Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Institutional-grade yield on USD, BTC, and Gold?

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

In this episode, host Sebastian Couture is joined by Torab, CEO of Move Industries, to discuss the tension of radical transparency and the decision to scrap Movement's complex L2 architecture in favor of a sovereign L1 powered by the Move VM. He explains how this transition drastically reduced latency and AWS infrastructure costs while improving the builder experience.The conversation explores Movement's core thesis: "Move is for Money". Torab argues that general-purpose L1s are becoming saturated and that Movement's true product-market fit lies in the Global South, serving nations battling currency devaluation. They discuss the implementation of AI agents for continuous security auditing, the "Move Alliance" for ecosystem financial alignment, and why the industry must move past "decentralization theater" to offer pragmatic, yield-bearing stablecoin products to users who actually need them. Finally, Torab teases the upcoming roadmap, including institutional-grade yield on USD, BTC, and Gold. Topics00:00 Intro & Context04:15 The Movement Turnaround09:30 Why Movement Pivoted15:00 The Move VM & Overcoming Developer Friction21:45 AI Agents for 24/7 Security Audits27:10 The Global South35:20 Currency Devaluation & The Demand for Stablecoins42:15 The Move Alliance49:00 Pragmatism vs. Decentralization 55:30 Roadmap: Bringing Yield to USD, BTC, and GoldEpisode LinksTorab on X: https://x.com/utorabyouMovement: https://movementnetwork.xyz/NEAR: https://near.ai/Sponsors:NEAR AI Cloud now lets developers deploy OpenClaw—the rapidly growing open-source AI agent platform—inside Trusted Execution Environments, providing hardware-level encryption with cryptographic attestations. With OpenClaw on NEAR AI Cloud, you can run agents with cloud convenience, but without traditional cloud data exposure. No hardware to manage. No trust assumptions required. Learn more at near.ai.

Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Pugio, and I'm here today with Torab, who's the CEO of Move Industries. There was a question of should we do it or should we not do it? Do we start something new, start something fresh, or do we stick to it? And from our side, we saw that we had some momentum. We had real builders. We had buy-in. I had relationship with investors.

And I said, hey, we made it through the darkest hours, which, you know, it was difficult. but it almost felt like treason to just walk away. From our side, we've been able to retain the overwhelming majority of our team. We've actually added more talent, and so it's been really exciting to see everyone motivated on the same page and just dedicated to turning this around. And I always talk about this, move is for money. That is literally why Facebook spent billions of dollars in R&D

brought the top researchers in the world together to build a language from the ground up. They could have just optimized solidity or used Rust, you know, SBM itself, But they decided, you know what, we're going to build a new language, the Move VM, and we believe that this is going to be the scalable solution for the future. So the last time we talked with someone from Movement was with the previous team. Most of you will know of Rushi, who is formerly CEO.

But yeah, I'm curious to talk to Torup today about what's changed since that leadership change came into place and what's happening now with the movement ecosystem and the chain, and also what's in the roadmap and what's to come. All right, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And I think a better question is what hasn't changed, but I'm happy to go through it and have that discussion. But yeah, it's been a roller coaster of a year. You know, in crypto, we age in dog ears. So excited to share some of our updates. Let's walk through a little bit of like, you know, people can go and read about, you know, what happened. There's like lots of reporting and there was the Corn Desk article, which talked about what happened, you know, and Rushi leaving and also Cooper stepping back. One thing I should just just, Point out as disclaimer is my fund, Interop Ventures is an investment in movement. Walk us through sort of what has happened in the last year since your team took over

so that people sort of get a sense of like where movement is today. Yeah. So maybe I'll just start with instead of saving people a Google search for those that maybe they don't remember or maybe they never even knew about it is essentially I was one of the founding team members. So I was a founding team member, but not a founder at Movement Labs. And essentially what happened is that I believe in March of last year or maybe even earlier than that, Binance saw some market maker irregularities.

They froze the market maker funds. I believe it was around $37 million something in that ballpark. And they said, hey, you guys essentially have six months to buy back move token. And so once we did a little bit of investigation, you know, the board at that time, I was not on the board, made some leadership changes. And once some of that information came out, we believed it was best for us to start new. with a fresh new company that wasn't tied to movement labs. And that is move industries where I serve as CEO.

And so essentially what we did with those funds is we were able to buy back right around 2% of token supply. We actually call it the the move strategic reserve. It's on chain. You can take a look at it. We've only recently started using it for the ecosystem and for builders. And so that's what it's going to be used for. And it's fully publicly transparent.

So no funny business possible. So that is essentially what has. happened. And I would say that probably the greatest part of my job is seeing the retention rate that we've had at movement. And so, you know, generally what happened, just, okay, just in crypto in general, it's very hard to keep talent, right? Because there's always some new company that just raised 50 million, 80 million, 100 million. And so how do you keep the team motivated, especially once the token is launched? And then especially in this market, as tokens aren't necessarily having the same rainbow and sunshines that they're used to. And so from our side, we've been able to retain the overwhelming

the majority of our team. We've actually added more talent. And so it's been really exciting to see everyone motivated on the same page and just dedicated to turning this around. This episode is brought to you by Near AI Cloud. OpenClaw is one of the biggest stories in AI right now. Rapidly, it gained over 200,000 get-up stars with adoption from Silicon Valley to Beijing. Why? Because OpenClawn makes it easy to create an AI agent that actually does stuff, like manager emails, browse the web, schedule appointments, and remember contacts across weeks of interaction. But where do you securely store and run an always-on agent that needs persistent access to your most sensitive data? Local deployment means you have to manage expensive hardware at home, and traditional cloud means surrendering full

access to your data to some cloud provider. Near AI cloud solves this problem by running open claw inside trusted execution environments. These are hardware-level secure enclaves where your agent operates in encrypted memory that even Near AI can't inspect. It's not a promise that they won't look. It's cryptographic guarantees that they can't. With OpenClaw on Near AI cloud, you get cloud convenience without data exposure. There's no hardware to manage and no trust assumptions required. You can learn more at neer.aI. I've said this publicly and also So amongst closed circles, I felt like you stepped up pretty significantly early on and, you know, felt like I felt like you took on like this very important leadership role in a time of turmoil. And in a time where I think a lot of people were, you know, looking, looking at this whole sort of fiasco is like, here isn't yet another, you know, like shady thing that happens in crypto.

