Movement Labs Nears $100M Funding Round, Valuing the Web3 Developer at $3B

Web3 development firm Movement Labs is reportedly nearing completion of a $100 million venture capital round, an investment that would value the company at $3 billion, according to a Monday report by Fortune, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The $3 billion valuation would make Movement Labs a blockchain “unicorn,” a term used to describe privately held companies valued at $1 billion or more. According to Crunchbase, other recent blockchain unicorns include Celestia and Story Protocol.

Web3 projects raised a total of about $1.6 billion in Q4 2024, according to Blockworks Research. While this marks an increase compared to the bear market of 2023, it still falls short of the highs of early 2022, which saw several quarters of over $10 billion in Web3 project funding. Movement Labs had previously raised $38 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital in 2024.

In December 2024, Movement Labs launched the mainnet for its Ethereum Layer-2 (L2) network, deploying its native MOVE token. The beta launch prioritized onboarding infrastructure providers, such as nodes and indexers, before opening up the network to general users.

The MOVE token plays a crucial role in Movement Labs' approach to transaction settlements. The company has introduced a unique mechanism called “postconfirmations,” which are designed to settle transactions on Layer-2 networks at speeds faster than traditional methods.

In a Sept. 2 blog post, Movement Labs described postconfirmations as an alternative to zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs and fraud proofs for Ethereum L2 transactions. “This mechanism reduces confirmation times to less than one second,” the company stated.

Fraud proofs on optimistic rollups, such as Arbitrum and Optimism, can take up to seven days to finalize transactions, while ZK rollups, despite offering faster confirmation times, often come with high costs.

According to Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche, postconfirmations allow applications to route transactions through a validator network that is secured by the MOVE token.

“You can launch a custom rollup using a set of validators, accept L2 security, and still post call data to Ethereum,” Manche explained. This process enables developers to maintain high transaction throughput and selectively settle data on Ethereum when necessary.

Movement Labs is named after the Move programming language, a Rust-based framework that was initially designed for blockchain applications. Several other prominent Web3 development firms, including Aptos and Sui, have also adopted Move for their projects.