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 pressure of about 38 million dollars, causing the token's market value to plummet from 3 billion dollars to less than 500 million dollars.
The subsequent investigation revealed a market maker contract described by an internal lawyer as 'the worst agreement ever seen'—a company named Rentech, which has almost no public information, appeared on both ends of the contract as a subsidiary of Web3Port and as an agent for the Movement Foundation.
In May 2025, after issues arose within Movement Labs and Rushi Manche was terminated, a new, independent company, Move Industries, was formed and acquired some members of the Labs team through arm's-length principles, while 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, Role, and Strategy
Deep Tide TechFlow: Thank you for accepting our interview. First, could you introduce yourself to the readers?
Torab: My name is Torab, and I am one of the founding team members of Movement, recently established and serving as CEO of Move Industries. Before this, I worked in Silicon Valley, where I was involved in sales growth for mobile data analytics at Salesforce and Sensor Tower.
About five years ago, I entered the crypto industry full-time. I worked on 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, which ultimately didn’t work out—looking back now, it was too early. I joined the Movement team about two and a half years ago and became one of the founding members. Since I took on this new role, it has been nearly nine months, and the experience has been great.
Deep Tide TechFlow: You recently became the CEO of Move Industries. What is the biggest change in your daily work? How has your leadership style changed from being the head of BD/growth to CEO?
Torab: From the start, it has been a significant change. 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 part, which I was completely uninvolved in before. These have all been great learning experiences for me.
I quickly realized that the previous role put a lot of responsibility on me but did not give me the real decision-making power. I often liken it to being a stepparent—you take on all the responsibilities of a parent, but you have no authority. I joke that 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 for me, what I am most proud of is that we have retained the vast majority of team members, developers, and investors.
Deep Tide TechFlow: After Rushi Manche left due to the controversy over preferential treatment for market makers, you immediately established Move Industries. What was the core consideration behind this decision? Why choose the name 'Move Industries'—does it have any deeper meaning?
Torab: After the problem arose, the first thing is to acknowledge the issue, figure out how we got here, and then establish mechanisms to prevent it from happening again. The first thing we did was remove the market maker. Now we only work with top-tier, professionally recognized, and trusted market makers in the industry.
Many people are curious about how Movement initially rose to prominence. The answer has always been, and will always be—community. By working closely with community members around the world.
We established the 'Global Hubs' program, which will continue to focus on this aspect in the process of rebuilding trust. Trust is hard to establish, but even harder to rebuild. We once had this trust; it collapsed, and now what we are doing is 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 a single company or person, but about a whole movement centered around excellent technology composed of developers, builders, and users.
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, 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 people.
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 assets.' Then I started researching and found out this is how wealthy people operate. Look at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos... They usually don’t sell stocks; they just use stocks as collateral for loans. I thought, 'Why don’t we ordinary people have this capability?'
Crypto is enabling people around 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 the Move Alliance to allow builders to grow together with Movement.
One of the biggest issues for most ecosystems is: Builders want the chain to do well so they can do well, but they are not economically tied to the chain. The Move Alliance is unprecedented—no ecosystem has ever done this, requiring every builder in the ecosystem to commit to holding the ecosystem token.
When the MOVE token reaches its rightful value, all ecosystem builders will benefit with us, rather than competing for more users or fees like 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. Since then, what specific measures has Move Industries implemented in these two areas? What key milestones or achievements can you share?
Torab: First, blockchain is technology. The first thing I did when I took 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 built the Move programming language; many of the tools were created by the team he led. He is 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 the latency from 12 seconds to 1 second, and the effects were immediate: TVL grew by 61%, daily DEX trading volume increased tenfold, and stablecoin TVL grew sevenfold. We evolved from a single public node before Monza to over 70 nodes after, meaning developers can truly unleash their potential.
We achieved zero network interruptions, processing more than 35,000 exchanges 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 recently announced the transition from L2 to L1, and we have also cleaned up the tech stack. No longer are there various different parts pieced together; now we have the entire tech stack as a sovereign chain. We can control every technical aspect, which allows the Movement chain to decentralize and for network governance. More importantly, L1 provides the foundation for developers and builders to fully realize the potential of the Move programming language.
In today's market, you must have a stance, because the general-purpose L1 is basically dead.
Deep Tide TechFlow: The launch of the Move Alliance is a milestone for you recently. 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: Every team actively building in our ecosystem has basically 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) is simply not working.
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?
After communicating with builders and understanding their needs, we proposed, 'What if you used that revenue to buy back MOVE tokens? If you put it in your treasury, we can offer you the same annual yield as staking.'
Every team in the Alliance has KPI-driven metrics that keep them financially aligned as part of the Alliance.
How does it work specifically? Basically, every team in the Alliance agrees to use 50% to 100% of the revenue they generate to buy back MOVE tokens.
