Author: Deep Tide TechFlow
Introduction
In December 2024, on its first day of trading, the Movement (MOVE) token encountered a situation where market maker Web3Port sold 66 million tokens, creating selling pressure of approximately $38 million. The token's market capitalization plummeted from $3 billion to less than $500 million.
Subsequent investigations revealed a market maker contract described by an internal lawyer as "the worst agreement I've ever seen"—a company named Rentech, with almost no public information, appeared on both ends of the contract as both a subsidiary of Web3Port and an agent of the Movement Foundation.
In May 2025, after internal issues arose at Movement Labs and Rushi Manche was dismissed, a new, independent company, Move Industries, was established. It acquired some members of the Labs team through an arm's-length transaction and appointed Torab Torabi as its CEO.
What does this crisis mean for Movement? How does the new leadership plan to clean up the mess? How will the value of the MOVE token be realized? With these questions in mind, Deep Tide TechFlow interviewed Torab Torabi, the current CEO of Move Industries.
Part 1: Movement's New Chapter—Brand, Roles, and Strategy
Deep Tide TechFlow: Thank you for accepting our interview. First, could you introduce yourself to our readers?
Torab: My name is Torab. I am one of the founding team members of Movement and was recently appointed as the CEO of the newly established Move Industries. Before this, I worked in Silicon Valley, handling sales growth for 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 ropes of crypto and blockchain, especially DeFi.
Later, I worked on a stablecoin project that ultimately didn’t succeed—in hindsight, it was too early. I joined the Movement team about two and a half years ago as a founding member. It’s been about nine months since I took on this new role, and it’s been a fantastic experience.
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 evolved transitioning from BD/Growth Lead to CEO?
Torab: It was a significant change from the start. Previously, I only focused externally, but as CEO, you have to manage both internal and external stakeholders. There’s also investor relations, which I wasn’t involved in at all before. These have been great learning experiences for me.
I quickly realized that my previous role came with a lot of responsibility but not the actual authority to make decisions. I often joke that it’s like being a stepparent—you have all the responsibilities of a parent, but not the authority. Jokingly, you don’t even have the right to scold 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 for me, what I’m most proud of is that we’ve retained the vast majority of our team members, developers, and investors.
Deep Tide TechFlow: After Rushi Manche left due to the market maker preferential treatment controversy, you promptly established Move Industries. What was the core consideration behind this decision? Why the name "Move Industries"—is there a deeper meaning?
Torab: After a problem occurs, the first thing to do is acknowledge it, figure out how it happened, 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 market makers trusted by exchanges.
Many people wonder how Movement initially rose to prominence? The answer has always been, and will always be—the community. Through close collaboration with community members worldwide.
We established the "Global Hubs" program and will continue to focus on this during the trust-rebuilding process. Trust is hard to build, but rebuilding it is even harder. We once had that trust, it collapsed, and now we are doing the work to rebuild it. This has been our focus for the past few months.
As for the name Move Industries—it reflects the entire industry we are building 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 isn’t about one company or one person but about an entire movement of developers, builders, and users gathering around exceptional technology.
Deep Tide TechFlow: As CEO, what kind of leadership do you think Movement needs at this stage? Facing the community, what key actions do you plan to take to rebuild and strengthen trust?
Torab: First, this isn’t about doing anything new. I’m continuing the philosophy I believed in when I joined Movement. I entered the crypto industry because I saw a financial system that was only accessible to a few.
My biggest "aha moment" was when I could use my Solana as collateral to borrow USDC or USDT. I thought, "This is incredible; I can buy a car without selling my assets." Then I started researching and realized this is how wealthy people operate. Look at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos... they typically don’t sell stock; they just borrow against it. I thought, "Why don’t regular people have this ability?"
Crypto is enabling people worldwide—even those without bank accounts—to access financial services worth millions of dollars (assuming they have sufficient collateral). For me, the question is: How do we bring this to the rest of the world? This is why I came to Movement; this is what I want to build.
We recently announced the Move Alliance, enabling builders to grow with Movement.
One of the biggest problems in most ecosystems is: Builders want the chain to do well so they can do well, but they aren’t economically tied to the chain. The Move Alliance is unprecedented—no ecosystem has ever done this before, making every builder in the ecosystem commit to holding the ecosystem's token.
When the MOVE token reaches its deserved value, all ecosystem builders will benefit alongside us, rather than fighting over users or fees as before. They are truly aligned with us at the incentive level.
