Why the Move Ecosystem Is Onboarding Devs at Speed l KBW2024

and stay [Music] attentive hello everyone uh my name is Alice go I am the co-founder of na'vi protocol and uh today we come to the conversation of why the move is on boarding at the speed um I'm very pleasured to be here today with uh the creator of move Sam black spere and uh the also the co-founder of miston lab as well as uh rousi the co-founder of uh movement Labs the newly layer layer to build on top of move language to start this conversation so the first conversation I want to start with Sam as a creator of the move language can you tell us more about how language got started and how does that feel yeah of course thanks Elis scope so I'm happy to tell you the story uh so I started off my career as a programming languages researcher I did a PhD studying formal verification static analysis and then for many years in Academia and Industry I worked on building automated bug finding tools and your job when you build automated bug finding tools is you read a lot of code you see a lot of bugs uh you get to understand where language is setting developers up for Success where are they setting developers up to fail what are things that make languages easy to reason about what makes them hard and so inev ibly like you just develop a lot of opinions about software safety about language design about what works well and what doesn't and so in 2018 after a couple years working on this stuff at Facebook um I got invited to join the Liber project and lead the effort on Smart contracts there and you know if you've spent a career studying programming language is the opportunity to design a new programming language in a space where safety is super important is obviously a dream kind of job so I jumped at that opportunity and I got to Libra and what I spent the first couple months doing was the same old thing I did before but for uh smart contracts instead of the the kind of code I was looking at Facebook read Bitcoin code read solidity code read evm and figure out like okay what kind of programs or programmers turn to rate where is the language helping them where is it getting in their way what's working well and what's not and basically there two there are a bunch of things I saw but there were two major ones so the first one is like boy you know for a setting where safety is of the utmost importance uh and the consequences of getting something wrong is someone's going to take your money uh there's not a lot of built-in safety features here you know things like rany this is 2018 this is like the times of the Dow hack was like the the popular the thing the Z gist uh things like energer overflows things like missing authentication checks uh these are all things that are like a big problem with C in the evm it seems like you know you want really nice baked in safety features not to leave these to to chance and then the other thing is that almost all these programs are about assets and access control and so like you want to have really good abstractions for defining assets for saying who holds them for saying the when they can be transferred when they can't and th those were also missing and so with move like the fir the two main things we're really trying to do is to to solve those problems like we want safety by default if there's a way to provide a feature that can avoid bugs like we want to do it and when we update the language we want to make sure that we preserve those nice safety properties that we already had and make things continue to be cohesive and then in terms of nice abstractions like we want the right way to encode assets to encode access control and we want this to be very high level not something lowlevel that we ask programmers to implement again and again and so I think like you know this is really what language design is is like uh if a programming language could be good could do everything well there'd be one programming language and we'd all use that but they're fundamentally tools for problem solving and they succeed to the extent that they solve the problem they're trying to tackle and they fail if they get loose focus and try to do too much so with move you know smart contracts are very idiosyncratic they're not as broad of a problem domain is writing a a compiler or an operating system or web app so you can really just focus single-handedly on those two problems so at Libra over three years I worked with a variety of really great folks on the design implementation of move folks like Dario who designed the B code format of VM Todd who designed the compiler folks who did early engineering like Tim and ran and Victor and we learned a lot uh we did a lot of things well we made a lot of mistakes I think many of which we later fixed when we sort of got a second bite at the Apple with s uh but that's the story of how a move got started wow that's that time must fly by you know and the second question is for rousi rushi could you introduce a like to us a little bit what movement movement Labs is and how it's relationship to the move and you know how does that differentiate Stand Out Among all the other layer TOS so my story isn't as cool as Sam's I was in college reading Sam's tweets and articles and the entire Libra project um and it was super cool because I was I was early Cosmos engineer early theem engineer um and I was getting hacked constantly and it pretty difficult writing solity code um so here was opportunity for the move language to really solve all issues that Sam explain better than I could um and I think our thesis like November 2022 is like we were building on opos I built one of the first apps on optos my co-founder also was a builder uh we were two community members actually um and the general thesis was we really believe in this language for the reason Sam outlined but we wanted to bring to the broad a theum community um I was building in Cosmos and ethereum and no one heard about move at the time there um so General thesis of movement is bringing the language a move bringing the principles of move for security for Block STM for high through execution on ethereum as a layer to um so yeah we're the first move layer to ethereum um so pushing forward the work that Sam and other folks in the move have been doing one of the key factor to evaluate the growth of the development Community is numbers according to the Electric Capital uh report there are 7.5% of uh developers are you are writing move language which is a 50% increase than a year ago so this is a question for Sam and both you know what's driving