Getting Started with Movement Blockchain

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a weekly podcast where we welcome founders, hackers and anyone in between to come on the podcast and showcase what they've built. And today I'm ecstatic to welcome DD Legend Rahat Chowdhury, who's also a DevRel at Movement. So if you didn't know, Movement is a community-first blockchain providing the highest possible TPS through Move, fast finality, native day-zero access to mass liquidity and modular customizations. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Rahat give us an overview of Movement and how you can get started with it today. All right, let's get things going.

GM GM. Welcome to the show, Rahat. Pleasure to have you on, man.

GMove, that's what we say.

Ah, GMove. Yeah, my bad. GMove, GMove. Gotta get with the times, that's right. Yeah, so it's a pleasure to have you on, man. It's a long time coming. I know I tried to get you a couple times before and some things happened with you switching jobs. So happy to finally have you on.

Definitely, man. No, it's... I've been wanting to be here forever, but yeah, things have not worked out for one reason or another. But awesome that we're back now.

Yeah, we're here now, exactly. Yeah, so I guess if folks aren't familiar, would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself?

Yeah, so my name is Rahat. I've been in the Web3 space for a few years now. I started off probably, I guess, in like 2016, 2017 as just a degen ICO chaser, trader person, you know. Fun fact, Tron paid for my wedding. But yeah, so some of my friends tell me that I should never say this out loud, but like Justin Sun has a special place in my heart. They said they cringe every time they hear that, but they'll cringe now. You heard it on the show first, there you go. Anyway, so yeah, I mean, like at that point I was just kind of like observing the space a little bit, not really in it in like the technical sense. I think like once NFTs kind of like started becoming a thing, I was a little bit interested, started learning Solidity. I did like one of those Chainlink bootcamps and kind of like taught myself the rest of the stuff. Was also around the time I think like Nader started also just like streaming about Web3 things. I started doing just like some anon freelancing for a couple of NFT projects. Some of those unfortunately did not go very well, but it is what it is. But it was good experience overall. And then I like officially got into Web3 as like a frontend engineer at Rabbithole for a while. But I kind of knew at that point like I wanted to go into DevRel, so I didn't really stay there very long because DevRel just kind of was like my bigger goal.

And I got and at that point, after that, kind of like got even more involved in DD. We had done like the Web3Con hackathon and virtual conference and stuff, which is super fun. And from there that's where I met like a lot more folks in the Web3 space. Got my first DevRel job at Polygon and yeah, from there it's been kind of like one thing after another.

Yeah, man. And I must say the Web3Con was a time, I'll say that. That was one of the more involved things that I've been a part of, and I'm sure yourself too. Like putting on a conference is not easy, to say the least.

No, it's not. We learned that the hard way.

Indeed, indeed. But we did it. But yeah, that's amazing, man. And I know you've got a bit of a music background as well. I know you're not all tech. I've seen you spit some pretty hard rhymes. You want to get into that a little bit?

Yeah, the music stuff. I mean, I've been dabbling on the music side since like high school, a little bit before high school. At first it was mostly to show off to my girlfriend at the time, which I guess it worked because we're married now. So maybe those things work, you know. So I mean, there was a couple times like I did consider like, you know, what would it look like if I pursued music as like an actual career, but it didn't last very long, to be fair. But yeah, there were times I put out like mixtapes, little albums. Like if you are, I suppose, like very good at searching on Spotify, you might be able to find things, but like I will let you folks hunt those down. I'm not going to reveal anything. But yeah, you can find some like old stuff that make me cringe when I hear them now, so there's that. Eventually it just kind of became more of just like a hobby, just something that I like to do on the side just for myself. It was like there was a one point it kind of like switched in my head between like I really hate this as a career or pursuing this as a career, but I love doing it just for me. So that kind of like became what it is.

Awesome, man. Yeah, we all need that like away from work activity and like even myself, like I started like messing around with GarageBand and just like mixing loops together and it's like a nice little getaway thing from the from the day-to-day. So I feel you there. And yeah, I guess you're at Movement now, doing DevRel. I guess how did you find yourself there? What kind of made you leave your last gig and pursue Movement?

