How Move found new purpose after the collapse of Facebook’s stablecoin Diem

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

When lawmakers in the United States quashed Facebook’s cryptocurrency ambitions, Blackshear and others searched for new applications for the language they created. It didn’t take long to find them. Today, several successful blockchains use Move, including Aptos, Sei and Sui, the latter of which Blackshear continues to work on as chief technology officer of Mysten Labs.

Cointelegraph spoke with Blackshear to discover why the end of Diem was just the beginning for Move and why it is a better choice for building blockchains than Solidity, Rust or other preexisting languages:

“The two high-level points are that Move is safer and more productive,” Blackshear told Cointelegraph. “I’ll touch on the safety point first. In my previous life, before joining Libra and creating Move, I worked in static program analysis and program verification, where I spent all day looking at bugs that real programmers wrote and trying to figure out ‘What led them to introduce this? Did the language get in their way? Is it just fundamentally hard?’ All of these sorts of things.”

“I did that same study on Solidity. To give one concrete example, a prominent bug at the time was the EthereumDAO hack. This was a huge event that led to a lot of money being lost and caused Ethereum to fork. When we looked at the essence of the DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] hack, the root cause was the reentrancy issue… so with Move, one of the things we did is we said we’re not going to have reentrancy.”

On the productivity side, Blackshear explains, “We have this object-based abstraction that just makes it very, very direct to translate your thoughts into code.”

The end of the beginning

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

It was a monumental undertaking of incredible ambition, but the project, initially named Libra before rebranding as Diem, never saw the light of day. A cryptocurrency developed by Facebook had one fatal inescapable flaw: it was a cryptocurrency developed by Facebook.

It’s an issue of which the social media giant seemed more than aware. From the outset, Facebook attempted to spread responsibility for the project as widely as possible, bringing multiple partners along for the ride, including PayPal, Uber, Vodafone, Spotify, Visa and Mastercard.

But no matter how many friends Facebook assembled, Diem struggled to find approval among regulators and the public alike.

As Blackshear says, “In summer 2021, there was a particular point where there were a lot of these false starts, times where it looked like we were going to launch. And then there was one particular thing that happened during that summer that just made it very clear — this is never going to happen.”

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In the summer of 2021, the United States Federal Reserve general counsel Mark Van Der Weide told Facebook it was uncomfortable greenlighting any stablecoin project until it had a “comprehensive regulatory framework” in place.

Facebook requested meetings with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. No meetings ever occurred.

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

“We reached a point where we hit the requirements for launching Diem from a tech perspective, and we were in a holding pattern in terms of partnerships and regulatory stuff,” said Blackshear.

When the axe finally fell, it was almost an act of liberation. “At that point, we had done all this research to figure out, ‘How do we build the better version?’ That’s when we decided, Move is ready for prime time,” Blackshear told Cointelegraph.

It’s primetime for Move

Blackshear may have created Move for Facebook’s Diem, but as the Mysten Labs founder admits, Diem was never the limit of his ambition.

“When you’re working on a programming language like Move, Diem was our first candidate or customer, but you want it to be broadly applicable,” said Blackshear. “The thing that inspired me was then that I wanted Move to be used in all blockchains. I want it to be the industry standard going forward.”

Together with fellow Facebook alumni, Blackshear created Mysten Labs. Team leader Even Cheng became Mysten Labs’ CEO. George Danezis, who led systems research, project lead Adeniyi Abiodun, and Kostas Chalkias, who Blackshear describes as “one of the most creative people I’ve ever met,” joined them.

Blackshear adds, “I think some people think five co-founders is a lot, but I actually don’t know how anybody does it with fewer, especially in this space.”

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

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

Like Sui, Aptos’ founders — Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh — previously worked at Facebook.

A third Move blockchain, Sei, is also performing well. A look at CoinMarketCap shows that Sei’s native token SEI has a healthy market cap of $1.59 billion, just a fraction above Sui SUI at $1.58 billion, while the Aptos ( APT ) market cap is currently $3.06 billion.

Aptos market capitalization. Source: CoinMarketCap

Blackshear’s dream of Move being the industry standard may still be some way off, but Sui is far from alone, and it appears the competition is no barrier to its success. As Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 16, SUI is enjoying extremely strong growth . In a three-month period, the total volume locked on the blockchain rose by 2,000%.

Cetus, Navi Protocol and Scallop Lend are among the protocols that are already contributing to its growth. Solend, a major lending protocol on Solana, plans to diversify with a lending platform on Sui.

Security, accessibility and speed

The future for Sui and Move appears bright if their current form continues, and while non-Move chains aren’t going anywhere — as Blackshear admits — he expresses a personal belief that Move “is the way forward.”

“I think smart contract safety is really holding back broader adoption of crypto,” he adds.

For that reason, a language that cuts out common attack vectors has major advantages.

As for his top priority for Sui, Blackshear cites accessibility. “We are laser-focused on developer experience. It’s what we care about the most, the thing we wake up thinking about every day. The thing we obsess over is developer experience.”

Looking to the future, Cointelegraph asked Blackshear what excited him most about the future of Sui. As it transpires, the Mysten Labs founder is a bit of a speed freak.

“Something I’m really excited about is we’re shipping the first major upgrade to Sui consensus since our launch. It’s called Mysticeti. Let me talk at a high level about what Mysticeti is doing. We’re really focused on being fast, and I mean fast in terms of low latency. We think throughput is important,” said Blackshear. “We think the thing that’s going to be differentiated in the long term is what chain 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 chain that’s faster.”

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

200ms block time equivalents on @SuiNetwork is now conservative. Expect below that on mainnet with the new consensus update, Mysticeti.

Fastest blockchain on mainnet is getting even faster.

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

“With Mysticeti, we think we can get that [decentralized exchange] time down to about one second, which is the theoretical minimum and is going to be the fastest anywhere,” he said.

According to Blackshear, the development period will also be swift, with Mysticeti scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2024.

A personal journey

For those on the outside, the story of Move seems unlikely: A language created for a cryptocurrency that failed to materialize is now enjoying a rebirth with three flourishing blockchain networks.

For Blackshear, it is also a profoundly personal journey. From his earliest days coding in Facebook’s “infra [-structure] dungeon” — as Blackshear jokingly calls it — to taking the lead on a significant project such as Diem was “a big moment of growth for me.”

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As for creating Mysten Labs, Blackshear says, “Being an entrepreneur is very different than being a language designer and being a chief technology officer[…] I’ve learned a lot, and it keeps me on my feet.”

While the public is still fairly new to Move, and its chains can still be considered in their infancy, Blackshear has been working on the language for six years now. For him, Move and blockchain is about more than just lines of code.

He says: “There’s a lot of big problems in the world, and there’s a lot of interesting tech problems. I want to work in something that maximizes my impact and is meaningful to me. So for blockchain, the way I think about it is that fundamentally, it’s a collaboration technology [...] At the most fundamental level, that’s what inspires me about blockchains.”