And I think it must have been, you know, intimidating to sort of take on that role at that time. But I think in the last year, like at least like, you know, turned around, I think sentiment around the, around movement and the moving ecosystem. And that's something that I think a lot of people don't talk about. So, yeah, I mean, like, I think you and the team have done like a very good job, given the circumstances. Yeah, yeah. Bring back trust and confidence to the movement chain and ecosystem.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things. Number one is I'm not going to lionize myself, but ultimately as a founding team member and I consider myself the architect or the ecosystem. There was a question of, should we do? it or should we not do it? Do we start something new, start something fresh, or do we stick to it? And from our side, we saw that we had some momentum. We had real builders. We had buy-in, you know, I had relationship with investors and I said, hey, you know, it almost felt like treason to just walk away. And, you know, we made it through the darkest hours, which, you know,

it was difficult. But you know what? We knew that going into it and you're never going to attain anything great or be able to you know achieve anything worthwhile without some type of sacrifice and going through difficulty honestly it was probably more difficult on my family than it was for me you know i'm married with kids and so uh movement is my other child uh that takes all my love and attention but you know we do our best to balance it and from our side we actually are if you've ever met any of our team members if you are at eat denver anything of the sort you'll see everyone is all smiled ready to go and we're not really phased at all by kind of what's going on in the market If you've been, a lot of our team members are veterans, so this isn't their first rodeo.

We've been through the one day 30, 40% drawdowns. So this is nothing compared to that. And so, yeah, it's been honestly incredible. And then also we've had a lot of investors such as yourself kind of step in and be really supportive. And so I think having that support goes a long way. And, you know, now there's a certain point where we're almost an underdog story and people generally like to root for the underdog. So I like our chances. Talk a little bit about some of the changes that you've implemented.

Specifically, I think in terms of transparency and governance that have kind of helped support building back trust within the community and the ecosystem. Yeah, I think that generally speaking, I'm talking about historically, not any particular organization, but there's a lot of incestuous relationship between the foundation and labs. So what happens is it's more of a formality, but in our situation, there actually are two complete individuals. independent organizations. We have the foundation and then we have what we call the labs team, which in this case is move industries. And so the market makers, anything token related, that is all handled by the foundation. And for us, we're truly just the stewards of the ecosystem, bringing in builders, building cool things and making sure, you know, that we're providing the best experience for users and builders. And so that kind of leads into, you know, we transitioned

from an L2 into an L1. And I'm happy to kind of walk through why we did that. But in terms of governance, you know, making sure that all the multisigs are in place, making sure that, you know, even if I wanted to, you know, I always joke that we need a system where if my evil twin took over my body, they wouldn't be able to wreak havoc. And so that's essentially what we've done with the governance and only using Tier 1 market makers. If I told you our market makers, they're all the ones that you know. Like there's no name that you haven't heard before. And so we've shared those with the exchanges. They're happy. And so that's kind of where we are today. This kind of like foundation dev team relationship often gets overlooked.

Like what are the kinds of shady things that you sort of see or have seen with regards to like foundations and dev teams that you are like committed to preventing with movement? And maybe like as a general sort of rule for the industry, like what kinds of things do you guys have in place that other teams should also perhaps follow to keep that neutrality between both entities? I mean, look, I can't speak to any particular. But generally speaking, what happens is that certain people will get the market maker deal for the token that may or may not be affiliated with someone on the lab's team. And so in our situation, that's basically impossible because we have no say. That's completely by independent directors at the foundation. And honestly, I think that's 99% of it. It's, you know, anything related to token, anything related to money.

And then everything else, I think most teams are on the up and up. But again, I don't know what I don't know. And this is, and most of the things you hear are murmurs and whisperers. and whispers at conferences or in boardrooms. But from our side, that's obviously what most people care about is, hey, what happened with the market makers? Hey, what happened with the tokens? And so we said, hey, we're just going to go to like radical transparency and make

sure it's 100% visible to the public or as much as possible. This shift from an L2 to an L1. So, you know, for context, movement was an L2. There was this whole architecture where it utilized. Ethereum as well as Celestea for DA. There was also like some complex ZK in order to have transactions be sort of instant and atomic. And one of the things about movement that I always thought was interesting was that it was using an Alt VM, which is the MOVE VM, which has particular properties in terms of security and preventing things like reentracy attacks and things like that that are possible. medium. And so that's, that's all been essentially scrapped now for an L1. Can you talk about the

reasoning for why, you know, this project that was initially an L2 and I think also like had an L1, I remember that was like M1, M2. It was like quite a complex architecture. Why shift to full on L1? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, raising capital, you have to be cognizant as a soup de jour. What is hot in that day and age, right? So, you know, I, At one time, the Atkins diet was hot. Now it's all about peptides, baby, you know, taking peptides and taking all these different types of supplements. And so similarly, in the VC space, if you want to be able to raise capital, you kind of have to ride the wave. At that time, the wave was being eth aligned.

Now we kind of laugh at that term. What the hell does that even mean? And you saw Vitalik recently, you know, tweet, I think a few months ago, about basically the L2 thesis is somewhat dead because they want to scale the L1, theorem L1. And so we saw that this architecture that we had set out to build just didn't make sense. Our latency was around seven seconds. And so if you're going to be an L2 and you're going to be slower, then why would anyone ever use you? So essentially the easy way to visualize this or to conceptualize it is we just wanted a better experience for builders and for users. And so we said, okay, let's reverse engineer.

