Move Alliance is unprecedented; no ecosystem has ever done this before.

Written by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Introduction

On December 2024, the Movement (MOVE) token faced a sell-off of 66 million tokens by market maker Web3Port on its launch day, resulting in a selling pressure of approximately $38 million, causing the token's market value to plummet from $3 billion to less than $500 million.

Subsequent investigations revealed a market maker contract described by internal lawyers as "the worst agreement ever seen"—a company named Rentech, which has almost no public information, appeared on both ends of the contract as both a subsidiary of Web3Port and an agent for the Movement Foundation.

In May 2025, after issues arose within Movement Labs and the dismissal of Rushi Manche, a new, independent company, Move Industries, was established, acquiring some members of the Labs team through arm's-length transactions and appointing Torab Torabi as its CEO.

What does this crisis mean for Movement? What does the new leadership plan to do to clean up the mess? How will the value of the MOVE token be reflected? With these questions in mind, Deep Tide TechFlow interviewed the current CEO of Move Industries, Torab Torabi.

Part 1: A New Chapter for Movement—Brand, Roles, and Strategy

Deep Tide TechFlow: Thank you for accepting our interview. Could you start by introducing yourself to the readers?

Torab: My name is Torab, and I am one of the founding team members of Movement, recently established as the CEO of Move Industries. Before this, I worked in Silicon Valley, focusing on sales growth in mobile data analytics at Salesforce and Sensor Tower.

About five years ago, I entered the crypto industry full-time. I worked at Marinade, the largest DeFi protocol on Solana at the time, where I truly learned the ins and outs of crypto and blockchain, especially DeFi.

Later, I worked on a stablecoin project that ultimately did not succeed—looking back, it was probably too early. I joined the Movement team about two and a half years ago as one of the founding members. It has been almost nine months since I took on this new role, and the experience has been fantastic.

Deep Tide TechFlow: You recently became the CEO of Move Industries. What has been the biggest change in your daily work? How has your leadership style changed transitioning from BD/growth lead to CEO?

Torab: It has been a significant change from the start. Previously, you only needed to focus externally, but as CEO, you have to manage both internal and external stakeholders. There’s also the investor relations aspect, which I was completely uninvolved in before. These have all been great learning experiences for me.

I quickly realized that my previous role came with a lot of responsibilities but without real decision-making power. I often liken it to being a stepparent—you take on all the responsibilities of a parent, but you don’t have the authority. Jokingly, you don’t even have the right to yell at the kids.

Now, as CEO, I have the ability to lead the team and make final decisions. The biggest difference is going from being a passenger to being the driver. But what I’m most proud of is that we retained the vast majority of our team members, developers, and investors.

Deep Tide TechFlow: After Rushi Manche's departure due to the market maker preferential treatment controversy, you immediately established Move Industries. What was the core consideration behind this decision? Why choose the name "Move Industries"—does it have a deeper meaning?

Torab: After the issues arose, the first thing was to acknowledge the problems, understand how we got here, and then establish mechanisms to prevent it from happening again. The first thing we did was remove that market maker. Now we only work with top-tier, professionally recognized, and exchange-trusted market makers.

Many people are curious about how Movement initially rose to prominence. The answer has always been—and will always be—the community. By closely collaborating with community members from around the world.

We established the "Global Hubs" program, which will continue to focus on rebuilding trust. Trust is hard to build, but even harder to rebuild. We once had that trust; it collapsed, and now what we are doing is the work of rebuilding that trust. This has been our focus over the past few months.

As for the name Move Industries—it reflects that we are building an entire industry around the Move language: infrastructure, applications, developer tools, and a thriving ecosystem. "Industries" represents scale, maturity, and long-term commitment. It also indicates that this is not about one company or one person, but about a whole movement of developers, builders, and users gathered around excellent technology.

Deep Tide TechFlow: As CEO, what kind of leadership do you think Movement needs at this stage? What key actions do you plan to take to rebuild and strengthen trust with the community?