Yeah, I mean, I you know, I'd been at Polygon for a while, went to Biconomy, then I was at another L2 and I was kind of tired, I guess, of like doing the same thing over and over again. Just wanted something a little bit different. So that's what like intrigued me at first about Movement, just like okay, what would it look like if I, you know, stepped outside of just like my comfort zone a little bit, tried something new. That was my initial pull. And then like as I started talking to the team and like everybody who's kind of been involved, that like really pulled me in. Definitely on the team, some of the best folks, awesome people that I've ever worked with. Just really enjoy working with them and like their... that really is what pulled me in.

Yeah, fair enough, man. Yeah, we all need that like great working environment and interesting project to boot. And this is a great segue to to get going with the content you've prepared today. And I must say it's pretty cool Movement's colors match DevNTell's colors with the black and yellow. So we got that, we got that too.

They do. Cool, cool. So share my screen.

All right, bringing you up to stage.

Cool. Oh, oops. I was not supposed to show this. You can all pretend that you did not see this.

We did not see anything. No one saw anything. We saw nothing at all. What are you talking about?

Cool. All right, so I'll just give like a brief intro to Movement. This is kind of like an abridged version of what I gave at ETH Denver. But hopefully will leave y'all kind of like a little bit of like where to go, where to start in the Movement ecosystem. We covered all this stuff already, this is just slides that I still had from Denver, but yeah, I'm that person. I think like a good place to start is just to kind of like understand just a brief history of Move, like the language and kind of like everything that led up to what this is now. So initially there were a couple of teams in Facebook, Diem and Libra, or maybe the same team. I that is... I'm not a little bit unsure on that side, but they it goes by those two names, Diem and Libra. Essentially what Facebook wanted to do at first was have like a blockchain kind of like underneath their entire behemoth of a social media platform, facilitating payments, things like that. They had decided to kind of like build something kind of new that would be able to match up to like their scale and like the behemoth that is Facebook. So they built out, you know, the Move VM and everything there, the Move programming language. And at some point the SEC, of course, decided to step in and say no, you cannot do that.

So they couldn't do that and the teams that were working on Move in general eventually split out and some of them went on to become Aptos, some of them went on to become Sui. So you had Sui and Aptos. They both use Move, but like slightly different flavors of Move. Like the concepts are pretty similar, but there are slight differences in their overall architecture as well as just like the flavor of Move that they use. Some of the syntax can be a little bit different, but overall like the concepts are pretty much the same. On the Movement side, we actually use the Aptos flavor of Move, so if you're coming from the Aptos ecosystem, you should be kind of like familiar with like what we're doing. So going into a little bit of like the Move VM itself. So the Move VM is a runtime that executes Move bytecode, so it's like similar to how you could picture I guess just like the EVM executing Ethereum bytecode that's compiled from like Solidity or Vyper. Move VM is just doing that from the Move language. Move is Rust-based, so if you've programmed in Rust before, a lot of the syntax should be kind of like familiar.

There's a lot of emphasis on Move with safety, flexibility and like a resource-centric design. That the best way to kind of like picture that is just like if you're coming from an EVM standpoint, you can think of Move as like a specialized environment that has very rigid rules with anything that's a resource. And that could be anything from a token, it could be an NFT, something as simple even as just like a hello world message. Like that these are resources that need to be essentially created and then moved from one place to another, hence the name. And not going to go too in-depth here, but within the language there's the design kind of like ensures that assets behave the way that real-world assets do. So rather than doing things like let's say in Solidity you're creating like some type of balance mapping, instead of doing that you would use you can actually like look into the resource of, you know, a specific asset that someone owns, like see their balance and there's like a single source of truth for a lot of these things. So you don't have things like partial state updates kind of like everywhere. There's a lot of controversy I guess on on Twitter of like is Move better than Solidity? From my opinion, I wouldn't you know, you can definitely write safe code in Solidity.