How do we do that? Just be your own sovereign L1 with your own tech stack. You don't need to make this Frankenstein chain of, I'll be quite honest. Again, I wasn't part of the raising of the capital, but it was, you know, you have Celestia for the DA, which is the Cosmos ecosystem. You have a settlement on Ethereum, which is, of course, the ETH ecosystem. You have the Muvium. We had raised some capital from Avalanche.

So it was just like how many different groups of crypto can we get as supporters? But ultimately, even if you have every single VC in the world pumping and saying, this is the future, it doesn't matter if it doesn't translate to an actual product that people want to use. So, and I think we see that right now in the market where, you know, people will say, oh, it was just a pump and dump or it was all just hype. You know, there's a million different projects that people talk about like this. But the reality is that they just haven't built a product that people want to use and they don't have PMF. And so for us, that's what our number one focus is. And in order to get there, we had to essentially build a sovereign L1. And so it's been amazing.

every single metric up and to the right. And our builders are happy, our team is happy, it's much easier to maintain. Our AWS bills got cut in half, essentially. So it's, you know, from every single perspective, it's been a win. And so that's essentially why we decided to pivot into an L1. Can you talk a little bit about the L1 architecture?

So is it using an existing sort of stack or is this essentially sort of built from the ground up? And yeah, I mean, are you still sort of sticking to move as the main VM, do you still have this ETH to move translation layer? I mean, there's all these sort of technical things that I'd like get into. So maybe we can spend a little bit of time kind of dissecting the L1. Yeah. Like what still remains from? Yeah.

So first and foremost, we do use the move language, which means we use the move VM. Again, the move language was actually created by Facebook. If you remember, they had this project called DM or Libra. And then Facebook, Mark wanted to make Zuckbucks, right? He wanted to make his own stable coin, the Federal Reserve. said the hell you are, they shut it down, and they open sourced it. And so we actually use the DM virtual machine, the MOVM, which is very similar to what APDOS uses.

So that's our closest comp. And so we've actually had a lot of builders who are already building on the VM, then transition over to movement. And so that's essentially it now we have our own validator set. So it's essentially being able to own some of the value capture as well by having your own validators and having it settle on movement as opposed to Ethereum, which is kind of the the defining characteristic of an L2 versus L1. And can you talk a bit about the stack, like the consensus mechanism,

like the difference are like parts of the, parts of the stack? Yeah, I think the most interesting part to kind of talk about. So there was something interesting about movement because originally the vision was we would be able to have a transpiler that would be able to break down EVM bytecode into move bytecode. And so essentially what that means is EVM teams would be able to deploy onto the MOVM. But as the front-facing ecosystem architect, what I, you know, within a few months found out was the people who are building, like for example, the Abe's and the curves of the world, they're not going to use a transpilot. They're going to actually just rewrite the code if they're going to do it and hire a move developer or a move team to help them build it out. And so from that side, you know, we saw that there's just not enough demand.

But ultimately, you know, what really matters, especially in the age of LLMs, we actually are seeing now that we're getting a lot of developers who have zero move experience or very minimal move experience that are trying to build. And with the proliferation of LLMs, it actually helps them and Claude, of course, being able to build projects without necessarily having all the know-hows or even knowing the ins and outs of the move language. Now, that presents its own set of problems around security. You know, recently we saw the Drift Hack, although that has. had nothing to do with the crypto side. That was a pure, you know, social engineering. But, you know, we've seen a huge interest. And so what we're trying to actually figure out now

is how do we scale audits for teams that are using LLMs? Because it's very difficult when you put real money at risk to be able to feel comfortable with money inside of it. And so with LLMs, we need to find a scalable solution to get audits. And of course, if you talk to any, ecosystems, you know it's really expensive and it is almost a prohibiting factor of teams launching is just being able to get enough money for audits. And if you talk to any L1, L2, the majority of

their grants that they give out, it actually all just goes to the auditors because people want to be safe, obviously. Yeah. And also increasingly auditors are relying on LLMs and in such systems to perform their audits. And I mean, this actually ties in well with some of the of the news that came out, I think today or yesterday, we're recording this on April 8th about the Mythos model and its ability to basically sniff out, you know, 30-year-old bugs and free BSD or, you know, other Linux-based operating systems and it's like sniffing out bugs that give you root access. I feel like, I think we're entering a world where, you know, security audits are at least like, there's going to be a lot less,

money to be made as a security auditor in the, you know, just traditional sense, right, where you have like an auditor looking at every line of code and most likely, you know, models would be doing most of that work. How do you think that changes, you know, perhaps like the industry, but also just ease of being able to write good, secure applications and being able to ship much, much more easily? Yeah, so we actually, we turned our head of Devril into our mirror of AI, jokingly because, you know, there's the Cryptozar, David Sachs.

And so his job was to essentially think about how we can use AI across the entire org. And obviously one thing we've done is we essentially have agents who are constantly trying to hack movement. So they're 24-7 trying to find vulnerabilities, both on movement the chain itself and then our top protocols. And so I think that this is where everyone is headed. And then, you know, you just always want to have security top of mind. Then, of course, there's the whole fear of quantum computing. Is it going to be that, you know, but it. If quantum computing happens, the first thing they're going to do is, you know, hack the banks and hack all.

Like, that's its own set of problems. But obviously, every blockchain should be thinking about how we become quantum resistant. And that's, but first and foremost, let's deal with today's problems before we deal with tomorrow's potential problems. And so, you know, we do have a white hacker policy where we work with teams if they say, hey, we think we found a vulnerability. We sit down with them. Why do you think so? And we've had a few of those. And it's been great.

And so it's great to have community that supports. I do think that the shipping was never really the problem. There's always going to be some 20 to 22 year old college grad that will just slam some monsters and zins and just work for like a month straight. So I don't think building the tech is actually ever been really the hiccup. It's always been product market fit. It's been the product itself. Why would people use this?