Part 2: Recent Progress and Core Competitiveness
Deep Tide TechFlow: At its inception, Move Industries announced a core leadership philosophy centered on technology and community building. Since then, what specific initiatives has Move Industries implemented in these two areas? Are there any key milestones or achievements you can share?
Torab: First, blockchain is technology. The first thing I did after taking office was focus on making the chain higher performance. We brought in Dr. Young Yang Liauw, who is now our Chief Technology Officer. He was the Move Platform Lead at Aptos and was at Facebook when the Move programming language was being built; many tools were created by the team he led. He was also one of the maintainers of the Libra open-source software.
Under Young’s leadership, we launched the Monza upgrade, which was transformative. We reduced latency from 12 seconds to 1 second, and the effects were immediate: TVL grew by 61%, average daily DEX trading volume increased 10x, and stablecoin TVL grew 7x. We went from a single public node pre-Monza to over 70 nodes post-Monza, meaning developers can truly go all out.
We achieved zero network outages, process over 35,000 swaps daily on average, 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 transitioning from an L2 to an L1, and we cleaned up the tech stack. It’s no longer a patchwork of different components; now, as a sovereign chain, we own the entire tech stack. We control every technical aspect, which allows the Movement chain to be decentralized and governed by the network. More importantly, L1 provides the foundation for developers and builders to fully leverage the potential of the Move programming language.
In today’s market, you must have a thesis because general-purpose L1s are basically dead.
Deep Tide TechFlow: The launch of the Move Alliance is a recent milestone for you. How does the Alliance work in practice? How is its buyback mechanism designed to remain transparent and verifiable on-chain? What role do you expect it to play in driving ecosystem growth? Which projects have joined the Alliance so far?
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 playbook for every chain (the chain has its own token, and then each team has 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 optimal time to issue a token, or not issue one at all?
After communicating with builders and understanding their needs, we proposed: "What if you used that revenue to buy back MOVE tokens? If you hold it in your treasury, we can provide you with APY similar to staking."
Each team in the Alliance has KPI-driven metrics to keep them financially aligned as part of the Alliance.
How does it work specifically? Basically, each team in the Alliance agrees to use 50% to 100% of the revenue they generate to buy back MOVE tokens.
Each quarter, each team will have a dashboard to track all these actions, and we will track revenue and daily purchases. We expect teams to use their revenue to buy back MOVE tokens within a certain period and hold them in their treasury.
All of this will be public for the world to see because it’s 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 plan?
Torab: When the market maker news broke, Binance refunded us $38 million and required us to use it for buybacks. This is well-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 have barely touched them but plan to deploy them soon.
Regarding the buyback mechanism, there are different models. Hyperliquid’s approach is mechanical—taking a certain percentage daily to buy back its own token. Other teams build a cash reserve and deploy it strategically when they see fit. I think both approaches have merits.
However, I believe buybacks are a short-term solution. The core question teams need to answer is: What is the value of the token? How do you make it the heart of the ecosystem?
One of the biggest mistakes I see teams make is chains issuing multiple tokens. I always joke that marrying a second or third wife doesn’t make you a better husband to the first wife. This is what these foundations are doing.
To me, it really doesn’t make sense. You are diluting attention and value. From my perspective, any value created by the team should flow back to a single token.
At Movement, I am committed to never issuing more than one token from our team. Any value we create (whether through products we launch or don’t launch) all flows back to the MOVE token. For me, this is a fundamental moral principle—not to create more tokens.
Deep Tide TechFlow: In September this year, Movement announced an upgrade from an Ethereum L2 to an independent L1. What was the core strategic consideration behind this move? Do you think L1s have a better chance of differentiation than L2s in the current competitive landscape? What specific changes has this upgrade brought to the project from both a technical and ecological perspective?
Torab: First is performance. Users only care about: Is it fast? Is it cheap? Is it easy to use? Although decentralization is also important to us, it’s a gradual process.
In the beginning, it will be more centralized. Every chain that launches has gone through this trajectory—starting with a small group of validators and gradually increasing.
But the first and most important thing should be performance.
For us, the top priority was to make Movement a highly available network that could compete with top blockchains. We achieved that; that’s the first reason.
The second reason is the economic model. As an L1, we can now enable staking, meaning users holding MOVE tokens will be able to stake and earn rewards.