Torab: First of all, this is not about doing something new. I am continuing the philosophy I believed in when I joined Movement. I entered the crypto industry because I saw a financial system that was only open to a few.

For me, the biggest "aha moment" was when I could use my Solana to collateralize and borrow USDC or USDT. I thought, "This is incredible; I can buy a car without selling my assets." Then I started researching and found that this is how wealthy people operate. Look at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos… they usually don’t sell stocks; they just use their stocks as collateral for loans. I thought, "Why don’t we ordinary people have this ability?"

Crypto is enabling people all over the world—even those without bank accounts—to access financial services worth millions of dollars (assuming they have enough collateral). For me, the question is: how do we bring this to the rest of the world? That’s why I came to Movement; that’s what I want to build.

We recently announced Move Alliance, allowing builders to grow alongside Movement.

One of the biggest problems in most ecosystems is that builders want the chain to do well so they can do well, but they are not economically tied to the chain. Move Alliance is unprecedented—no ecosystem has ever done this, allowing every builder in the ecosystem to commit to holding ecosystem tokens.

When the MOVE token reaches its rightful value, all ecosystem builders will benefit alongside us, rather than competing for more users or transaction fees as before. They are truly aligned with us on an incentive level.

Part 2: Recent Progress and Core Competitiveness

Deep Tide TechFlow: At the inception of Move Industries, it was announced that technology and community building would be the core leadership principles. What specific initiatives has Move Industries implemented in these two areas since then? Are there any key milestones or achievements you can share?

Torab: First of all, blockchain is technology. The first thing I did after taking office was to focus on making the chain more high-performance. We brought in Dr. Young Yang Liauw, who is now our Chief Technology Officer. He was the head of the Move platform at Aptos and was there when Facebook was building the Move programming language; many tools were developed by his team. He is also one of the maintainers of the Libra open-source software.

Under Young's leadership, we launched the Monza upgrade, which is transformative. We reduced latency from 12 seconds to 1 second, and the results were immediate: TVL grew by 61%, daily DEX trading volume increased tenfold, and stablecoin TVL grew sevenfold. We expanded from a single public node before Monza to over 70 nodes after Monza, meaning developers can truly unleash their potential.

We achieved zero network interruptions, processing over 35,000 swaps daily, and the ecosystem has deployed over 11,000 smart contracts. This chain has become truly usable and can compete with the industry’s top blockchains.

We also recently announced a transition from L2 to L1, and we cleaned up the tech stack. No longer is it a patchwork of different components; now we have a complete tech stack as a sovereign chain. We can control every technical aspect, which decentralizes the Movement chain and enhances network governance. More importantly, L1 provides a foundation for developers and builders to fully leverage the potential of the Move programming language.

In today’s market, you must have a proposition because general-purpose L1 is basically dead.

Deep Tide TechFlow: The launch of Move Alliance is a recent milestone for you. How does the Alliance operate in practice? How is its buyback mechanism designed to maintain on-chain transparency and verifiability? What role do you expect it to play in driving ecosystem growth? Which projects have currently joined the Alliance?

Torab: Basically, every team actively building in our ecosystem has chosen to join the Move Alliance program. I think part of the reason is that the standard approach for every chain (having its own token and each team having its own token) simply doesn’t work.

Why do people issue tokens? Teams want to create an economic event for themselves and their users. But what if we could wait for the best time to issue tokens, or simply not issue tokens at all?

When we communicate with builders and understand their needs, we propose: "What if you used that revenue to buy back MOVE tokens? If you put it in your treasury, we can offer you annual yields similar to staking."

Every team in the Alliance has KPI-driven metrics that keep them financially aligned as part of the Alliance.

How does it work? Basically, every team in the Alliance agrees to use 50% to 100% of their generated revenue to buy back MOVE tokens.

In the first quarter, each team will have a dashboard to track all these actions, and we will monitor revenue and daily purchases. We expect teams to use their revenue to buy back MOVE tokens and hold them in their treasury within a certain timeframe.

