there are nuances. So how are you guys thinking about consolidating those two ecosystem With your compiler, is it? Is it like can we write codes in both and then it gets basically posted on on ethereum, a virtual machine? Like how are you guys thinking about that?
Speaker 2:yeah, so both languages actually have the same bytecode patterns. Um, it's just different language semantics. So we actually support both aptus and suite move in the runtime. Essentially, bold is both down to the same bytecode and launching the VM. So no matter if you're an AppDesk builder or a C builder, we'll be able to support you regardless. It's similar to JavaScript, where you had React and Vue, which are two frameworks of the same language, which is JavaScript, but the same JavaScript bytecode. Right, similar to Move you have two different frameworks of the same Rust bindings.
Speaker 4:So we're able to support both without any issues. Rushi, so in terms of parallel execution, like one question is, because of move, there is parallel execution. But let's say, in Ethereum, when we have sequencer, if you can make the sequencer run fast and make it very beefy, do you reckon we still require parallelization to basically achieve that throughput? Like, how are you thinking about that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think most sequencers today are kind of broken, like Arbitrum and ZK-SYNC.
Speaker 2:Both died at 100 TPS with inscriptions. So yes, if you increase the hardware requirements for a sequencer you can notch higher throughput, but still isn't enough. The benefit of parallel execution isn't the throughput itself, it's state management. So when you have multiple threads let's say, for example, you have a high activity event like inscriptions on one thread, it doesn't affect Uniswap on another thread, it doesn't affect the game on another thread the multi-threaded processing is actually the benefit of parallel processing because when you have high network activities like GMX going crazy or inscriptions going going crazy, that takes down the network in most layer twos well. So parallel execution you can essentially have multiple threads that can handle load balancing um. So the traditional approach for layer twos now is fractal scaling, where you need l2s and l3s and l4s and it kind of gets ridiculous right because you need to keep scaling to actually scale um, whereas with parallel execution you just need to optimize the base state which is on the layer to itself so, more than throughput, your idea is state management.
Speaker 4:So things like gas fees, like we can optimize for gas fees in the future, future and have parallel fees, market things like that. Is that where your, where your head is?
Speaker 2:yep, exactly like you want local sp markets like that, you want consistent low gas fees. Right, if you look at a lot of these dead layer twos, they have low gas fees because no one's using the chain. But imagine world where you actually have people using the chain, like something like solana. You want the experience to remain the same even when the network's going crazy, and that's only possible with paralyzed markets.
Speaker 1:That makes an awful lot of sense, yeah, and I guess I'm conscious of asking this question so early on, but I feel like it's one that we could potentially get into in a fairly big way. Are you able to talk a little bit about, I guess call it, the end vision for movement labs, and I'm talking here not just about what the ecosystem looks like, but I'm also talking about movements positioning within the industry, right Like, I think, the sort of that. The pure let's call it, like you know, a pure EVM, ethereum, l2, that sector has shown very clearly that first mover or even early mover advantage is just not sufficient. So I know that you guys have that at the moment in a very pure sense, but what does it mean to maintain that advantage sort of over time as well?
Speaker 2:I think it comes with community.
Speaker 2:Right, our code is open source. Anyone can copy and paste in like launch their own move l2. And we actually have a stack that encourages people to launch their own move l2s. We have three flagship l2s are launching within our network. It's more about, like, how you do ecosystem building and name brain name like, name brand and ecosystem building. So, with brand and ecosystem building With our community, we've established ourselves as leaders in this move ecosystem space. For anyone to fork that would be difficult given the fact that we've been doing this for over a year and a half, I think. Generally, any kind of alert to any kind of tech is open source. There's nothing stopping people launching another base to any kind of tech is open source. Like there's nothing stopping people launching another base right, you can go in Conduit, press one quick roll-up, launch and launch your own base OP stack roll-up. But it really depends on your distribution, how you're attracting customers, how you're building community, how you're building hype, and I think that's not something they can replace easily.