the move to grow developer grows yeah absolutely so the the number story I'll tell you a number story and I'll tell you a sort of like community and culture story so when you look at the numbers I think these like the latest Electric Capital report is from July of this year so that runs from July 2023 to July 2024 in July 2023 s was really really new it had just come out like two months ago and on any new platform no matter how easy it is to learn it takes developers a really long time to get started to build momentum to figure out what they're trying to do for and for other developers to build the the sort of infro that's some apps need to get started and so I think like two months in s we didn't have a l momentum but fast forward a year to July 2024 and especially like sort of beginning March 20124 there's been a ton of momentum like the that move growing at 50% like s is growing even faster and like the high 60% and we see like we see this in the numbers but also just subjectively from energy and the developer Community like we started to hear I think like around early 2024 of last year like this meme that we really like of like s has the best developer experience and move is a big part of that and you know this is the sort of thing like of course it's our goal and we wake up every day like going after that but you can say it till you're blue in the face and no one's going to listen people only listen when other developers are saying that and they can show you what they've built and actually put something behind it so I think especially in defi like we've had really excellent Builders like na'vi like aftermath like scallop like cetus like Kaa that have really shown what you can do with move and sort of pushing the boundaries with some of the new features that we've added and I think combined with the tvl growth and SED that's really been a a driving force in the the mood devel Community from both the numbers perspective and the more subjective perspective yeah I think I like to remind people when salana was starting off it took like three plus three four years to get to where it's today um so when people talk like I think six months ago people were asking like why is move growth slow I was like well comparatively to like sana's growth we're actually doing pretty well um it takes time like Sam said for developers to come to a to form like a community built around move um so I think like take a step back look at other program languages other VMS and I'll would say the movie system is doing objectively well um we have a Vib in EOS system across all move l1s l2s whatever um there's a lot of move infrastructures I think there's like nine plus move VMS in some capacity we have move in Bitcoin we move in ton um we have S and apdus we have layer twos layer 3es um so we're seeing Innovation across the board and I think it's actually really net positive because when salana started off it was just the only svm U but now we have like so many mve VMS kind the market spreads more like gospel but the move language I think net positive for everyone involved and the next question is for so Sam um just from the techn standpoint I think it's really worse to discuss and understand you know how does this move language especially with a lot of Builders here really differentiate Stand Out than the traditional Solly based languages yeah so we talked a little bit about the safety aspect which I think is by far the most important thing I think people are Tire as Richie said people are tired of getting hacked and really like if you're a builder you want to focus on the thing you're trying to do and minimize the the side concern so I think that's like the top goal and the number one most important thing I think there's a number of other features that are that are differentiating that have been important especially recently so withu like one of the things we focus on a lot and talk talk about a lot is objects which is you know there's one representation for coins for nfts you know for in-game assets for packages and this is a unifying abstraction throughout the stack so if you're a programmer you write objects if you're a wallet developer you show objects in the wallet if you're if you're calling a function you pass objects in objects or inputs to transactions they have a built-in they have a built-in display functionality and so like having this common vocabulary throughout the stack I think avoids a lot of indirection that you have with the evm data model or with the salana data model where what developers write is one thing but then what people are actually seeing higher up the stack is something that has to be recreated via view functions or via some other layers of indirection that just make that just makes life trickier so really like with objects we think the gap between thought like you know you explained to sort of uh your technical friend what your smart contract is trying to do and the actual code is about as small as it can be and that's been a big Advance one other Trend and I think something that um good move is doing well that compared to other languages is there's this programmable transaction blocks feature so what this allows you to do is that you know most Trans in most language in most platforms you call one smart contract function and then that's it and then maybe there's a batching feature we sort of smash a lot together but it doesn't give you much more than that and so with programable transaction blocks you call a function it takes objects in objects come out you can pipe them into the next function you can pipe you can then throw another function behind that maybe the first function pipes objects into the third function it has this nice strongly typed Lego block structure that makes it really easy to build up more complex transactions and importantly you can do this on the client side like from a typescript front end you can do it from rust you don't have to write new move code to compose the move smart contracts are already out there and I think this is super super important thing because of course we love move we all love writing contracts but uh it's even better to meet developers where they are uh on the client side already and let them just you leverage move uh and leverage move in really rich ways without having to to drop down into the smart contract layer when they don't need to so I think those two things are there's a a long long list but I think like those are near the top of features that developers tell me when they say like I've come to site and you know this is what