How is it better? Is it just a little bit better? Is it an order of magnitude better? And what is the actual use case? So I do think this is one of those situations where originally crypto was this, it's a new industry, you just throw a bunch of crap out of wall, see what sticks. And we have essentially gone past that phase. Now we're much more mature. VCs are much more judicious in how they deploy their capital.

And so they want to see real PMF. They want to see real use cases. And so that's kind of where movement is now focused on. And I do believe that we're going to see the shift across the board. for the teams that actually survive the next 12 months, my thesis is that they're going to pivot very aggressively and go towards niches as opposed to being general purpose, L1s or L2s.

I think like one of the things we talked about recently when we met in person was that, you know, the edge is increasingly distribution. And as the industry continues to consolidate around, you know, a handful of really powerful use cases, distribution continues to be, you know, the thing that allows chains to continue to operate and, like, you know, we'll make the difference between those who survive and those who don't. I think with, with movement, there is, you know,

there's sort of like two headwinds, just, of course, like distribution, and that's hard enough on, on any chain, like having the ability to be out there and be visible, whether that's in, like, in FinTech or with any sort of like yield use case, et cetera. And then you have also the move language, which sort of on the back end makes it difficult to, say, attract developers that already know solidity. Of course, again, we talked about LMs and how that makes it easier. How do you think nowadays about movement and it's like core positioning as a blockchain, as an L1, as having these differences that can be headwinds, as I mentioned, but can also be its strengths? Like, how do you kind of position movement to users but also to developers?

Well, first, I don't think the market gives a crap about whether EVM, SVM, MOVM, like, no one cares, right? Like, we've realized that leading with tech doesn't really matter. There's just a minimally viable product that you need, that it's fast enough, it's not too slow, the latency is good. And it's, for example, if you're doing high frequency trading, that's like its own beast. But if you're not doing high frequency trading, most blockchains actually fulfill it. Now it's a question of where do you fit into this, I call it the global tapestry. of business. Where do you fit into this? And so from our side, I truly do believe that there's going to be very few general purpose L1s. I think Monad is probably the last one that's going to throw its hat

into the ring in a meaningful way. And of course, they raised a lot of capital and they have a great team. And so, you know, based on what I'm seeing, just purely as a general purpose L1, I think Monad, Solana, Ethereum are going to be there. And what I mean by that when I say general purpose, the way I define it is that most of the building will be done by outside teams, aka outside builders. So if I were to reverse engineer like, you know, a blockchain that's a multi-billion dollar valuation and I reverse engineer how they got there, I don't see any timeline in which it was some team in the ecosystem,

you know, some 22, 23-year-old builder from Indonesia that built this amazing app. And then in it of itself, okay, they raise, they do an amazing, they build an amazing, project. They make a crap ton of money. But then the question is, where's the value accrual back to the actual blockchain itself, right? And the poster child of this is Polymarket and Polygon. Polymarket has a multiple, I think a 20, 25x larger valuation than Polygon. It's actually host chain. So from one perspective, that's good. But if you are a supporter of Polygon, that's not good because you're like, wait a minute, we hit the home run, but there's no points on the scoreboard for us. How did that happen? And so,

I do think that what we're going to see is a lot of teams either changing the value capture or building the products themselves, which is the path that we're going down. So in a nutshell, I do not think it makes sense for a multi-billion dollar enterprise to be fully at the mercy of the builders in the ecosystem and just cross your fingers and hope that one of them hits PMF. It's not scalable. And even if they do, there's been so many cases where a project finds PMF and they go to a different chain.

So you can't even lock them in. So it's a very difficult business problem to solve if you don't take the reins yourself. I guess what's interesting here is what you said about Monad being the last general purpose chain. Does that mean that the L1 premium no longer exists? And like what is the kind of like narrow PMF that movement wants to operate as a as a chain in a broader ecosystem of L1s that may have very specific like, you know, private credit or tokenization, etc? where like, well, what do you guys focus on? Sure. So I'm not going to be the one to say that the L1 premium is dead.

I'm just, look at the charts, you tell me, you know, is there a premium that we're saying for L1s versus L2s? That's probably one question. And I think it's pretty obvious that whatever that premium was, it's not what it used to be. Let's say that's the safest comment I can make. In terms of where we fit in, look, move was made for money. And I always talk about this, move is for money. That is literally why Facebook spent, you know, billions of dollars in R&D, brought the top researchers in the world together to build a language from the ground up.

They could have just optimized solidity or used Rust, you know, SBM itself, but they decided, you know what, we're going to build a new language, the MOVM, and we believe that this is going to be the scalable solution for the future. And so that's exactly what we're using. Now, the question, to answer your question, where does movement fit into this? Our number one focus is to be the global money layer and settle. layer for the global south. I'll be honest, the Western world is well served. They are very well served. I have 10 different ways if you're an American where I can send you money, no problem,

no fees. If you're not an immigrant, I'm shocked if you've ever remitted money. Unless you are, you know, you come from immigrant background where you send money to your uncle, your auntie, you probably have never used Western Union, right? At worst, maybe you've done a wire from your bank account and even then you're kind of annoyed. But if the worst thing that an American has to deal, you're, with is a wire transfer and their bank calls them. Are you sure you're not sending things to a Nigerian prince? You know, they're pretty well served. They have access to a bunch of different assets. But when you travel, that's when you start realizing, wait a minute, there's a lot of use cases and a lot of underserved people. And for me, you know, we talk about

movement as the people's chain. You know, Satoshi's original vision was how do we bank the unbanked? And so that is essentially what our focus is on, is going to the places that are underserved and trying to provide them the value proposition of blockchain, of instant global settlement, and how we can essentially revolutionize certain businesses as well. So that's where I say movement will fit in. We have some things that we're working on that I don't want to announce until it's finalized, but just understand that move is for money. We're fully pivoting into that and that we have a lot of interesting developments over the past few months.