Speaker 1:Fair play. So you really think that sort of regardless of how I guess, regardless of how unique the tech is in and of itself right, foundational architecture, actually a project is ultimately a blockchain project is going to live and die by community.
Speaker 2:That's kind of the end there's also some tech things that we have closed source at the moment, which is like the evm interpreter, which is pretty closed source. We're doing some work on sequencer, some monitoring mempools and, um, there's a world we can use a sequencer to monitor transactions and reorder transactions in case of fraudulence. So that's also closed source. So right now, some of the key innovations that we have are closed source, but eventually will be open source to also protect the moat. But yes, I would say community existing building.
Speaker 1:Fair enough. And the EVM converter that's how effectively you guys are going to be able to attract EVM developers to build on the network. Yep, and that's fully proprietary. That's built in-house. Built in-house, fully proprietary. Got it Very cool, very cool.
Speaker 4:Rushi, you mentioned hype and community building. How are you guys doing that? How are you guys building hype and building the community. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think like like obviously the financing does a lot of the work, like I mean, like when you have a large fundraising announcement gets people excited. But I think generally it's like we're really focused on being grassroots. Me and cooper both came from like a ecosystem background. We're early builders in the space. We kind of recognize the downfalls a lot of ecosystems and kind of benefits a lot of ecosystems. Oftentimes, with these later ones, later twos, it gets very bureaucratic where the leadership is abstracted away. It takes like 10 to 15 business days to even get a response from the foundation, which makes it a pretty pain in the ass to work with on any chain, with us constantly online tweeting or just directly responding to people in DMs, helping builders with eXystem grants and connected ventures. We already have like five to six protocols that have closed rounds which we're very excited about.
Speaker 2:But I think, like I mean obviously BarrowChain started this kind of wave of very community-driven ethos and I learned a lot from Smokey and the work he's done over there. But it's also about like how to incentivize net new apps. Right, anyone can copy and paste an EVM app. Anyone can copy and paste an EVM app. Anyone can copy and paste an AppDust app over, but how do you get people thinking about new ideas and design spaces? So we're working with a few teams on move AVSs, move Bitcoin rollups, move AI, stuff even, which is interesting. So experimenting with each kind of category is very important to us, and working with builders who really align with the ethos is important as well.
Speaker 4:And Rushi, between yourself and Cooper, are you kind of dividing, let's say, the product line and community community part between each other? Are you guys kind of like covering both? Uh, because, as you mentioned, like, distribution is as as important as the product. So are you guys having that division of labor where, let's say, one of you guys focuses on community building, goes to all the conferences, the other guy focuses on product, like how you? How do you guys approach that?
Speaker 2:I think generally like I'm more external, facing so I'm at the conferences, I'm with investors and whatnot. Cooper is more internal and works with operations, works on community side, works with like marketing management stuff, um. So I think we kind of have a split where I'm generally more external, I'm the loud one, I'm always the one talking, and cooper is more quiet, reserved and we have a good balancer. Um, cooper is more focused now these days on bde, community building, and I'm kind of focusing more product side, um, but we can't alternate, take turns in the roles and responsibilities rishi, we also saw your cap table.
Speaker 4:Like aptos, as you mentioned earlier, is one of the one of the investors, but uh, smoky from barry chain is also one of the angel investors. So just from a macro perspective, are you guys also thinking about building L2s on other ecosystem apart from Ethereum, like is that part of the roadmap or are you guys already actively working towards that strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we actually have Gaiman, which is like a coin market cap incubator chain. They're doing a move VM on BNB chain. There's a few Barichain products they're exploring move L2 on um, essentially bear chain because there's some throughput issues. I'll come up with bear chain. So how keeping paralyzed state to um bear is something we're exploring. Um, those are three main ones that we're kind of thinking, given my relationship with the teams there, um, we've seen some like move on bitcoin stuff as a team working on that right now, which is really exciting. Um, they're closing around, which I think is generally interesting because it's like you have a paralyzed execution environment living on top of Bitcoin. There's a better trading experience. It's still a pretty early stage and the team's kind of working through that, but that's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:I was just going to ask is it a coincidence that Mist and Labs isn't on the cap table? Do they just not do direct investments. Is that all it is? I don't think we did. It could be a coincidence at least to say I don't know.
