Exclusive Interview with Move Industries CEO Torab Torabi: How is Movement Rebuilding Trust After the Market Maker Scandal?

Written by: Deep Tide TechFlow 

Introduction

On the first day of its launch in December 2024, the Movement (MOVE) token was hit by a sell-off of 66 million tokens by market maker Web3Port, resulting in about $38 million in selling pressure. The token's market cap plummeted from $3 billion to less than $500 million.

The subsequent investigation revealed a market maker contract described by internal lawyers as "the worst agreement ever seen"—a company called Rentech, with almost no public information, appeared on both sides of the contract as both a Web3Port subsidiary and an agent of the Movement Foundation.

In May 2025, after internal issues at Movement Labs and the dismissal of Rushi Manche, a new independent company, Move Industries, was established. It acquired some members of the Labs team through an arm’s-length transaction and appointed Torab Torabi as its CEO.

What does this crisis mean for Movement? How does the new leadership plan to clean up the mess? How will the value of the MOVE token be reflected? With these questions in mind, Deep Tide TechFlow interviewed Torab Torabi, the current CEO of Move Industries.

Part 1: A New Chapter for Movement—Brand, Role, and Strategy

Deep Tide TechFlow: Thank you for accepting our interview. First, could you introduce yourself to our readers?

Torab: My name is Torab, one of the founding members of Movement, and I recently established and became CEO of Move Industries. Before this, I worked in Silicon Valley, focusing on mobile data analytics and sales growth at Salesforce and Sensor Tower.

About five years ago, I entered the crypto industry full-time. At that time, I worked for Marinade, the largest DeFi protocol on Solana, where I truly learned the ins and outs of crypto and blockchain, especially DeFi.

Later, I worked on a stablecoin project, which ultimately didn’t succeed—looking back now, it was just too early. I joined the Movement team about two and a half years ago as one of the founding members. It’s been about nine months since I took on this new role, and the experience has been great.

Deep Tide TechFlow: You recently became CEO of Move Industries. What has been the biggest change in your daily work? How has your leadership style changed as you transitioned from BD/growth lead to CEO?

Torab: It was a big change from the start. Previously, you only needed to deal with external matters, but as CEO, you have to manage both internal and external stakeholders. There’s also investor relations, which I never participated in before. All of this has been a great learning experience for me.

I quickly realized that my previous role gave me a lot of responsibility but not the real authority to make decisions. I often joke that it’s like being a step-parent—you take on all the responsibilities of a parent but don’t have the authority. Jokingly, you don’t even have the right to yell at the kids.

Now, as CEO, I have the ability to lead the team and make final decisions. The biggest difference is going from being a passenger to being the driver. But for me, what makes me most proud is that we retained the vast majority of our team members, developers, and investors.

Deep Tide TechFlow: After Rushi Manche left due to controversy over market maker favoritism, you immediately established Move Industries. What was the core consideration behind this decision? Why did you choose the name "Move Industries"—is there a deeper meaning?

Torab: After the problem occurred, the first thing was to acknowledge it, figure out how we got here, and then establish mechanisms to prevent it from happening again. The first thing we did was remove that market maker. Now, we only work with top-tier, professionally recognized, and exchange-trusted market makers in the industry.

Many people are curious about how Movement rose to prominence in the first place. The answer has always been—and always will be—the community. By working closely with community members around the world.

We established the "Global Hubs" program and will continue to focus on this as we rebuild trust. Trust is hard to build, but even harder to rebuild. We once had that trust, it collapsed, and now what we’re doing is rebuilding it. That’s been our focus over the past few months.

As for the name Move Industries—it reflects that we are building an entire industry around the Move language: infrastructure, applications, developer tools, and a thriving ecosystem. "Industries" represents scale, maturity, and long-term commitment. It also shows that this is not about one company or one person, but about a movement of developers, builders, and users gathered around excellent technology.