Solidity has a huge developer, you know, community environment and ever like developer tooling is like much more mature than where we might be right now. But I do think that the environment that's provided by like a lot of these like VM-level safety features is worth considering. It's it's just another environment for you to be able to write safe code. So where does Movement actually come into play with all of these things? So public mainnet soon. TM. That's what everyone's been asking about, but very, very soon. So we're going to be a movement, so the Movement network mainnet will be a PoS sidechain on Ethereum. So we'll be like the first Move-based chain that you'd be able to use within the Ethereum ecosystem. The Movement network mainnet is going to be the first Move chain... rephrase that... Movement network mainnet will be the first Move chain built using the Move Stack. So as we've been building out the chain, we've been building out what's called the Move Stack, which you'd be able to use to kind of like in the future spin up your own Move chain.

And you'd be able to like plug and play and like take out different parts of the stack as you see fit, like if you want to use a different DA layer, etc. whatever. All of that can be like interchanged. But ultimately like with the mainnet, our goal is bring the Move VM to Ethereum, allow developers to tap into like some of the cool features in Move, some of the cool safety features and build new stuff on top of ETH. And yeah, so if you find any of that interesting you want to go in, you want to start building stuff out, there's a couple different places you can start. Obviously our developer docs going to be some of the first the first place to go. It we've got a short guide for like building out your first Move module, getting set up with the Movement CLI. So the Movement CLI would help you with like setting up your dev environment for like building out like Move modules, which is what we call smart contracts. And it's similar experience to like how you would see like your Hardhat or Foundry, though my hope is that like we actually in the Move ecosystem can push for like more mature robust tooling. So one of the things that I'm actually looking for is like if you're interested in coming in and building out developer tooling, I'd love to talk to you.

I would love to see people coming in and building out like Hardhat or Foundry for Move, you know. That that's one of the big things that I'd love to see like in the near future. Something we're talking about internally and like how we can enable folks to do that, so definitely talk to me if you want to explore something like that. But yeah, there's stuff like interacting on chain, the different network RPC endpoints and all that are available. Technically there is a mainnet RPC in there, just saying. If you're like completely new to Move, I hope I did not... can you still hear me? Yeah, yeah, this is cool. If you're like completely brand new to Move, we do have like a version one of our developer portal up which includes like different learning paths, tutorials, some dev tools and stuff that you can use. There are some kinks in there that we have to work out, but that is also open source. It's sort of like a Movement Academy type thing that we're building out and we're going to be adding more features onto here as we go along and improving the content. Some things do need to be fixed up and patched up, but yeah, this is open source as well, so if folks want to get involved, definitely would be cool to see people in here as well.

But yeah, those are some of the quick places. I'll actually do a quick overview of the developer portal. So you have these things that are like different like learning paths if you want to do like very basic concepts, going from like installing the CLI to learning about like data types, functions, etc. like it goes from like the very, very basics. And then eventually some more advanced concepts. And then we're starting to slowly add like vertical-based concepts as well. So like if you want to look into how NFTs work, like there's a bunch of different ways to build out NFTs. All of this is here. And then on the DeFi side, it goes from like we call tokens like fungible assets, going to how like building those out, swapping, doing like a Pump.fun type of tutorial, lending and borrowing stuff, all of that will be improved and adding a lot more to those. And then like you have your basic like one-off guides and tutorials as well that you can go into. Post-mainnet we're hoping to add like more on-chain kind of like stuff here. So like as you do things, you'd be able to like, you know, unlock on-chain credentials. So keep an eye on that coming soon, there'll be like some cool stuff attached to that there as well. But yeah, these are kind of some of the things that you can do to get started. We'll be adding a few more tutorials later today. So maybe after you're seeing this, you'll see like a bunch more tutorials up here as well. So yeah.

Excellent. We have a question from the crowd if you want to entertain that. Wan asks, is Movement network also considered as omnichain?

That's a good question. So the Movement mainnet itself is just like sort of a it's it's a sidechain on top of ETH. And that's like the first chain that is built using our Move stack. And like using the Move stack, you can build other Move chains and we're looking into like the interoperability side of things there. So I wouldn't necessarily say an omnichain solution. The the initial offering our network is more of like a I would say general purpose chain and then as we kind of like build things out, you could maybe use that term. I wouldn't use it right now though. Good question, great answer.