Speaker 2:We didn't speak to them in depth about the financing and it seems like their goals are differently than ours. But it wasn't intentional by any means. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Just wanted to clarify that for sure. So, rushi, just a quick question really. So you mentioned at the start that you've raised, I think, 42 million to date. Congrats on that. That was a big announcement, amazing. I would love to know, like your personal experience from raising in the bear to raising in the bull, what's like the massive difference between like you know, you just raised 30 million in your in your recent announcement how, what was the differentiation between a bear and a bull and how much easier was it? And talking to different vcs, just love to know your insight and being able to speak into numerous uh uh venture funds of um, the total experience um and the bear market, people didn't really believe in non-EVMs.
Speaker 2:It was either like EVM or nothing. And now we're seeing, especially in the bull market, more experimentation happen. So 2023 is the year of the DA layers. You had Celestia Eigen, avail. These kind of groups really focused on the DA layer.
Speaker 2:But last year and the year before that no one was thinking about non-EVM experimentation, especially in the bear market um, lps, uh, family offices, funds they really tend to hold on to what was sacred in the past.
Speaker 2:So the evm has always been around there. It was safe um, and that's why the investment choices made sense to that. But I think post ftx um, like there was like eight months where no one invested anything on evm. Like pretty much everyone wrote us off and was like if it's not EVM, it's not going to work out. But I think, especially as the bull market creeped up and people recognized like hey, there's more design spaces, there's more developers, there's more use cases that can be unlocked with execution environments, we saw the Slana VM chains get funded. We saw the Move VM chains get funded so it became a lot easier to sell when obviously there's more capital and there's more willingness to experiment, and then that led to the VM craze that we saw with SVM, move VM, and now pretty much everyone thinks next-gen VMs are here to stay and everyone's really focused on apparelization.
Speaker 3:As you were racing through the bear market. Was there any point or time where you got frustrated? Maybe that they were. It was hard to get fundraising was hard to connect with vcs. No one was really um deploying capital at the time. Was there any point? You're, like you know, forget this? I think maybe I need to try something different. Or was your vision always aligned of movement? Labs is going to be a success? I know I can achieve this. Something big. No one's really tapping into this right now. I should follow through yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think like there were definitely times like, oh, I don't know how it's gonna end.
Speaker 2:Well, is this gonna like be what we envisioned? Um, I think, especially like me and cooper's backgrounds, like we were two college kids, um didn't really have the fancy phds or didn't have the fancy mckinsey job or the fancy um chain link background. We weren't that experienced in terms of resumes and were more community builders. So I think with that, that made the fundraising a little bit more difficult because, especially in bear markets, capital deplorers like to bet on experienced founders and post-exit founders and stuff like that. So I think there was parts where we thought, hey, should we go back and maybe get a job and like, maybe build up more experience? Um, but I think like we never got to that point where we ran out of capital or um, because we map, because I think we always manage our finances pretty well, and um like had good cap table management and whatnot. Um, and then, as kind of bull market creed backed up, we were able to bring in all the interest that we wanted.
Speaker 3:Amazing Manuel. Congratulations on the recent announcement. That was a big, big raise.
Speaker 1:So I was going to ask a question. I don't know whether you heard all of it, but effectively, both myself and, I think, our audience as well will be really excited by the community angle that you guys are pushing sort of in tandem with making impressive tech. And you mentioned a little bit about pitfalls, right, community development, pitfalls and I can definitely think of a few projects EigenLayer being obviously the most recent one that maybe had incredible community development and just completely fumbled the bag like really messed it up. So what kind of pitfalls are you thinking about here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, especially in the move chains, both L1s promised an airdrop, kind of, and then last minute we're like no, we're not doing an airdrop. I think when you look at any original community L1, l2, a lot of those communities are bootstrapped from wealth generation effects. Solano had it at $0.60, the Solano community bid it at $0.60, and then rode all the way up. Even recently it was at $8, a lot of people bid at eight bucks and now it's like the most vibrant community right. So when you look at any, if you're looking at token price action, like usually you'll have to have some kind of wealth creation effect to have long-term holders and long-term believers.