One beneficial副产品 of this—because we have Global Hubs (these are groups of builders and advocates promoting the Move language and Movement ecosystem worldwide)—we can use staking rewards to fund their activities, such as bringing in new users, educating people about the value of our ecosystem. Everything operates as a self-sustaining model. Global Hubs can stake their MOVE tokens to remain economically aligned 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 the "Serving the People's Chain." Around this positioning, which verticals or ecosystem niches is Movement currently prioritizing? What upcoming developments should the community most look forward to?
Torab: As I mentioned, the Move language was born for money. That’s actually why it was shut down—Facebook wanted to create its own stablecoin, and the US 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 crypto. We want to be the foundation they build on. As part of this, we are hosting hackathons and inviting different builders to build around it.
Think of it like a shopping mall; in a mall, you need restaurants, stores, parking lots, etc. We want to build a complete ecosystem.
However, I don’t like telling builders what to 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 live coding applications, especially mobile apps. One reason for this strategic partnership is to enable our builders to use these tools. We want to push everyone to become more consumer-facing and more mobile-centric.
60% of web traffic comes from mobile. Billions of people have phones but not laptops. If you don’t have a comprehensive mobile strategy, you exclude 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? Sui and Aptos are relatively mature. What do you think is Movement’s core competitive advantage? Looking ahead, where do you ultimately hope Movement will be in this landscape?
Torab: One question is whether people actually perceive the differences between SVM, Move, or EVM. I personally believe there are clear differences, and they are important.
When you look at the origins of Sui and Aptos, most team members and founders came from Facebook’s original Diem (formerly Libra) project. While they were impressive, even revered, for being from Facebook, my view is different.
The entire spirit of crypto is the opposite; it’s a spirit of "building something for the people, by the people." Our team is more crypto-native. My career was built in crypto. Although I have some Web2 background, my entire crypto experience has been in the trenches of DeFi from the early days.
I believe this is an advantage for our Movement team. Builders say we are more down-to-earth; when they come to Movement, they feel we totally get it. That’s the first point.
Second point: We will never issue another token. All value created in our ecosystem will flow back to the MOVE token. This is a drastically different strategy from other ecosystems.
Third point: We will never cannibalize our builders. When you build a product, you have to 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 competing project. This is part of our philosophy.
Part 3: Industry Views and Market Outlook
Deep Tide TechFlow: Recently, news that former Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche launched Nyx Group sparked discussion in the community. Opinions varied, but skeptical voices seemed to dominate. Are you concerned that Rushi’s renewed activity might bring past controversies surrounding Movement back into the public eye? What is your personal view on the launch of Nyx Group? As someone who worked closely with him, do you think Rushi Manche is preparing for a return to the spotlight through Nyx Group?
Torab: To be honest, we’ve been heads-down focused on what we’re building. I found out about it when investors asked me if I knew. The answer was no.
Ultimately, people love controversy, so anything divisive will get attention. It makes me a bit sad because we’ve made so many amazing strides, but some people still ask about this. However, it has no substantive impact on us.
People will always associate him with the project to some degree, but I believe our team is heads-down hard at work. I always 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 are far removed from it now.
In this nearly year-long period, we’ve focused on where Movement can go, not where Movement has been.
Having said that, what excites me is we recently listed the MOVE token on Aerodrome, the largest DEX on Base. This means the MOVE token should be accessible to all Coinbase users worldwide (except New York). Except for New York, the MOVE token should be accessible to all Coinbase users worldwide. You should see this soon.
Deep Tide TechFlow: Final question: As 2025 draws to a close, what are your key predictions or expectations for the crypto market in 2026?
Torab: My wife always asks me, "Should I buy some Bitcoin?" I say, "I guess so. Generally, Bitcoin goes up." She says, "What kind of answer is that? You work in crypto, and you don’t even know if Bitcoin will go up?" I say, "If I knew that, I’d be a trader, not a builder."
I can’t give price predictions. But what I can say is that we will see more adoption of stablecoins. We see different chains launching, like Tempo and Plasma, which say they focus on payment rails.
I believe there will be significant international legislation targeting US stablecoins. I think the USDC-USDT duopoly is actually not good for other countries because if everyone adopts this "network dollar," they are effectively shorting their own national currency.
We’ve already seen this 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’ve already seen growth in privacy tokens like Zcash and Monero. I believe that because there will be increasing legislation targeting stablecoins, people will turn to privacy and security.
I believe we will return to the cypherpunk spirit that launched Bitcoin.