In the first 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 and hold them in their treasury within a certain timeframe.
Everything will be open for the world to see 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 and asked us to use it for buybacks. This is all documented in the public record. We executed these buybacks and reclaimed nearly 2% of the token supply.
Currently, we have two MOVE reserves. One is on Ethereum, which is 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 hardly moved them, but we plan to deploy them soon.
Regarding the buyback mechanism, there are different models. The Hyperliquid model is a mechanized way—buying back a certain proportion of their own tokens every day. There are also other teams that establish a cash reserve and strategically deploy it when they think it is appropriate. I think both methods have their merits.
However, I think buybacks are a short-term solution. The core question the team needs to answer is: What is the value of the token? How can it become the core of the ecosystem?
One of the biggest mistakes I see teams often make is issuing multiple tokens on the chain. I always joke that marrying a second or third wife won't make you a good husband to the first one. That's what these foundations are doing.
For me, it really doesn't make sense. You are distracting attention and value. From my perspective, any value created by the team should return to a single token.
At Movement, I pledge to never issue more than one token from our team. Any value we create (whether through products we launch or do not launch) will all revert 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 the upgrade from Ethereum L2 to an independent L1. What was the core strategic consideration behind this move? Do you think L1 has a better opportunity for differentiation than L2 in the current competitive landscape? What specific changes has this upgrade brought to the project from both 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.
At the beginning, it will be more centralized. Every chain that goes online has gone through this trajectory—from a small group of validators to gradually increasing.
But first and foremost, performance should be the most important.
For us, the top priority is to make Movement a highly usable network that can compete with top blockchains. We have achieved this; that’s the first reason.
The second reason is the economic model. As L1, we can now enable staking, which means users holding MOVE tokens will be able to stake and earn rewards.
One beneficial byproduct of this is—because we have global hubs (these are groups of builders and advocates promoting the Move language and Movement ecosystem around the world), we can fund their activities with staking rewards, 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 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 'Serving the People's Chain.' Around this positioning, what verticals or ecosystem segments is Movement currently prioritizing? What developments should the community expect in the near future?
Torab: As I mentioned, the Move language was born for money. This was actually the reason 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 our collaboration 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 on which they build. As part of that, 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, parking, and waiting spots. What we want to build is a complete ecosystem.
But I don’t like telling 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 frontend and real-time coding applications, especially mobile applications. 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 network traffic comes from mobile. There are billions of people with mobile phones but no laptops. If you do not 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 believe Movement currently stands? Sui and Aptos are already relatively mature; what do you see as Movement's core competitive advantages? Looking ahead, where do you ultimately hope Movement will position itself in this landscape?
Torab: One question is whether people really perceive the difference 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 were impressive for being part of Facebook, even revered, my view is different.
The entire spirit of crypto is the opposite; it is a spirit of 'building something for the people, by the people.' 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 beginning.
I believe this is our Movement team's strength. Builders will say we are more down-to-earth; when they come to Movement, they feel we completely understand. That's the first point.
The second point: We will never issue another token again. All the value created in our ecosystem will flow back to the MOVE token. This is a strategy that is completely different from other ecosystems.
The third point: We will never eat into 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 about former Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche launching Nyx Group sparked discussions in the community. Opinions are divided, but the dissenting voices seem 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 has closely collaborated with him, do you think Rushi Manche is preparing for a comeback in the spotlight through Nyx Group?
Torab: To be honest, we have been focused on what we are building, and I only found out about this when an investor asked me if I knew about it. The answer is no.
Ultimately, people like controversy, so anything that is divisive will garner attention. This makes me a bit sad because we have made so much amazing progress, but some people will still question this, yet it has no substantive impact on us.
People will always associate him with this project to some extent, but I believe our team is hard at work. I always joke that our vehicle has no rearview mirrors—we only look forward. I'm not worried about the issue you mentioned.
Controversy is controversy, but we are now far away from it.
Over the past nearly year, we have focused on where Movement can go, not where it has been.
Speaking of which, I’m excited that we recently listed the MOVE token on Aerodrome, the largest DEX on Base. This means the MOVE token should be available to all Coinbase users globally (except in New York). Other than New York, the MOVE token should be available to all Coinbase users worldwide. You should see it soon.
Deep Tide TechFlow: Last question: As we approach the end of 2025, what key predictions or expectations do you have for the crypto market in 2026?
Torab: My wife often asks me, 'Should I buy some Bitcoin?' I say, 'I think you should. Generally speaking, Bitcoin tends to go up.' She then says, 'What kind of answer is that? You work in the crypto industry, and you don’t even 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 what I can say is 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 targeting U.S. stablecoins internationally. I think the duopoly of USDC-USDT is actually not good for other countries because if everyone adopts this 'network dollar,' they are effectively 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 believe 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.