Speaker 2:So obviously you can do the airdrop strategies, um, but I think like what teams are realizing that?
Speaker 2:Like increased predatory airdrop farmers? So the line between like okay, how do you make sure you incentivize your community versus just not like getting civilly attacked and um, just airdropping 10 percent of your supply and getting dumped on right, um, I think like one thing that we're prioritizing is a, obviously having good amount of percentage earmarked for community um, with certain initiatives to keep them long term. But b, I think it's like how do you make sure that people hold on onto the token and have value-cruel mechanisms. So we're announcing a huge program called GILS which essentially creates a bunch of different categories for builders. Whether you're a meme maker, you're an artist, you're a designer, you're a smart content developer, and you essentially get on-chain KPIs. So you're incentivized to essentially hold a token, keep participating in the network, and that leads to more rewards. I can't say too much right now, but over the next few weeks we'll be announcing that program and I think it'll be pretty exciting to see how the on-chain KPIs are built into tokenomic designs.
Speaker 1:That was actually that was going to be. My next question is you know what maybe implementation looks like for you guys?
Speaker 1:but it sounds like next few weeks there's going to be some um, some details coming out for sure would you say fair play, fair play, and yeah, I suppose, take a step, a brief step away from from movement lab, specifically, and we can definitely come back. Um, but one that I did want to ask you, as an already successful founder, and actually very much directed to to cam and medhi too, is if you had to pick sort of everyone knows that a founder, especially a small founding team's capacity, bandwidth is limited If you had to pick three factors of a project that are just an absolute priority when it comes to the early stages of a blockchain project, what would they be? I'm talking here really about stuff like, I think, community development that's obviously going to be pretty high up on that list, I would guess for all of us here things like, you know, building the correct cap table or trying to develop proprietary tech, like what are those sort of two or three key factors that a project founder should be just obsessed with to begin with?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think for me usually first, I do a lot of angel investments myself. Um, usually, like in the span of two years, two or three years, it takes for a protocol to's a lot of pivoting. There's team issues, there's differences with the tech stack. I think it comes down to founder bets. Ultimately, can this founder deliver? Does he have high conviction? Does he have grit?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of the investors that invested on us early on saw that mean Cooper, that like, hey, these are young kids, probably don't have the best acumen in terms of technical experience, don't have the fancy degrees, but they're going to dig down when it gets tough, they're going to stay through this and it's going to be a good bet, I think, for those investors that believed early on. We did a good return for them so far and hopefully we can continue to do so. But even when I'm looking for founders, I think it's always like can this founder withstand a bear market If tomorrow exchange goes down? Are they going to be around crypto tomorrow? They can pivot AI, I think, like for us, we started like the week after FTX started, so it couldn't get any worse than what we started, right? I'm sure, like the rest of the guys can chime in.
Speaker 1:I just I would intro. I love that whole. Do I stay in crypto or do I pivot to AI? Yeah, it's so iconic like why not just do both? But yeah, no, sorry, carry on, cam. Maybe anything to add?
Speaker 4:yeah, typically for me, um, when I'm looking at founders, especially experienced founder, I'm looking for whether they're focusing on product or distribution. In my opinion, more experienced founder um focus more on distribution and I think this was something common with rushi as well right, like he was hustling and and you could see that he, his focus was also distribution, like he was there in all the conferences. He was there in all the relevant circles. Um, so I think, from from a founder perspective, like one thing I'm looking for, at least least in crypto, because we're not building products, like sometimes you're also building economy, especially if you talk about L1s and L2s. So looking for founders that focuses more on distribution for me is a key, rather than just product.
Speaker 1:And what does distribution look like in the blockchain world? Right With material goods? Very, very obvious, you know, even with something like a pure SaaS business, material goods very, very obvious. Um, you know, even with something like a pure sass business, very, very obvious. What does distribution actually mean in blockchain?