And I guess you're fresh off the heels of ETH Denver. I guess what's the... are there any big announcements that you guys made at Movement or any interesting hackathon projects that you saw built using Movement that you wanted to mention?

Yeah, while we were at ETH Denver, it was mostly kind of like supporting a little bit our different ecosystem partners. So one of the slides I actually forgot to take off of the presentation I just went through was me actually introducing some of our different ecosystem partners that like came to Denver with us. We got them like on the ETH Denver stage, had them like pitch their what they're actually building. A couple of those projects are like one really cool one is Bracket. They're building a couple of different things. One's like a prediction market type of app. They have a mobile app called Hooked, which is similar. And then Bracket itself is like a web app. So those are cool things to take a look at. Henry Social is another one. They're building like an AI a consumer AI product that basically like helps you find products online to buy and like there's a lot of cool like crypto integrations in there as well. And I love those guys because they're actually... it's hard to build in the consumer space right now, but like they're doing it, they're they're like going full force like in there. And then the other team that we had brought on was WarpGate, who are building a DEX as well as like a Pump.fun style kind of like app as well.

Awesome, man. Yeah, it seems like there's lots of lots going on in the Movement space, which is excellent to hear. I guess from I you touched on it briefly, but not briefly, but you did touch on it. As a Solidity dev, how much of a learning curve is there to jump to Move? Like when you were learning Move, how did you find the experience? Or any tips you can give folks?

Yeah, I would say so when I started learning Move, see I came from the EVM space, I was mostly coding in Solidity. I had like played around with Rust a little bit before, so I think that was kind of helpful. Like the syntax wasn't as scary as it might be if you're just like straight coming from Solidity or JavaScript or something like that. So yeah, if you've done some Rust before, then it should be kind of familiar and easier to pick up. If you've never like looked at Rust or anything like that, then there might be a little bit more of a learning curve and just like the concepts are a little bit weird to wrap your head around when you're coming from Solidity. Like stuff like resource-oriented programming, stuff like like even basic things at first tripped me up as like one when you deploy like a module or a smart contract, you're not deploying and getting an address for that contract, you're deploying to an address, to an account. So that account can actually own several modules. So like a bunch of different contracts or modules can all be within one contract and then you have to like specify which contract you want. So like little things like that that you might not necessarily be used to just like is just something you have to like think about and like get used to a little bit. But I think yeah, once you get used to like some of those smaller nuances, it's not too difficult.

Awesome, awesome. And we have a question from the crowd around if you offer any specific training courses or specific modules to help Solidity devs ramp up.

Yeah, so right now I had mentioned like the developer portal that we had, that's probably a good place to start. There's also a lot of cool resources from Aptos as well that would help given that we're Aptos compatible, a lot of those resources would be helpful too. We are starting to explore, you know, working with different folks in the Web3 space for like training and education style things. I definitely also want to further build out just like the developer portal a little bit more to add like more video-based stuff that people can like go through on their own time. So those are all things that we are working on and actively thinking about. So yeah, I would say start off in the developer portal first, look at some of the Aptos docs and really just like start playing around and building things. One of the things that I had recommended some people do was even just like go into like Solidity by Example and try to convert some of that to Move. I think that's a good thing to try out. I'll be hopefully doing some livestreams doing exactly that, so follow along if you want to keep up with that.

Awesome, man. And in terms of people building like a Hardhat or Foundry clone to support Movement or any other thing that you guys are looking forward to being built, are there any opportunities for grants or hackathons coming up that people should know about?