Deep Tide TechFlow: As CEO, what kind of leadership do you think Movement needs at this stage? Facing the community, what key actions do you plan to take to rebuild and strengthen trust?

Torab: First of all, this isn’t about doing something new. I’m continuing the philosophy I believed in when I joined Movement. I entered the crypto industry because I saw a financial system open only to a few.

For me, the biggest "aha moment" was when I could use my Solana as collateral to borrow USDC or USDT. I thought, "This is incredible, I can buy a car without selling my assets." Then I started researching and found that this is how the wealthy operate. Look at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos... they usually don’t sell stocks, they just use them as collateral for loans. I thought, "Why don’t ordinary people have this ability?"

Crypto is enabling people all over the world—even those without bank accounts—to access millions of dollars in financial services (assuming they have enough collateral). For me, the question is: how do we bring this to the rest of the world? That’s why I came to Movement, that’s what I want to build.

We recently announced the Move Alliance, allowing builders to grow together with Movement.

One of the biggest problems in most ecosystems is: builders want the chain to do well so they can do well, but they’re not economically aligned with the chain. Move Alliance is unprecedented—no ecosystem has ever done this, requiring every builder in the ecosystem to commit to holding the ecosystem token.

When the MOVE token reaches its deserved value, all ecosystem builders will benefit with us, rather than competing for more users or fees as before. They are truly aligned with us at the incentive level.

Part 2: Recent Progress and Core Competitiveness

Deep Tide TechFlow: When Move Industries was founded, it announced technology and community building as its core leadership philosophy. Since then, what specific initiatives has Move Industries implemented in these two areas? Are there any key milestones or achievements you can share?

Torab: First of all, blockchain is technology. The first thing I did after taking office was to focus on making the chain higher performance. We brought in Dr. Young Yang Liauw, who is now our CTO. He was the head of the Move platform at Aptos and was there at Facebook when the Move programming language was built; many tools were created by his team. He was also one of the maintainers of the Libra open-source software.

Under Young’s leadership, we launched the Monza upgrade, which was transformative. We reduced latency from 12 seconds to 1 second, and the results were immediate: TVL grew by 61%, daily DEX trading volume increased tenfold, and stablecoin TVL grew sevenfold. We went from a single public node before Monza to over 70 nodes after Monza, meaning developers could really unleash their potential.

We achieved zero network downtime, processed over 35,000 swaps daily, and the ecosystem has deployed over 11,000 smart contracts. This chain has become truly usable and can compete with top blockchains in the industry.

We also recently announced the transition from L2 to L1 and cleaned up the tech stack. No longer a patchwork of different components, we now have the entire tech stack as a sovereign chain. We can control every technical aspect, which enables Movement chain decentralization and network governance. More importantly, L1 provides the foundation for developers and builders to fully realize the potential of the Move programming language.

In today’s market, you must have a proposition, because general-purpose L1s are basically dead.

Deep Tide TechFlow: The launch of Move Alliance is a recent milestone for you. How does the Alliance work in practice? How is its buyback mechanism designed to maintain on-chain transparency and verifiability? What role do you expect it to play in driving ecosystem growth? Which projects have joined the Alliance so far?

Torab: In our ecosystem, almost every team actively building has chosen to join the Move Alliance program. I think part of the reason is that the standard approach for every chain (the chain has its own token, and each team has its own token) just doesn’t work.

Why do people issue tokens? Teams want to create an economic event for themselves and their users. But what if we could wait for the best time to issue a token, or simply not issue one at all?

When we communicated with builders and understood their needs, we proposed: "What if you use that revenue to buy back MOVE tokens? If you put it in your treasury, we can offer you the same annualized yield as staking."

Every team in the Alliance has KPI-driven metrics to keep them financially aligned as part of the Alliance.

How does it work specifically? Basically, every team in the Alliance agrees to use 50% to 100% of their revenue to buy back MOVE tokens.