Speaker 4:just look at charles hopskin, that's best distribution, right like the way he he carried himself on twitter, youtube. He built a large community, um, maybe perhaps without a product there. There are fans out there that will basically put their life on the line for him and for the, for the vision of the protocol. So I think for me that's distribution and also inspiring other builders to build on top. And that can only come through when you have the vision and your inspiring figure out there like so for me, that's how I kind of see distribution in web3 another example yeah, right, yeah, so it's.
Speaker 4:It's about educating, it's about sharing vision and just inspiring other to build on top of you I guess that's because your product is not something really.
Speaker 1:Your product is basically an economy in some respects, especially if it is an l1 or an l2, so so understand that for sure, cam, is there anything that you particularly look for, admire, think should be a priority?
Speaker 3:I think, like the biggest part is something that we've constantly mentioned throughout this call is like being able to build a community, um, like we know how important that is, and we've numerously said that across how many podcasts we've done up till today is that tech is one thing, and, and being able to build a community and and um, a core community is, is another thing. So, like one of the big things that when we're speaking to founders is we're making sure that these guys understand web three, because I think building a community inside web three is like totally different. And the other thing is like when you're building a certain protocol, if it's a game, then yeah, cool, that's fine. It's easy to build a community because they retail, understand the gaming, uh economy, um, and it's easy to get people to come to within your community and play the game, and they understand it because it's easy to understand, whereas something that's more tech related and focused on, on actual developers, it's like how do you now build a community around you know, uh, an overall web3 community, when it's something that is derived towards, uh, builders?
Speaker 3:So I think that's another unlock and if a founder can do that, um, and we see high conviction, that's somewhere that we, you know, definitely want to invest in. I think that's one of the big things that we look at, because if we're investing in someone that is has no web3 experience, but is, you know, huge developer or you know, has you know, met earth and instagram, or instagram met the same, or whoever in terms of their experience, it doesn't mean that they're going to be able to come in here and somehow navigate around web3 and build a really strong community, because I just don't think that happens. Um, I think, yeah, that's the biggest thing. I believe and, uh, I think we've mentioned that numerous times across certain podcasts.
Speaker 1:I think, just before we wrap up that question and maybe talk a bit more about the movement ecosystem as it is at the moment, one thing that I think is really interesting that nobody here said was oh, you need a certain degree, you need a certain level of education in this field, you need to have worked at a certain firm beforehand. I think that is pretty unique to to web3 and blockchain.
Speaker 3:Like rushi, you would say the position sorry, yeah yeah, I think like that is a great upper hand when it comes to raising funds. Like great, like you've, you know, you've got a certain degree, you've been to harvard or you've been to cambridge, um, it really helps. But like that initiates like a first call with, uh, some certain funds and of course it's great. But I just don't think every successful person has to have gone to university or college or whatever you call it like. For me personally, I didn't go to university, something I didn't want to do. Um, I haven't raised 38 million, but it's not something where I'm like oh I I recognize, but it's like I don't.
Speaker 3:I don't think that every successful person has to have an education. I don't think that is true. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and successful entrepreneurs are people that didn't go on to um further education, so I think we shouldn't dismiss those people at all and and I think there's probably a lot more people in crypto that are successful entrepreneurs that don't have an education. It's just that we see a few of them and people look up to them.
Speaker 1:I personally look at people that are graduated and have degrees and I think you know you guys are academically clever, but it still doesn't mean you're a great founder, there is no degree in exactly what we do in this space yet, like one of the big appeals to me getting into the space was that it is actually probably, I think, the only industry really where young people are taken seriously, because nobody has 30 years experience in this vertical Like it's just complete impossibility.
Speaker 4:So there's a master's right, there's a master's in blockchain, a couple of universities offer. I'll tell you honestly, masters right, there's a master's in blockchain a couple of universities offer. I'll tell you honestly, I learned, yeah, so I did that. I'll tell you honestly, I learned more through reading reports and block works.