I'm really lucky about it compared to where I was before yeah and the next question for rushi uh because movement Labs aims to be the layer two how does the f frto as well as hyp help contribute to this vision and specifically why do you why do the cross chain interval blockchain is really important in the ecosystem a question like why e what's the fractal you referring to yeah the fractal and hyperlink oh the like the conversion you talking yeah so I think one thing that we recognized is like move is a really highly performing language but in the the system majority still Solly developers so how do you bridge a gap between evm ethereum and those Die Hard Maxis and the language and gospel we try like chill right um so we do the two ways a by living on ethereum as layer 2 inhering ethereum liquidity and security um but most importantly I think one thing that we brought to the market was fractal which is our evm interpreter so right now if you go on our test net you can deploy solidity code right out the box or you can deploy move code out of the box um so we kind of want to be Best of Both Worlds I think the way we mark it is like our evm is not going to be as good as the existing evm there's it's obviously interpreter obviously this translation but it allows evm developers who never would try move to least enter the EOS system so let's say for example you have Unis swap fork or curve fork or you have a per Dex on like etherum and orbitron whatever and you want to try the moving system you can still deploy your code um and be part of the moving system part of the moving Community part of the testnet um but then you'll quickly realize that it's much better right move out of the box you'll have higher throughput you'll have all the security guarantees that move has um so it's kind of our way of onboarding it's similar to like salana soing or what neon attempted to do with salana um where you can attempt bridge the gap between evm and move land um through this interpreter so I think by focusing more on the theum system and the evm system we're bringing new devs into the moving system amazing we have talked about the developer communities and now let's move on to the results you know it's been more than a year since s launched mainnet and the S Community has reached in 18 million active W address with the close to 500k uh like daily active users and not only on that from the technical part of standpoint point they having great product Innovation launch like warus the decentralized storage as well as uh Pro ptb program programmable transaction block as well as you know the Miss main that got launched uh all transactions on along s n has been reduced the transaction speed by 70% and na'vi we were also very fortunate to have the average transaction speed of 0.7 seconds for peress Trans transaction and you know na'vi was also able to carry out the $8 billion borro volume as a landing Bor protocol on top of this s inet it's been only been a year uh you know I think s has achieved a lot I think there should be a little bit Plus for the for Sam and all the builders here um so the question is the speed and growth is magnificent but what do you think of Sam this is a question for Sam what do you think is going to be a drive the next technical Big Bang moment for the site and move in general yeah it's a great question I think you know I appreciate the kind words like this is a hard year to follow up on uh you know we had we had ZK login you know send transactions from Google accounts and Facebook accounts and and these sorts of things we had misset as you mentioned so 700 millisecond latency that's been quite good and then we've had some product we had some more product detect things like anoi where you package together ZK login and sponsor transactions just to make it really easy getting started uh developing apps without worrying about the wallet barrier or the acquiring tokens barrier and then St cash which is leveraging ZK login to you know have just a really accessible web wallet that you can connect directly to your favorite apps like na'vi and so I think a lot of what's what we're excited about going forward so you mentioned warus you know Waris devet is out uh so we're really focused on warus test net there's a lot of work to do in terms of the the features that we need to add uh the warus hackathon is coming up this month and then mainnet is a little bit beyond that so I think they um it's such a new thing to have I think of it as sweet today like it's a computer that has Ram but no dis and uh you know it's uh when you have warus you'll add that disc and I think there's just lots and lots of things we're seeing that you can do especially because warus is so nicely integrated into sui and with move just in terms of the program programmability you can do with the warus storage resources and these sorts of things so that's the tech perspective but I think the Big Bang moments I'm really excited I'm most excited about are okay we spent so much time on developer infrastructure and core features I think the things that it's possible to build onu now are substantially different than a year ago and there are at least a couple things in the pipeline that I can't talk about here that are using the everything or substantial subset of what we've done that I think are going to make a big difference so I think uh we'll definitely have more big bang Tech moments going forward I think warus is the biggest of those for a smaller big bang you know movie ns are dropping this week we're quite excited about that but I think really like the product and developer Big Bangs going forward are the ones I'm I'm the most excited about that's amazing okay uh now we're going to go go to to the short answer a little bit lightening up run of move favorite for fun and to Pure to the move nerds uh what's your favorite uh move feature Sam Ry why don't you start off I've been talking a lot um well there two types of movies so I'll focus on app or what we use I think move prover is really interesting um having formal verification run time when you ex smart contracts checking for resource type memory safety um which is probably one of the bigger features of the move VM that we use um but generally like type safety memory safety I think our thesis is like security ethereum has always been like a meme um everyone knows it's kind of important it's like privacy where everyone is like we need security and privacy but no one actually does anything I think move in entire movie system is really focused on making security sexy again um