that whole Iran deal is going to need some currency to pay for passes through the stricry to Moose. I don't know if Iran's going to accept Moved tokens, but we can try. Yeah. No, just because I heard somewhere that they're going to accept Bitcoin for payment or something, something crazy. So I want to like kind of dig into this a little bit because like, you know, a lot of teams over the years have like built applications that have been sort of targeted towards the global South, targeted towards, you know, in South America or like African markets or like parts of Southeast Asia. And I think those use case

have always, those use cases have always been like very interesting on paper. You know, in the end, it's sort of like the people of those places that gets to decide what they use. And it's never sort of like people in Silicon Valley or in Europe that kind of like come and push their their use cases onto them. That approach has seen its set of challenges, right? Like coming with this piece of technology and like, what is your approach to sort of embedding movement into, because again, these are all different markets, like every country, you know, in the global south has its own, you know, existing payment rails, political, sort of monetary sovereignty issues, right? And then there's like other chains that are competing for that,

like, you know, Cosmos also right now is like going out trying to sell the Cosmos stack as like a way for governments to build their own sovereign sort of like central banks on a blockchain. It's like, how do you think about positioning movement and, What is your strategy for going into those markets or the markets that you're prioritizing first for any particular reason? Or yeah, how do you see that? Yeah, I, you know, one thing I always say is I am not in the business of telling people this is what this is PMF for you. If you don't understand where people are, there's no way that you can give them a product. And so for example, myself, I just traveled to East Africa.

We met with some heads of state cabinet members to try to understand what matters to them. and then based on that, you know, provide them some insights as to what are the use case that blockchain on law? And so for us, we are fully pivoting. I just came back actually from traveling. And so it was actually really, if you saw it on Twitter, I was in Ethiopia. We were able to meet with the president. We're able to meet with the cabinet members and try to understand, hey, what do you guys, what do you guys care about?

What matters to you? And, you know, we found a lot of really cool things. So first and foremost is every country wants to be able to be able to. compete globally. Like that's just 100%. Right. So if there's new technology, if you look at their charters, they talk about digitalizing dollar, you know, digitalizing money and also AI. How do we incorporate AI? However, the thing is when you are a nation state that's, I'll say catching up, assuming that let's say US and China are leading, you don't have any room for error. So once you allow let's say crypto or blockchain or you, let's say open the doors to AI, you can never put that

genie back in the bottle. So they have to be very meticulous about how they roll it out, when they roll it out, and being able to tighten the straps if, you know, things start going off the rails. And so if you don't understand that, you can never essentially work with people because you don't understand their fears. And I mean, this is like basic sales stuff, right? I come from a cell. Like, you have to understand what they care about. And so a lot of teams, they live in this Silicon Valley SF silo thinking, oh yeah, the world is going to want A, B, and C. and they just have no idea. And that's why you actually,

if you look at the founders, some of the ones who find the best PMF are actually immigrants, who they live the experience and they come where the talent is, they get their resources, and they start building for where they just came from. And so I do think that it's not coincidence

that some of a lot of the best founders are the ones who were immigrants that recently came to America and they just essentially found the tools. In terms of revolutionizing businesses, you know, DAS was recently in New York, I think it was like two weeks ago. A shout out to Blockworks.

I heard it was amazing. I was not able to attend because, again, I was in Ethiopia. But, you know, I listened to one of the talks by the CEO of Western Union. And so obviously any business that relies on float will be revolutionized by digital dollars, aka blockchain, because they can settle instantly. So Western Union actually has a billion dollars. One B, what the B? One billion dollars in pre-funding across all the different markets.

they serve. That is the most capitally inefficient thing you can imagine, right? Instead of that money going into the business, they have to pre-fund it. Why? Because if I send money to, let's say Senegal, they take three to five business days for the money to actually go from bank to, there's actually three banks or four banks that get touched. My bank, to the corresponding U.S. bank, to their corresponding U.S. bank, and then to the national bank. So it touches many hands, which takes a lot of time. And so they have to pre-fund that money. Exactly. So they have to pre-fund that money. And they also have to take currency risk, right? So what if the dollar goes down? What if the dollar goes up? And so these are all the different things that teams have to worry about. But with stable coins, you essentially can wipe all that

away because within a few seconds, they get the USDT, the USC, they redeem it. They do the FX. And now it's a completely revolutionized business. So that's essentially where movement is focused and headed. And we've made a lot of significant progress. Again, I know this is a, it's a little tacky to say it, but not give particular names. But when the ink is dried, I promise that we will announce it. Okay. So it sounds like a pretty significant pivot

to building infrastructure for national economies, national banks, etc. to facilitate global payments. Like, where do you think lie the biggest opportunities? Is it South America? Is it sort of like West Africa

or sub-Saharan Africa? Is it Southeast Asia? where are you seeing the biggest opportunities and what are the kind of particular pain points that you know moved and solved there? First of all, the names of countries that you've never heard of, that's generally good because that's where no one is. Right. So I don't want to go where everyone is already focused. That's just personally from a business perspective. But secondly, any currency that has faced serious devaluation, those are generally the first adopters of blockchain in general. So I'll use, you know, if you look at Kenya or Ethiopia,

They had millions of holders of stable coins before the government actually approved it. Right. And so the reason why the government approved is because they saw this overwhelming demand. So generally, business people and young professionals are the ones that are at the forefront of technology. Because, you know, imagine, like, just imagine you are, let's say, a Turkish business e-commerce businessman. And you accept money in Turkish lira, but you need to pay Facebook because you want Facebook ads and dollars. So how do you even hedge this, right? So your only real option is I need to hold dollars because I need to have fixed costs.