All of this will be publicly visible to the world because it’s all on-chain. We will set up dashboards for everyone to monitor and verify these activities.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Speaking of buybacks, could you share more details about the current MOVE buyback framework and the progress of the plans?

Torab: When the market maker news broke, Binance refunded us $38 million, requesting that we use it for buybacks. This is documented in public records. We executed these buybacks, reclaiming nearly 2% of the token supply.

Currently, we have two MOVE reserves. One is on Ethereum, the ERC-20 version of MOVE; the other is on the Movement chain. Together, they account for about 2% of the total supply. We haven't moved much, but we plan to deploy soon.

Regarding the buyback mechanism, there are different models. Hyperliquid's approach is mechanized—buying back a certain percentage of their tokens daily. Other teams establish a cash reserve and strategically deploy it when they see fit. I think both methods have their benefits.

However, I believe buybacks are a short-term solution. The core question the team needs to answer is: What is the value of the token? How do we make it the core of the ecosystem?

One of the biggest mistakes I see teams make is issuing multiple tokens on the chain. I often joke that marrying a second or third wife doesn’t make you a better husband to the first. This is what these foundations are doing.

To me, this really doesn’t make sense. You are diluting attention and value. From my perspective, any value created by the team should revert to a single token.

At Movement, I commit to never issuing more than one token from our team. Any value we create (whether through products we launch or not) will all revert to the MOVE token. For me, this is a fundamental ethical principle—no more tokens.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In September of this year, Movement announced its upgrade from Ethereum L2 to an independent L1. What was the core strategic consideration behind this move? Do you think L1 has a better chance of differentiation than L2 in the current competitive landscape? What specific changes has this upgrade brought to the project from a technical and ecosystem perspective?

Torab: First is performance. Users only care about: Is it fast? Is it cheap? Is it easy to use? While decentralization is also important to us, it is a gradual process.

In the beginning, it will be more centralized. Every chain that goes live has gone through this trajectory—starting with a small group of validators and then gradually increasing.

But the most important thing should be performance.

For us, the top priority is to make Movement a highly usable network that can compete with top blockchains. We have achieved that, which is the first reason.

The second reason is the economic model. As L1, we can now enable staking, meaning users holding MOVE tokens will be able to stake and earn rewards.

A beneficial byproduct of this is that—because we have Global Hubs (these are groups of builders and advocates promoting the Move language and Movement ecosystem around the world)—we can use staking rewards to fund their activities, such as bringing in new users and educating people about the value of our ecosystem. Everything operates as a self-sustaining model. Global Hubs can stake their MOVE tokens to maintain economic alignment with Movement and earn staking rewards. They can then use these rewards to fund local activities, such as developer workshops, marketing campaigns, and other initiatives they plan.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Movement positions itself as "Serving the People's Chain." What verticals or ecosystem segments is Movement currently prioritizing around this positioning? What upcoming developments should the community look forward to?

Torab: As I mentioned, the Move language was born for money. This is actually why it was shut down—Facebook wanted to create its own stablecoin, and the U.S. government felt they wanted to replace the dollar.

This is the core value proposition of the Move language, which is why we recently announced a partnership with KAST. We believe they have the potential to become the de facto new bank in the crypto space. We want to be the foundation upon which they build. As part of this, we are hosting hackathons and inviting different builders to build around it.

You can think of it as a shopping mall, where you need restaurants, stores, and parking. What we want to build is a complete ecosystem.

However, I don’t like to tell builders what they should build. What I want is for us to become more consumer-facing and mobile-oriented. That’s why we partnered with Replit to launch the Move Builder Kit.

Replit is one of the top cloud development platforms. They focus on front-end and real-time coding applications, especially mobile applications. One of the reasons for this strategic partnership is to enable our builders to use these tools. We want to push everyone to become more consumer-oriented and mobile-centric.