In the first quarter, each team will have a dashboard to track all these actions; we will track revenue and daily purchases. We expect teams to use their revenue to buy back MOVE tokens and hold them in their treasury within a certain period.

All of this will be open to the world to see, because it’s all on-chain. We will set up dashboards so everyone can monitor and verify these activities.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Speaking of buybacks, can you share more details about the current MOVE buyback framework and the progress of the plan?

Torab: When the market maker news broke, Binance refunded us $38 million and required us to use it for buybacks. This is all publicly documented. We executed these buybacks, reclaiming nearly 2% of the token supply.

Currently, we have two MOVE reserves. One is on Ethereum, the ERC-20 version of MOVE; the other is on the Movement chain. Together, they account for about 2% of the total supply. We’ve barely touched them, but plan to deploy soon.

Regarding the buyback mechanism, there are different models. Hyperliquid’s is a mechanical approach—using a certain percentage daily to buy back its own tokens. Other teams build a cash reserve and deploy strategically when they see fit. I think both approaches have their merits.

However, I think buybacks are a short-term solution. The core question teams need to answer is: What is the value of the token? How do you make it the core of the ecosystem?

The biggest mistake I see teams make is issuing multiple tokens for a chain. I always joke that marrying a second or third wife doesn’t make you a better husband to the first. That’s what these foundations are doing.

For me, it really doesn’t make sense. You’re diluting attention and value. From my perspective, any value created by the team should flow back to a single token.

At Movement, I promise never to issue more than one token from our team. Any value we create (whether from products we launch or don’t launch) all flows back to the MOVE token. For me, this is a basic moral principle—not to create more tokens.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In September this year, Movement announced its upgrade from Ethereum L2 to an independent L1. What was the core strategic consideration behind this move? Do you think L1 has a better chance of differentiation than L2 in the current competitive landscape? What specific changes has this upgrade brought to the project from a technical and ecosystem perspective?

Torab: First is performance. Users only care about: is it fast, is it cheap, is it easy to use. Although decentralization is also important to us, it’s a gradual process.

At the beginning, it will be more centralized. Every chain that goes live has gone through this trajectory—starting with a small group of validators and then gradually increasing.

But first and foremost, performance should come first.

For us, the top priority is to make Movement a highly available network that can compete with top blockchains. We’ve achieved that, and that’s the first reason.

The second reason is the economic model. As an L1, we can now enable staking, meaning users holding MOVE tokens will be able to stake and earn rewards.

This brings a beneficial side effect—because we have global hubs (these are groups of builders and advocates promoting the Move language and Movement ecosystem worldwide), we can use staking rewards to fund their activities, such as bringing in new users and educating people about the value of our ecosystem. Everything operates as a self-sustaining model. Global hubs can stake their MOVE tokens to stay economically aligned with Movement and receive staking rewards. Then they can use these rewards to fund local activities, such as developer workshops, marketing campaigns, and other initiatives they plan.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Movement positions itself as "Serving the People's Chain." Around this positioning, which verticals or ecosystem niches is Movement currently prioritizing? What upcoming developments should the community most look forward to?

Torab: As I mentioned, the Move language was born for money. That’s actually why it was shut down—Facebook wanted to create its own stablecoin, and the US government thought they wanted to replace the dollar.

This is the core value proposition of the Move language, which is why we recently announced a partnership with KAST. We believe they have the potential to become the de facto new bank in crypto. We want to be the foundation for what they build. As part of this, we’re hosting hackathons and inviting different builders to build around it.

You can think of it as a shopping mall, where you need restaurants, shops, parking lots, etc. We want to build a complete ecosystem.

However, I don’t like telling builders what they should build. What I want is for us to become more consumer-facing and mobile-oriented. That’s why we partnered with Replit to launch the Move Builder Kit.

Replit is one of the top cloud development platforms. They focus on front-end and real-time coding applications, especially mobile apps. One of the reasons for this strategic partnership is to enable our builders to use these tools. We want to push everyone to become more consumer-facing and mobile-centric.