I can't have cost in dollars and then my lira is getting, you know, debased. It would be an impossible to run a business. And again, we take these things for granted, but at scale, it's impossible to do this unless you have access to the US dollar. You add the yield on the US dollar. Now you're talking, right? So not only do I get to save in dollars, I get to earn in dollars. And so that's phase two for movement is.

we will essentially be the yield back end for many fintech apps and for many national economies. So that's what we're focused on. It's a very big swing. And we're just lucky to have a lot of traction already. So for us, it's essentially being able to be the digital dollar rails and then also the yield back end for the global south. Yeah, I guess there's a challenge there also, which is that like historically like some countries and I'm not familiar with sort of the African economies, but countries in South Africa and South America. have like banned their their citizens from swapping in and out of dollars or holding dollars. So this is like whole political pressure as well for countries to maintain sovereignty over

their currency. And if like everyone is like selling their currency for the dollar, deep values of currency, etc. How do you think that that looks in the future? Like do we move towards a world where we have like just fewer currencies and a lot of the lower tier currencies just kind of default to using what's more slickwood most available and so like get in line with, you know, sort of like US dollar denominated currencies. And, you know, there's, of course, you know, the other side of that, which is like the growing importance of like the BRICS countries and also this kind of like shifting hegemony of the United States, which I think, you know, most people agree there's a trend towards,

you know, a multipolar world where you have sort of like multiple countries sort of josting for power and sort of economic relevance. Do you think that there are barriers to having U.S. dollar adoption in some countries, given the fact that China might be present there, Russia may be present there in significant ways? And like, how do you think about that? Yeah. So I'm very opinionated about this topic. Anyone with a set of ears, I've probably talked to them about this and yapped their ears off.

From my side, I believe that every single nation state, like they have no choice but to use the U.S. petro dollar, right? That is why the U.S. has dominance is the petro dollar. And you can look into the history. of, you know, there's all these, you know, historical reasons as to as to why that happened. But ultimately, I do believe that every single nation state is going to have to nationalize their currency. Because as of right now, it's unfair. So if I'm a Turkish business person, I have the US dollar or have the lira. Just in a vacuum, I'm always going to choose the dollar because

look at the, look at the performance of lira against a dollar. Now, on top of that, I have access to yield for USD, whether it's USD tier. See, I can earn, let's say, another 4% 5%. Not only do I get the better currency, but I get to yield, I get better yield. The only way the lira can compete in a blockchain economy is they need to be able to digitize the lira and then digitize their T-bill yield, whatever they're, you know, I think right now it's giving on 40%. So if I'm a, if I'm a business person and I have access to the dollar and I can earn 5%, or I have access to a digital lira and I can earn 40%. Now it gets a little bit more interesting because now there's a lot of on the bone, I can essentially go delta neutral. I can, you know, buy the lira, then short it.

And then I can, you know, even if there's like a pendle type product or I can sell it, you know, the, so there's all these different types of things that are possible, but the nation states have to adopt a actual currency. I think that is step one. And then step two is to provide yield in the native currency. And that has that has been essentially the crux of the conversations that I've had with different nations is essentially how do we do that in a responsible way. And if you do it, it has to be very shortly after you allow stable coins. Because if there's too much time in between, your currency can essentially get destroyed. But if you take a look at Nigeria, they outlawed crypto and their spread was roughly 30%.

And I know because I was at a stable coin project before movement and we saw that they would essentially arm up to 30%. But once they allowed crypto, that actually made it an open market. And so yes, the Nair went down for a little bit of time, but that spread compressed. and now the market spoke and you know and the spread is very small. It's like I think 3% or 4% between the national bank rate and the street rate, whereas before it was 30%. So I do see that there will be a little bit of short-term pain when they accept the dollar,

but eventually it'll bottom out. So for example, in Ethiopia, it's actually illegal to have stable coins. So what happens is it's also illegal to essentially have US dollars unless you have like a big business with a bank account. So for them, you actually are panicking to get that. So the reason why the spread the premium exists for the dollar is because they have no choice that they're panicking. Oh crap, like how can I get access to the dollar and the price just keeps going up and up and up. But if they actually created a free market, the premium would shrink down to like maybe single digits, low single digits.

But again, it's very difficult. I don't hold anything against their government. I think most governments, they, when it comes to money and fiscal policy, they have to be very, very stringent and careful because, As you know, it's all one hair away of, you know, completely falling to the ground. Yeah, that's interesting. So, like, let's take maybe more of a look at movement in the movement ecosystem. So what is happening in the movement ecosystem right now? I've been like sort of paying attention. We have some investments there.

And what are people building? There's this Move Alliance that you guys announced also in the last few months. Yeah, what are people excited about and sort of building it? Yeah, look, the reality is that in any ecosystem, the people, the reason why people build anywhere is because they think there's some chance of financial mobility. They can make a lot of money. I always joke, you need to buy Mama a house, right? Everyone's goal is that I make enough money where, you know, I can buy my mom a house,

buy my dad a car, whatever it might be. So essentially you need that financial mobility. And so it's very difficult in a crypto bear market to be able to build an ecosystem with not necessarily, you're at the mercy kind of of the market, right? Is the, is the ecosystem going to start flourishing? So from our side, we've been working very intimately with. the teams to explain to them what's on our roadmap, what's on the horizon so that they don't build in a silo. And so step one was how do we get everyone financially aligned? So I'm going to walk you

through this. There are scenarios where the token of the chain goes up, let's say Salana went from $10, $8, up to $200, right? So at 20xed. In that instance, where at 20x, most protocols maybe got a 2x or a 3x. So they actually underperformed the block chain by, you know, what, 70%, 80%. And so the question to ask is why? The reason why is because they don't have a financial alignment directly. It's indirect. So the thought process, oh, Salonah is going to be worth a lot more.