Yeah, so we we actually just wrapped up like an AI hackathon that we were doing. Some cool stuff kind of came out there, we're going through the judging on that right now. We're also currently in the Celestia Mammoth hackathon, so if you're in there, that actually that just wrapped up as well. I also have to judge those. A lot of judging in in the future. We're looking at like a a pretty big like mainnet hackathon in the next month or two. So definitely look at look out for that. I think those will definitely have some good bounties on the dev tooling side. But if you're already interested and already starting to wanting to start building, we definitely have, you know, grants and things like that. So if you think you can do it, you have a serious kind of like proposal, we can definitely look at grant funding and stuff like that. At least I will I will like push and like attack BD until they give you grant funding. There you go. Rahat fighting for the people. Hell yeah.

And the question about if there's a Scaffold-ETH for Move, it doesn't sound like it, but D13mp1Sec...

Actually, yes. Oh there is, actually there is. Oh dear. There you go. Oh, let me see if I can bring it up. Um, so this was actually built out during one of our earlier hackathons. This guy's awesome. let me see if I can find where did it go? Yes, okay, I found it. Let me share my screen. These are all awesome questions by the way, gang. Good stuff. So yeah, this is Scaffold-Move. It was built by Arjun Johan, you can follow him on Twitter here. So he actually built this out in one of our earlier hackathons. Scaffold-Move you can use to quickly, you know, start building on either Aptos or Movement. So if you've used Scaffold-ETH, a lot of the features here are pretty similar. Deployment script, module hot reload stuff, some custom hooks and cool things. So you get like a out-of-the-box kind of like app here that you can just like start playing around and building on top of. Yeah, this is pretty similar to Scaffold-ETH. Maybe drop the... is there a way to drop it in the comments or anything? Or yeah, yeah, you should be able to type in there. But if not, we'll add it to the YouTube description if... yeah, I'll just send it over to you. But yeah, sweet. Awesome, man. Well there you go, it does exist.

Awesome, man. Yeah, unfortunately we're coming to time. One last question I want to ask you, since you're fresh off the ETH Denver scene. Um, what are some trends and upcoming developments that you've seen on the floor that people are really excited about and maybe people who didn't attend the conference might not know is coming up?

Yeah, I would say you know, a lot of people think that the AI meta is gone. Based on conversations I had that's far from gone. People are definitely still building on the AI side of things and definitely figuring out how AI and kind of like crypto work together a bit. And I've seen so like one of our ecosystem partners like I mentioned Henry Social is definitely dabbling still in that side of things and going outside of just like, you know, Twitter agents and things like that. So I think I think the meta of like Twitter AI agents is probably dead and like people want like actual useful agents, so a lot of people are like kind of like heads down building on that side of things from what I've seen. RWAs are trying to make a become a thing, I guess, and I and I think they they are and like will be. I'm not 100% sure just like that side of things how how it would work, but I've definitely heard quite a bit on that side of things as well.

And in general I think just a lot of people are like trying to figure out okay like how do we build actual apps, consumer stuff. A lot of people are like ideating and trying different things on that side. So that was is really what gets me excited because like we definitely need just more apps, you know. Yeah, definitely.

And actually on the AI front, an interesting narrative that I've seen pop up just recently is AI agents might be the key to unlock the the bad UX for people to like start using crypto, right? Because it's just like oh, you just go to an AI agent like oh, I want to I want to move funds from like X chain to Y chain or I want to create a wallet on this chain. It's just like it like abstracts all that stuff away. It's like oh okay, spun you up a wallet at OX like whatever. So I think I think there's a lot of a lot of promise there.

Yeah, I'd say guess like my hot take is that AI has finally given account abstraction a reason to exist. There you go.

Nice, yeah. Rahat is a bit of an expert in account abstraction. But awesome way to end things off. Thank you so much, Rahat. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and give us that wonderful overview of Movement and all the things going on. And remember gang, you heard it here first, mainnet soon TM. So we'll all be on the lookout for that when Movement mainnet drops. And yeah, looking forward to that. Yeah, thank you thank you so much, man, for having me on. My pleasure. And for folks who watched us live, you can claim your BitBadges attendance badge for doing just that. So if you're into collectibles, definitely check out the link that I've put in the comments below as well as in the YouTube description to claim your badge for watching us live. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Wednesday. Happy hacking and looking forward to people building cool things on Movement. All right y'all. Catch you later. Cheers.