How Move Facebook’s stable coin found a new purpose after falling dime

At Facebook, Sam Blackshear created Move, a programming language specifically tailored for blockchain applications, but Diem, the Move-powered cryptocurrency, never took off.

As lawmakers in the United States scrapped Facebook's cryptocurrency ambitions, Blackshear and others looked for new applications for the language they created. It didn't take him long to find them. Today, several successful blockchains use Move, including Aptos, Sei, and Sui, the latter of which BlackShare continues to serve as the Chief Technology Officer of Mysten Labs.

Cointelegraph spoke with Blackshear to find out why the end of DEM is the beginning of MOVE, and why building blockchain with Solidity, Rust or other early languages ​​is a better choice.

“The two top-level points are that Move is safer and more efficient,” Blackshear told Cointelegraph. “I will touch on the security point first. In my earlier life, before I joined Libra and created Move, I worked in static program analysis and program verification, spending all day looking at errors written by real programmers and asking, ‘What made them introduce this? Did the language get in their way? Is it basically hard?' All that kind of stuff.”

“I did a similar study on Solidity. To give a concrete example, the big mistake at the time was the EthereumDAO hack. This was a huge event that caused a lot of money to be lost and Ethereum to move. Looking at the nature of the DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] Heck, the root cause is the re-entry issue… So with Move, one of the things we've done is say we can't re-enter.

On the productivity side, Blackshear explains, “We have this object-oriented abstraction that makes it very, very straightforward to translate your ideas into code.”

The end of the beginning

In the year In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook assembled a team of experts in cryptography, programming and distribution systems. Their mission? To build a new global-scale, blockchain-powered payment network from the ground up.

It was an incredibly ambitious undertaking, but the project was never named Libra before it was originally named Dim. The Facebook-made cryptocurrency had one indelible flaw: it was a Facebook-made cryptocurrency.

The social media giant seems to be the case. From the beginning, Facebook tried to spread the responsibility of the project as widely as possible, bringing many partners along for the ride, including PayPal, Uber, Vodafone, Spotify, Visa and Mastercard.

But no matter how many friends Facebook has gathered, Diem has struggled to gain acceptance from regulators and the public.

According to Blackshear, “Summer 2021, with so many false starts, was a unique point where we seemed to start. And then over the summer one thing that made it very clear was that this was never going to happen.

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In the year In the summer of 2021, US Federal Reserve General Counsel Mark van der Weide told Facebook that he would not be comfortable greenlighting any stablecoin project until a “comprehensive regulatory framework” is in place.

Facebook asked to meet with US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. No meetings happened

Diem was dead, but Blackshear and his colleagues were looking to the future.

“We've gotten to the point where we've got the requirements to launch Diem from a technology standpoint, and we've been partnering and keeping things under control,” Blackshear said.

When the ax finally fell, it was almost an act of liberation. “At that point, I thought, ‘How do you build the best version?' We did all this research to find out. That's when we decided, Move is ready for prime time,” Blackshear told Cointelegraph.

It's prime time to move.

BlackShare may have created Move for Facebook as a dime, but as the founder of Mysten Labs believes, dime was never the limit of its interest.

“When you're working on a programming language like Move, Diem was our first candidate or client, but you want it to be widely applicable,” Blackshear said. “What inspired me was that I wanted to use Move in all my blocks. I want it to be the industry standard going forward.

Blackshear co-founded Mysten Labs with Facebook alumni. Even team leader Cheng became the CEO of Mysten Labs. They were joined by George Danzis, who led the systems study, Adeniyi Abiodun, project leader, and Kostas Chalkias, whom Blackshear described as “one of the most creative people I've ever met.”

Blackshear adds, “Some people think five co-founders is a lot, but I really don't know how anyone can do with less, especially in this space.

The five founded Myston Labs in September 2021, and on May 3, 2023, Myston Labs launched Sui, a new layer-1 blockchain built on Move.

Sui wasn't the first to come to market with the Move-powered blockchain. Aptos, which launched in October 2022, holds that honor.

Like Sui, Aptos' founders — Avery Ching and Mo Shek — previously worked at Facebook.

The third Move blockchain, Sei, is doing well. According to CoinMarketCap's view, SEI's native token SEI has a healthy market cap of $1.59 billion, a fraction of Sui's SUI at $1.58 billion, while Aptos (APT)'s market cap is currently $3.06 billion.

The Blackshear Move's dream of becoming the industry standard may still be some way off, but Sui is far from alone, and the competition doesn't seem to be standing in the way of its success. Cointelegraph reported on January 16 that SUI is experiencing extremely strong growth. The total amount locked on the blockchain increased by 2,000% in three months.

Cetus, Navi Protocol and Scallop Credit are among the protocols already contributing to the development. Solund, the main lending protocol on Solana, plans to replicate it with a lending platform on Sui.

Security, accessibility and speed

The future of Sui and Move is uncertain if they continue in their current form and even if the stationary chains go nowhere – as Blackshear believes – Move is “the way forward,” he expressed his personal belief.

“I think smart contract security will prevent broader crypto adoption,” he added.

For this reason, a language that cuts through common attack viruses has great advantages.

As for Sui's top priority, Blackshear cites accessibility. “It's laser-focused on the developer experience. It's what we worry about most, what we wake up thinking about every day. What we care about is the developer experience.

Looking to the future, Cointelegraph asked Blackshear what excites him about Sue's future. When it comes to running, the founder of Mysten Labs is a bit of a speed bump.

“What I'm really excited about is that we're sending the first major update to the Sui Treaty since we launched. It's called Misty. Let me play at a high level what Misty is doing. We really focus on being fast, and I mean fast in terms of low latency. “We think the transfer process is important,” Blackshear said. “What makes the difference in the long run is which chain do we think is the fastest? If you're building payments, if you're building a game, if you're building anything — all things being equal, you're going to pick the fastest chain.”

BlackShare explains that payments on Sui take 400 milliseconds, and decentralized exchanges take two to three seconds. That doesn't seem logical, but Blackshear thinks it's too slow.

200ms block time on @SuiNetwork is now conservative. Stay tuned below for Mysticeti on the new consensus update.

The fastest blockchain on the mainnet is getting faster.

– David Ticzon Mysten Labs Sui (@DavidTiczon) January 21, 2024

“With Mysticeti, we think we can achieve that. [decentralized exchange] Time is down to about a second, which is theoretically the lowest and the fastest anywhere,” he said.

According to Blackshear, the development timeline will also be fast, with Mystity slated to launch in the first quarter of 2024.

Personal travel

To outsiders, the story of Move seems unlikely: a language created for cryptocurrency that failed to materialize is now enjoying a rebirth with three growing blockchain networks.

For Blackshear, it's also a deeply personal journey. From the first days on Facebook “infra [-structure] Prison” – as Blackshear jokingly calls it – leading significant projects like Diem “was a huge growth moment for me.

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Regarding creating Mysten Labs, Blackshear says, “Being an entrepreneur is very different from being a language designer and being a chief technology officer.[…] I've learned a lot, and it keeps me going.”

While the crowd is still new to the movement, and the chains may still be in their infancy, Blackshear has been working on the language for six years. For him, Move and blockchain are more than lines of code.

He said: “There are many big problems in the world. There are also many interesting technological problems. I want to work on something that increases my impact and is meaningful to me. So for blockchain, the way I think about it is basically, it's a collaborative technology. […] At the most basic level, this is what inspires me about blockchains.