And so the top decks on Salon or the top lending protocol should be at least 10%. But the market told us that's not true. And so the reason why we did the Move Alliance is we wanted to make sure that everyone is financially aligned with movement. And so essentially what the Movers Alliance is, is they take a significant portion of their fees and they use it to buy move token. Why? Because everyone should have, you know, I call them moonbags that are aligned with movement. So if movement does go up, they actually write up that appreciation and value. Because the reality is that if in this case, let's say movement

dies, every project on movement is dead. So you have this asymmetric downside where not only does the project have to win, but then you also have to win. And so to me, that's, that doesn't make sense. Because if I die, you're already dead. So this was a way for us to basically financialize the alignment between teams. And so I do think that that's really important. I want them to like me, but I don't want that to be the reason why they build on movement. I want it to be because they are actually rooting for the success of, you know,

the economy, let's call it, a movement. Why should people build on movement? You know, like if you had to, if you had like a room full of the developers right now and, and you had their ear, like what would be your pitch to them as to, why they should build there. So I would, first and foremost, I wouldn't try to convince them. I would explain to them what we're building and understand if that's interesting to them. I never want to make someone love me. Genuine desire cannot be negotiated. It can never be

negotiated. You can't talk to a girl as to why she should love you. She either loves you or she doesn't love you. She either respects you or she doesn't respect you. There's nothing you can say to make someone love you and respect you. And so I've learned that the hard way. You can give as many grants. At the end of the day, it's like buying a box of chocolate and flowers. It's cool. It fizzles after an hour or two, and that's the end of the conversation. And if anything, if you bring it up, you're kind of a corny loser. Oh, well, what about that grant I gave you?

You know, that's not the way you build business. So to answer your question, I'm not in the business of convincing. I'm in the business of showing this is what we're doing. This is what we're building. Does this speak to you? If it does, you know, my sword is yours. I will do everything I can to get you. the resources and support you need.

But if it doesn't speak to you, I'm not going to try to convince you because at the end of the day, this is a tough industry. Being a founder is really, really hard. When you're laying down on your bed, staring at your ceiling, thinking, God, this is really tough. The thing that's going to get you through is not, oh, Tarab told me that, you know, we're going to be successful. No, it's going to be because you have your own individual thesis and motivation and

aligns with where we're headed and that there's a one plus one equals three. And there's a synergy where we can. can help each other. So I don't really do pitches like that because it doesn't work. All right. But I mean, if you have, I mean, like, let's put like this, like, if you had to put your best word forward and if someone were to ask you, like, hey, I, you know, I've got this opportunity to build over here, I've got an opportunity to build over here. What are some of the things that people have the opportunity to build on movement, let's say that maybe they don't have the opportunity to build somewhere else? How should people be thinking about what movement can offer them as an ecosystem, as a chain, as opportunities,

et cetera. So maybe a better way to answer this is tell you why the teams we have have chosen to be on movement. So based on the conversations I've had, one of the main things that we do is we choose a handful of partners. We work very closely with them, do everything we can to get them in front of investors. We give them access to our roadmap so they understand where we're headed so that they can understand where they fit into this story. And so from our side, If you are on movement, we will do everything in our power to support you and to help you grow. But right now, the main focus is on payments, yield, and providing this Web2.5 infrastructure where we don't have the full decentralization of an Ethereum, but we're also just not some corpo chain. So finding that middle balance where we're able to meet people where they are.

It is impossible for me to go to one of the top, you know, let's say North African or South American FinTech apps and say, hey, yeah, we put your money in drift. North Korea hacked it. I am so sorry you lost like $100 million, but it's okay because we're decentralized. They don't give a damn about decentralization. They are not going to lose the funds. So you have to realize that your romantic idealism is great for the romantics. But for the pragmatists and the realists, you have to meet them where they are. and they have very strong fiduciary duties to their depositors or to their users.

And so if you can't answer those questions, you're essentially out of luck. And as we know, the insurance industry in crypto is basically zero, right? It's very difficult to get insured. And all the insurance companies that did insure, they all went bankrupt. And the second a big hack happened, they're like, uh-oh, we don't have money. So it's just like Hurricane Katrina every single month, there's a hack. So I think people realize that the insurance companies are not going to pay out. So you have to take things into your own hands.

And so that's essentially, if those types of use cases are interesting to you, if you want to bank the unbanked, if you care about providing this value to the rest of the world, then movement is the place for you. If you want to work purely on Wall Street and stuff like that, I'm sure there's other places that are focused on that more aggressively than we are. I also want to talk a little bit about the current state of the market. and get your thoughts on. I've talked to a lot of people in the last few months

about, you know, kind of like where, where they think we're at and sharing our thoughts in terms of like what this bear market represents. And one thing I've noticed and that other people have noticed as well is that like folks that have been in this space for a long time and I kind of put myself in this category as well are kind of like checking out in this bear market.

I mean, you know, we're still interested in the space. but not with the same amount of fervor and enthusiasm and excitement as we perhaps had in the past. And for me, what that looks like is it feels like crypto is getting to this place where a lot of the ideals, the ethos, the innovations that we saw in the last five to seven years, well, it's not getting any funding. It's not getting people excited. You know, we just saw like East Denver being pretty much, you know, like pretty much dead. I wasn't at ECC, but I've talked a lot of people who were there and they said that like it was good, but like the vibes were not there. There was not a lot of great events or side events.

A lot of the attention, a lot of the applications are staple coins, RWAs and sort of like these very fintechy type products. That a lot of the really cool infrastructure, the privacy, the decentralization, the, you know, self-sovereignty, etc. is getting a lot less attention. And I think for myself and a lot of people like me who have been in this space for a while, that's what got us interested in the space. And to see that not really making its way into this next sort of phase of crypto,

this institutionalization of crypto, feels a little bit like, it feels a bit disappointing. Yes. So, yeah, I'd like to get your take, if this resonates with you, and if all that sort of like interesting kind of experience, experimental researchy stuff that the space has been doing for the last decade really doesn't make its way into the next phase of crypto, which is like being able to use stable coins in your Revolut app. Was that all for nothing? What comes out on the other side? Do we actually have any of the things that we set out to build that got us excited about the space in the first place? Well, it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved that at all, right? The old Tennyson. So at least at least we should.

tried, right? No, look, at the end of the day, technology goes where the talent goes, right? So I think a lot of people think, oh, the talent goes where the tech is, no, it's the opposite. So obviously, when you have freaking Facebook giving out LeBron James, Leo Messi type contracts, a billion dollars to come sign, as opposed to in crypto where, you know, there's a quarter billion dollar hack on like the second biggest chain on Solana, you know, the decision isn't that difficult, right? And so there's always this hotball of money. It was crypto before. Now it's an AI. And generally young, smart kids from Stanford, from Berkeley, and from the top universities, they go where the hot ball of money is because they want to buy mama a house, right?