Speaker 4:Then right, yeah, and doing that so one of my regret is I might have like studied too much. Uh could have entered crypto like earlier. So, yeah, I don't think this space there's like, yeah, one part to success, I guess 100%, which is, I think, really special, actually as an aside.
Speaker 1:But to go back to our topic for today, rushi, do you think you could give us I guess I want to see an overview of the movement ecosystem as it exists today, so builders, state of it, everything in between.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think we have a unique position in this Ethereum L2 market where there's a bunch of EVM forks for each L2, like on blast, on mode and all these different orbits on base and whatever. We're actually bringing in that new apps A from, obviously, the AppAsense Week system. We're getting a lot of those builders to essentially look at the Ethereum system and how can they bring their learnings from the DM program to a network like Ethereum. But I think what we're really prioritizing and accelerating is unique use cases and unique verticals. So we just hired Ali who is at Reciprocal Ventures and his full-time focus is essentially taking five to seven apps and teams that we have high conviction in putting them through Accelerator and looking at specific category leaders.
Speaker 2:So we have three teams doing a move avs right now. Um, which is like insurance policies around um, policy layers around form verification layers, um. Shared sequencers um. That's one category. We have a team doing a move on bitcoin right now. We have two move um. Ai teams essentially are doing on-chain models with parallel execution, um. And then we have a few gaming apps as well um. So I think, like you can do, you can approach ecosystem building in a traditional way where it's like, yeah, like the decks, you have learning protocol, you have two games, we call it a day, but that what that leads to is a pretty nascent ecosystem where there's no actual excitement behind it. There's no net new things you're bringing to the table, um, and I think we kind of take a step back. We have the learning protocols, we have the decks, but that's not too difficult to get. If you're any half-good founder BD team, you can do that. The question is how to get net new builders and net new products coming into the system.
Speaker 4:Rushi, can you double-click on this? So you mentioned different verticals. Can you explain to us in detail some of the interesting projects in each vertical, which are kind of building either unique use case or use case you're excited about, let's say, from gaming to DeFi, to Infra to middleware?
Speaker 2:We started with Infra, I think like Gordon's a team. They raised capital in the past. Essentially, they're doing a paralyzed VM on top of Bitcoin, so essentially it's an on-chain Bitcoin order book. They can do native BTC swaps any of all the benefits of a paralyzed runtime like move, as well as security benefits. So it's the most secure and fastest way to trade Bitcoin on exchange. Today we have a team called Henry that's doing essentially on-chain cashback, so think of like honey that you have on your browser. They're doing essentially a consumer chain where they can do points programs for shoppers, um. So it's like the first, like consumer shopping focused um blockchain focused on um consumer points, consumer loyalties. That's using a stack um. We have two in stealth ai teams that have just closed rounds that we're super excited for essentially doing on-chain gpus. Um and doing training models on top of the layer to itself. Um. You have two games that are launching as well. Um. I think obviously you have like the dfi system, so you have like total labs, which is the biggest move protocol they're deploying on top of us. You're bringing all the benefits of of lending protocol to stablecoin. They're also working on avs right now. Um, which is pretty exciting. Um I might.
Speaker 2:I tweeted about this yesterday but my inbox got flooded with like lot of move AVS stuff. I think in the past there was a lot of teams that wanted to work on security and insurance, but there wasn't any foundation or ecosystem that was particularly excited about security. Security was never sexy. It was never top priority for any chain or ecosystem. For us, security is the top priority. We want to build a DeFi hub for the most secure transactions and the most secure clients. So we're seeing a lot of AVS work around insurance policies. Can you use restaked ETH as collateral for investments? We're seeing like formal verification rules being built into AVS tooling and yeah, I think there's like we're really focused. I think one thing we realized is like there's a few key verticals like Bitcoin, ai, avs and instead of like trying to create an own narrative we're leaning into of better investment for venture capitalists because they like to invest in these hot categories but they can also get the benefits of the moving system. So I think that's what we're looking at right now.
