Institutional-grade yield on USD, BTC, and Gold?

Movement’s stated ambition is to bring institutional-grade yield to everyday users, first on USD and later on BTC and gold. A USD yield product was scheduled to be announced April 9, with BTC and gold products to follow; the plan also includes access to gold and yield on gold. Movement has integrated Circle and supports USDC, which the speaker says matters to planned partnerships. Many users prefer custodial gold services, he says, because self-custody creates the risk of losing seed phrases.

The broader goal is to provide digital-dollar rails and a yield backend for fintech apps and national economies, particularly in the Global South. Stablecoins such as USDT and USDC could let businesses settle transfers in seconds, reducing prefunding needs and currency exposure. The speaker contrasts this with transfers to Senegal that can take three to five business days and pass through three or four banks, and says Western Union holds about $1 billion in prefunding across its markets. Kenya and Ethiopia already had millions of stablecoin holders before their governments approved use, which he attributes to strong demand.

The speaker argues that stablecoin access should be paired soon with yield on local currencies, so dollar-denominated assets do not weaken domestic money without a competitive alternative. He contrasts roughly 5% yield on USD with roughly 40% on the lira, saying the higher local return could make lira more attractive to a business with dollar expenses. But currency and monetary changes must be managed responsibly, and allowing dollar access may bring short-term pain before narrowing exchange-rate spreads. He says Nigeria’s spread was about 30% when crypto was outlawed and fell to about 3%–4% after it was allowed; he argues Ethiopia’s stablecoin ban and limits on dollar access sustain a premium that a free market could reduce to low single digits.

Movement’s strategy changed from an Ethereum-settled L2 using Celestia for data availability to a sovereign L1 with its own validator set and technology stack. The speaker says the earlier design had roughly seven-second latency, while the L1 improved the experience for users and builders, simplified maintenance, cut AWS bills by about half, and allows Movement to capture value and settle transactions on its own chain. Its technology uses the Move language and Move VM, derived from Facebook’s open-sourced Diem project, with Aptos identified as its closest comparison. The speaker says Facebook invested billions of dollars in R&D on Move, believing it could scale better than further optimizing Solidity or using Rust in the SVM.

Movement dropped plans for an EVM-to-Move transpiler after concluding that prospective EVM teams were more likely to rewrite code with Move developers. Large language models could help developers with little Move experience enter the ecosystem, but the speaker warns that inexperienced developers using them create security risks. He cites the Drift hack as social engineering rather than a crypto-side exploit. More broadly, he sees product-market fit and use cases, not the ability to ship software, as the main challenge for crypto teams. He expects surviving teams to specialize over the next 12 months and predicts few general-purpose L1s will remain, naming Monad, Solana, and Ethereum as likely survivors; distribution, he says, matters increasingly, while many markets care more about adequate performance than whether a chain uses EVM, SVM, or Move.

The company and ecosystem have also undergone organizational change. Binance flagged market-maker irregularities, froze about $37 million in funds by the speaker’s estimate, and gave Movement six months to buy back MOVE. The buyback covered about 2% of token supply, now held in an on-chain MOVE Strategic Reserve that he says supports builders and the ecosystem transparently; leadership changes followed an investigation. Move Industries was formed separately from Movement Labs, with the foundation and company operating independently. The speaker says the team retained the overwhelming majority of its members and added talent, and that he stayed because of momentum, active builders, investor relationships, and ecosystem support. He says governments adopting blockchain or AI have little room for error, while fiduciary responsibilities make fund security essential for financial apps; crypto insurance is nearly nonexistent, and insurers have failed to pay after major hacks.