Venture capital firms Gate Ventures and Boon Ventures have partnered with Movement Labs to establish a new $20 million fund focused on supporting Web3 startups.
As announced on October 13, the fund is aimed at developing Move-based protocols, with a particular emphasis on projects that bridge the Move network with Ethereum-compatible (EVM) applications.
“The fund will invest across a range of Web3 verticals within the Move ecosystem,” a spokesperson for Gate Ventures, the investment arm of crypto exchange Gate.io, told Cointelegraph.
The investments will be directed toward decentralized finance (DeFi) projects focusing on security, GameFi involving in-game asset transactions, NFT management, and interoperability solutions that enable seamless data and asset transfers between the Move and EVM ecosystems.
Startups backed by this initiative will also have access to a mentorship program, participate in hackathons, and join a research grant program aimed at improving blockchain interoperability.
Movement Labs is a protocol built using the Move programming language, which was initially developed by Facebook-parent Meta. Unlike the Aptos Network, another layer-1 that uses Move, Movement Labs’ upcoming mainnet will serve as a layer-2 solution for integrating Move and Ethereum transactions.
Recently, Movement Labs secured $38 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital. The funds will help advance fast-finality rollups, cross-chain atomic transactions, and customizable transaction sequencing.
Supporting startups in both the Move and EVM ecosystems is essential for boosting liquidity and developer adoption.
“The ultimate goal is to create an integrated blockchain environment where developers can build across platforms without sacrificing security or performance,” a Movement Labs spokesperson explained.
Movement Labs has been actively investing in its ecosystem. In September, the first cohort of startups in its accelerator program raised $13.2 million in seed funding. Additionally, $10 million was secured from the Web3Port Foundation to support native DeFi protocols and consumer and gaming applications within the Move network.