Speaker 1:So thank you for that. And I mean the truth is so. I knew that with the traction you guys have, the ecosystem must be at least fairly mature. Given the point that you guys are at in terms of development, I didn't expect it to be that extensive. What's been the strategy there? And have all of those teams? Have they been inbound, or has it been the result of really aggressive BD pushes? What's been the strategy there? Because I can think of at least three or four L1 or L2 ecosystems that have been around for 18 months plus that don't have that kind of development.
Speaker 2:I think it's a combination of aggressive BD we have a talented BDT and it's really doing a lot of outreach but also it's like we work mostly with teams and less projects. Like, I think a lot of L1s and L2s look at like a name brand. They try to get them and then try to get deployment. We look at more of a founder level because we have more conviction of founders. So we have, like I would say, say, 10 or 15 founders that we have really high conviction in. Um, that we're like no matter what you do, we'll support you, because usually that's a better bet in any, in any crypto bets, usually a founder-based bet. So if we can find the founders that we like, that are loyal to us, that won't leave in like three weeks to another chain um, that's what's more high priority to us, and then from there we can ask them okay, what are you interested in? How can we help and how can we help you scale the next four to six weeks, and that creates a really comprehensive business model for them.
Speaker 1:Okay and obviously the way you guys are structured is very much angled at efficiency. You guys are streamlined, defi, I think. In a few ways Would you expect to have a meme coin ecosystem in the end? Is it that kind of ecosystem that you guys are going for, like talking community development here?
Speaker 2:We actually already have meme coins, devnet. There's like no coin that's using devnet gas. It's actually up 40. I actually don't know how it's possible. That's like someone can do that, but there's trading on devnet gas right now um for me is it pseudonymous yeah, yeah, yeah it is, but it's like I didn't know it. I tried trading it and I couldn't get devnet gas because it was difficult to get, like a faucet went down um.
Speaker 1:So I guess it's blush well, I didn't expect that answer, but that's pretty cool. Okay, what is it? What is it? Movers?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's called. Let's take those movers. I don't know if I can show tickers properly here, but um, it's pretty good, yeah, everyone go away and do their own research.
Speaker 1:Obviously also rushi. Is there anything that you especially want to talk about with regards to movement that we want to slot in?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think like um, like we're really excited about the raise, I'm really excited about community building. But I think one thing that really emphasizes being open to community, like if you ever want to, if you ever had idea, if you ever have something you want to work on um, you can personally dm me, personally dm the team, um, I respond within like an hour or two, so I'm like chronically online. So I think it's generally like we we're trying to bring in this whole security landscape. I think in the past, like everyone hasn't really focused on security. It's kind of been like a byproduct of you can audit and you might not get hacked.
Speaker 2:But we're really looking at security as this next breakthrough in blockchain innovation. Obviously, everyone's focusing on speed right now, but it's like a Lamborghini without brakes. It doesn't matter if you do 20,000 TPS. If you can't stop hacker attacks, it is 20,000 TPS to enable hackers, right. So really focus on building the DeFi hub and gaming hub where, if you're deploying user assets let's say you're a 14-year-old girl or you're a 16-year-old grandma you want to deploy um assets on your chain, not worried about getting hacked, and then use on-chain finance, right? Um?
Speaker 1:so I think in the next six to twelve weeks, we'll position ourselves as leaders of, like, the smart contract security realm. Very cool, so really key as a, as a point of emphasis, for sure, um cam medley, is there anything you guys want to want to dive into before we wrap up?
Speaker 3:No, I think mainly asked everything and covered a lot of it, so I appreciate your time, Rishi.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah it's been great to have you, I'm excited about the ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too. I didn't know how extensive it was.
Speaker 4:I'm just excited about what they're building and the ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Very nice. Well, likewise, likewise, for sure. So just a final reminder before we wrap up nothing in this podcast, in this episode, was in any way intended to constitute financial or legal advice. We mentioned assets, we mentioned projects. Everything is opinions, potentially very subjective. Please, everyone, understand the risk in crypto and do your own research. Risk in crypto and do your own research.