which is kind of our motto yeah I'm tempted to say objects but I already talked about that so I think you know that that's definitely my answer from a developer perspective from a program language is researcher theorist perspective I really like the ability system you know move comes from this tradition of so-called substructural type systems like linear types and aine types that rust kind of has and that some other research languages have had but then abilities and hat tip to Todd from the the M team who this is his brainchild really like came up with a way to package this with the persistent storage that blockchains have that you can express all of those combinations but Express other things as well so every time I write you know has key has store you know copy of these sorts of things uh I smile a little bit that one definitely makes me happy and let's keep the question a little bit short favorite move IDE I use vs code yeah I use vs code I like I don't know what plugins you like uh I really like the m and move one of course got to prop that and I just met a a Dev yesterday at jet from dsrv who built this really awesome uh they call it s extension where it has really nice integration for publishing and upgrading smart contracts you can use both those together at I hear about this if there's a cursor for like svm or movm that'd be super cool I think cursor is taking over for AI uh blockchain tools um so I'm curious to see if you guys are working on like AI move Dev tools at all yeah we have a lot of folks sort of looking at that I mean the big Challenge and you guys probably see this too is you need more training data like you know there's not enough training data for solidity and for move there's even less I mean we're looking at things like let's decompile all the main net packages you know we've got 24,000 packages some of them are pretty big so that part kind of helps but then the quality decompiled code is not exactly what you want for having a high quality model uh so we're looking at a bunch of different things there I I would love to get to that point I have to say I do have some reservations about I think AI assistants are great I think for smart contracts like the code is small enough and it's so dense that you know maybe you just want to write from scratch and have ai help you generate the tests maybe generate the specs uh and and other things but uh let let's see we're always getting surprised I have to cut it show because we're now running a presidential debate here we need na'vi to ship more code all right uh so the last question is actually one of my most favorite you know since move is still new baby and it is time really for exciting to S and movement Labs title sponsor for the Korean blockchain week you know this is people like as a build myself you know running na'vi I think move is really the new language it's like the the the electric car versus the gasoline car that have been running for decades so how do you guys foresee the upcoming five to 10 years growths for the move language and its ecosystem in general I think we're focused on E theum system and Catering to those developers and for the first time we're seeing this alternative VM expansion when we started moving everyone's like the evm is won anything not evm is awful and today everyone's like loves alternative VMS wassom VMS Etc um so I think the future of move is just being part of many systems as possible our thesis is move everywhere where we believe in the secure programming the secure VM and our goal is for developers to use it on all blockchains I'll be happy if there's more sweet developers in the next six months because that's more move developers General writing better code um so I think in thesis we move exists everywhere and it's endgame 10 years from now yeah no I totally agree with that you know the analogy I like to use and this is a bit inflammatory but you know I generally think it's accurate where I think in the long run I think move is the JavaScript of web 3 and I think solidity is the cobal of web 3 now cobal is still a very popular language it's running a lot of important Legacy financi infrastructure it's not going anywhere but I think the new code um you know the future looks like we hope it'll look like the the kids in school will be learning move you'll be writing the new stuff in move uh this is sort of like what's pushing forward this is what a new new chains are going to use which which is a trend that we're seeing and then from the tech perspective I think the most important way move can evolve is to make it easier to use move up up the stack uh at the application Level that kind of sounds like it's not a move problem it sounds like an SDK or RPC problem but I think it really is or it's productive to think of it this way so things like programable transaction blocks help with this but I think anything you can do where smart contracts offer this new kind of API that gives you Atomic composability that gives you shared state that gives you sending money and programming with um with scarcity and anything you can do to just let developers use that in place without having to to drop down I think is going to be the most important direction for for mood to be going in uh so move everywhere uh both across other chains and off the stack and you know as a bu final comments I want to add on top of there is I've only been used building for move for the past two years close to two years but the growth and the gross potential is just significant and you know this is the most robust Builder community uh regardless of movement Labs or uh movement Labs or miston primary miston we're very developed Focus team and that also means that all the business people have the very developer sense of you know growing helping more Builders you know if there's no Builders then there's no great product so that sense carries on throughout the culture and through Facebook and they have the best technical documentation the most supportive channel for all the developers regardless where you are in South Korea and US or Europe to get support at any time time 24/7 so I you know as a builder that building Defi and variet of two infrastructure I think I'm very bullish on this so um today it's truly my honor to host Sam and rushi today and uh you know they're the most approachable person I can ever imagine so if you guys have as a developer business person if you guys have any questions please don't be shy to reach out to all of them and uh yeah let's let's become a mover thanks guys thank you all let's go [Music]