And so I do think that as VC dollars dry up in an industry, that is like the canary in the coal mine. However, that should not dissuade those who are strongly ethos driven. But it is going to be true that it's more difficult. It's easy to be an idealist when you have your stomach is full. It's much harder to be an idealist when you're living off scraps, right? the starving musician. So now it's the starving, you know, decentralized dev.

So, you know, even Ethereum, which everyone loved the fact that Ethereum was decentralized, they felt that Solana was running laps around them because they had a little bit more of central leadership. And even the biggest ETH bulls were kind of upset by the Ethereum foundations. I'll call it malaise or idealism. And so there is going to be a certain point where your idealism is great, but what does that mean for me? We saw with Tornado Cash with Roman, you know, this man built an amazing protocol, which was able to obfuscate funds and make it so that the government over, to limit government overreach.

And this guy gets put into this long litigation and legal battle facing prison, right? So there is a certain point where if you're really about that life, as we say, then you're going to have to deal with the consequences. But most folks, you know, they're idealists. But when when push comes to shove, they're going to want to live under a roof and be. warm at night. And so I do think that's a real problem that we have to address. And so if it doesn't translate into a real product that people will use, then what was the point, right? Like, I love tornado cash, the concept of tornado cash, but who are the main users? They're generally hackers, right? The first thing they do is they go to tornado cash. That's not necessarily a bad thing, right?

Cash is not intrinsically bad, but it is the medium of choice for drug deal. So does that mean that cash is inherently evil? No. So to answer your question, I do. do think that we are straying from God's light every day. But the reality is that if decentralization doesn't meet people where they are, then it's just a cool passion project to have on the side. Now, personally, we need decentralized systems, but that doesn't mean that every single system has to be decentralized. And so, especially for the L-1s that don't necessarily have PMF,

why are you doing decentralization theater? Who are you doing this for to make yourself feel better? It doesn't matter. Create a product that people want to use. And so that's the lesson that I've learned over the past, let's call it, year, is that you have to build something that people want to use. And then you can, you know, have your ethos down the road. Well, I mean, it looks like the thing people want to use is, yeah, stable coins and, and, and getting yield on RWAs, which like, I think a lot of us saw this coming, right? We saw the moment where we wouldn't have Napster anymore, but we'd have Spotify, you know?

I sort of been using that analogy for years now. And everyone, I think people would be like, yeah, but Spotify's not great because, like, artists are not making money either. It does feel like a lot of the talent that has been here for a while is, you know, it's like, it's a cycle, right? There's like this new talent coming in now. It's the, you know, people who are familiar with fintech and like want to see this getting to sort of like fintech and banking and traditional finance.

So I actually think we're going to go back towards piracy. So, you know, originally, all you had was like Netflix. Then you had HBO. Then you had Paramount. Then you have Hulu. Then you have Disney. You're like, yeah, what the hell? So now they package them.

Just like it used to be with cable. So it's like we just reinvent the same wheel. So there's always going to be this constant expansion and contraction. I actually do believe that we're going to go back towards more decentralized services because of the U.S. dollars hegemony. And nation states are going to want to limit it. So people will need a way to be able to circumvent government.

overreach. And as we know, the government's appetite has never satiated. It is never satiated. So as it overreaches in certain countries, you will see people go towards these decentralized protocols. And it's really important that we have them. It's always like the free rider program where I'm happy tornado cash exists, not that I would ever build it. And I don't want to deal with all the bullshit that comes with it, but I'm sure someone else will. So we have to as an industry think about how do we support these initiatives and not create this free rider? problem. So as we wrap up here, one of the next priorities for the next, you know, six to 12 months and, yeah, where can people sort of keep up to date on what's your call to action to our community?

Yeah, yeah. So I think the first thing is, you know, follow myself or I kind of share all the updates. It's at Tarab U, T-O-R-A-B-Y-O-U. It's a joke like I'm going to Rob you because my name's Tarab. Not that great when there's lots of hacks, but that is how people remember it. or go to Move Industries. We have our website as well, follow us on Twitter. We have a lot of really cool updates. Recently, we integrated Circle. So as we go down this more institutional traditional path,

traffic by path, we have now USC, which is huge because this is going to be the crux of a lot of the partnerships that we have lined up. Of course, now we have the L1. We're going to announce a new yield product that's coming to movement. I think tomorrow, today's Wednesday, April 8th. It'll be announced tomorrow April 9th. By the time this comes out, yeah, for sure. Yes, exactly, exactly.

So being able to provide institutional grade yield to everyday users, that is essentially, again, what we're focused on is access to the dollar or the currency of choice and then yield. So starts with USD, it'll go to BTC and then gold. There's a lot of appetite for gold in these countries. Wait, wait, wait. This is going to go after you actually announce it. So you can say it here, and then when people listen to this, they'll actually know what it looking at.

So the USDA one is the one that's being announced tomorrow. The other ones are going to be announced afterwards. So I'm just giving you a glimpse of the roadmap because ultimately there's only a few things that people really want to hold. Gold is obviously battle tested. Nothing more lindy than gold. And so our goal is not only to give people access to gold, it's also to give them access to yield on gold. And so that is amazing because now they don't have to hide it under their mattress. You know, when they go on a vacation, they just hold it in their wallet.

So obviously a lot of them are custodial solutions. So there's no fear of, oh no, you know, I lost my seat phrase and now I lost all my life savings. So we're essentially, again, meeting people where they are. Cool. Well, Zarab, thanks for coming on, sharing this update and come back anytime. Thank you, Seth. Thank you, brother. Cheers.