60% of network traffic comes from mobile. Billions of people have phones but no laptops. If you don’t have a comprehensive mobile strategy, you’re excluding a large part of the world’s population from becoming users.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In the broader Move language-driven ecosystem, where do you think Movement currently stands? Sui and Aptos are already relatively mature. What do you think is Movement’s core competitive advantage? Looking ahead, where do you ultimately hope Movement will be in this landscape?

Torab: There’s a question of whether people really perceive the differences between SVM, Move, or EVM. Personally, I think there are obvious and important differences.

When you look at the origins of Sui and Aptos, most team members and founders came from Facebook’s original Diem (formerly Libra) project. While they were impressive for being part of Facebook, even revered, my view is different.

The whole spirit of crypto is the opposite—it’s about "building something for the people, by the people." Our team is more crypto-native. My career was built in crypto. Although I have some Web2 background, from early on, my entire crypto experience has been in the trenches of DeFi.

I believe this is the advantage of our Movement team. Builders say we’re more grounded; when they come to Movement, they feel we truly understand. That’s the first point.

Second: We will never issue another token. All value created in our ecosystem will flow back to the MOVE token. This is a fundamentally different strategy from other ecosystems.

Third: We will never cannibalize our builders. When you build a product, you must ask yourself: who are you preventing from building that product? For example, look at Deepbook on Sui or Decibel on Aptos—they are essentially competing with their own builders. That’s something we will never do. We support our builders, but we will never build a competing project. That’s part of our philosophy.

Part 3: Industry Views and Market Outlook

Deep Tide TechFlow: Recently, news of former Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche launching Nyx Group sparked discussion in the community. Opinions are divided, but skepticism seems to dominate. Are you worried that Rushi’s renewed activity might bring past controversies around Movement back into the public eye? What’s your personal view on the launch of Nyx Group? As someone who once worked closely with him, do you think Rushi Manche is preparing for a comeback via Nyx Group?

Torab: Honestly, we’ve been heads-down focused on what we’re building, and I only found out about this when investors asked me if I knew. The answer is I didn’t know.

At the end of the day, people love controversy, so anything divisive gets attention. It makes me a bit sad because we’ve made so much amazing progress, but some people still ask about this, though it has no substantive impact on us.

People will always associate him with this project to some extent, but I believe our team is focused on the work. I always joke that our car doesn’t have a rearview mirror—we only look forward. I’m not worried about the issue you mentioned.

Controversy is just controversy, but we’ve moved far away from it now.

In almost a year, we’ve focused on where Movement can go, not where Movement has been.

On that note, what excites me is we recently listed the MOVE token on Aerodrome, the largest DEX on Base. This means the MOVE token should be open to all Coinbase users globally (except New York). Except for New York, the MOVE token should be open to all Coinbase users worldwide. You should see it very soon.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Last question: As 2025 draws to a close, what are your key predictions or expectations for the crypto market in 2026?

Torab: My wife always asks me, "Should I buy some bitcoin?" I say, "I think so. Generally, bitcoin will go up." She says, "What kind of answer is that? You work in crypto and don’t know if bitcoin will go up?" I say, "If I knew that, I’d be a trader, not a builder."

I can’t give price predictions. But what I can say is, we’ll see more adoption of stablecoins. We’re seeing different chains launching, like Tempo and Plasma, claiming to focus on payment rails.

I believe there will be major international legislation targeting US stablecoins. I think the USDC-USDT duopoly is actually not good for other countries, because if everyone adopts this "network dollar," they’re essentially shorting their own national currency.

We’ve already seen this in the UK—if you hold more than a certain amount of stablecoins, you must declare it. I think such regulation will push people more toward privacy.

We’ve already seen the growth of privacy coins like Zcash and Monero. I believe that as more legislation targets stablecoins, people will turn to privacy and security.

I believe we’ll return to the cypherpunk spirit that launched bitcoin.