60% of web traffic comes from mobile. There are billions of people with smartphones but no laptops. If you don’t have a comprehensive mobile strategy, you are excluding a large part of the world’s population from becoming users.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In the broader Move language-driven ecosystem, where do you think Movement currently stands? With Sui and Aptos already relatively mature, what do you see as Movement's core competitive advantages? Looking ahead, where do you ultimately hope Movement will be positioned in this landscape?

Torab: One question is whether people really perceive the differences between SVM, Move, or EVM. I personally believe there are significant differences, and they are important.

When you look at the origins of Sui and Aptos, most of the team members and founders come from Facebook's original Diem (formerly Libra) project. While they may impress people for being part of Facebook, even to the point of reverence, my view is different.

The entire spirit of crypto is the opposite; it is about "building something for the people, by the people," and our team is more crypto-native. My career has been built in the crypto space. While I have some Web2 background, my entire crypto experience has been in the trenches of DeFi from the early days.

I believe this is our advantage at Movement. Builders say we are more down-to-earth, and when they come to Movement, they feel we completely understand them. That’s the first point.

The second point: we will never issue another token. All value created in our ecosystem will flow back to the MOVE token. This is a strategy that is fundamentally different from other ecosystems.

The third point: we will never cannibalize our builders. When you build a product, you must ask yourself: Who are you preventing from building that product? For example, look at Deepbook on Sui or Decibel on Aptos; they are essentially competing with their own builders. This is something we will never do. We support our builders, but we will never build a competitive project. This is part of our philosophy.

Part 3: Industry Perspectives and Market Outlook

Deep Tide TechFlow: Recently, the news of former Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche launching Nyx Group has sparked discussions in the community. Opinions are divided, but the skepticism seems to dominate. Are you concerned that Rushi's re-emergence might bring past controversies surrounding Movement back into the public eye? How do you personally view the launch of Nyx Group? As someone who once worked closely with him, do you think Rushi Manche is preparing to return to the spotlight through Nyx Group?

Torab: To be honest, we have been focused on what we are building, and I only learned about this when an investor asked me if I knew about it. The answer is no, I didn’t know.

At the end of the day, people like controversy, so anything that has a divergence will get attention. This makes me a bit sad because we have made so much amazing progress, but some people will still ask about this, even though it has no substantive impact on us.

People will always associate him with this project to some extent, but I believe our team is focused on hard work. I often joke that our car has no rearview mirror—we only look forward. I’m not worried about the issue you mentioned.

Controversy is controversy, but we have moved far beyond it now.

In this nearly year-long period, we have focused on where Movement can go, rather than where Movement has been.

That said, what excites me is that we recently listed the MOVE token on Aerodrome, which is the largest DEX on Base. This means the MOVE token should be available to all Coinbase users globally (except in New York). Aside from New York, the MOVE token should be available to all Coinbase users worldwide. You should see this soon.

Deep Tide TechFlow: One last question: As 2025 comes to a close, what key predictions or expectations do you have for the crypto market in 2026?

Torab: My wife always asks me, "Should I buy some Bitcoin?" I say, "I think you should. Generally speaking, Bitcoin tends to go up." She replies, "What kind of answer is that? You work in the crypto industry, and you don’t know if Bitcoin will go up?" I say, "If I knew that, I would be a trader, not a builder."

I can’t give a price prediction. But I can say that we will see more adoption of stablecoins. We see different chains launching, like Tempo and Plasma, claiming to focus on payment rails.

I believe there will be significant legislation internationally regarding U.S. stablecoins. I think the USDC-USDT duopoly is actually not good for other countries because if everyone adopts this "network dollar," they are essentially shorting their own currency.

We have already seen this situation in the UK; if you hold more than a certain amount of stablecoins, you must declare it. I think such regulations will push people more towards privacy.

We have already seen the growth of privacy tokens like Zcash and Monero. I believe that because there will be more legislation targeting stablecoins, people will turn towards privacy and security.

I believe we will return to the cypherpunk spirit that launched Bitcoin.

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