Argentine blockchain engineering firm Rather Labs has shipped a Move-to-WASM compiler, a command-line toolchain, and an EVM interaction framework that together allow smart contracts written in the Move programming language to run on Arbitrum via its Stylus execution environment. The project, funded through the Arbitrum DAO's Stylus Sprint Grants Program, entered public beta in February 2026. It is aimed at an estimated Move developer base of roughly 4,800 across chains who want access to Arbitrum's liquidity without a full rewrite of their core contract logic in Solidity.

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What Was Built and Why It Is Technically Difficult

Move is a programming language originally developed by Meta for its canceled Diem payments project and later adopted by Aptos and Sui as their core smart contract environment. Its defining feature is a resource-oriented type system that enforces strict asset ownership at the language level: digital assets cannot be duplicated or implicitly destroyed.

This makes it well suited to financial applications involving controlled minting, collateral receipts, and settlement boundaries.

The problem is that Move's object-based storage model is fundamentally incompatible with the slot-based storage architecture that underpins the EVM. Rather Labs had to build a storage mapping adapter to bridge the two systems in addition to the compiler itself. The toolchain also includes cross-contract call support, which lets a deployed Move contract interact with existing Solidity contracts already running on Arbitrum. Deterministic ID generation and common contract pattern utilities round out the package.

Arbitrum's Stylus environment, which runs a dual EVM and WASM execution layer, was already open to languages like Rust, C, and C++. Move represents a more significant extension because its type system differs conceptually from C-style memory management. According to Arbitrum's documentation, Stylus contracts benefit from compute costs that are roughly 10 to 100 times lower than equivalent EVM operations, primarily due to WASM runtime efficiency. RedStone Finance benchmarks put average gas savings at around 49.5 percent versus Solidity; separate benchmarks from WELLDONE Studio found computation-heavy workloads reaching up to 86.6 percent savings. A Rust implementation of the Poseidon hash function on Stylus cut gas from 86,952 to 11,887 units, a reduction of roughly 86 percent, according to a NioLabs benchmark.

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Grant Origins and Who Rather Labs Is

The Arbitrum DAO allocated 5 million ARB through its Stylus Sprint Grants Program specifically to attract non-Solidity developer tooling to the network. Rather Labs was formally selected as a grantee in April 2025. The firm was founded in Buenos Aires in 2020 by Federico Caccia, a nuclear engineer who serves as CEO, and Franco Scucchiero, who serves as CTO. The company now employs more than 60 senior engineers across 13 countries and lists Arbitrum, NEAR Protocol, and MultiversX as official ecosystem partnerships. It has shipped over 80 products.

Rather Labs is part of a growing cohort of blockchain engineering firms based in Latin America. The region has developed a substantial pool of senior technical talent, and Rather Labs' own distributed team spanning 13 countries reflects the competitive quality and geographic reach that have made LATAM-based firms increasingly prominent in the broader Web3 infrastructure space.

"Rather Labs has been selected by the Arbitrum Stylus Sprint Grants Program to develop a Move-to-WASM compiler, facilitated through Arbitrum DAO, marking a significant step toward enhancing interoperability and security within the Arbitrum ecosystem," the company wrote when announcing the grant in April 2025.

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Market Context on Arbitrum

Arbitrum currently holds approximately $2.8 billion in DeFi TVL, representing about 31 percent of all Layer 2 DeFi liquidity, according to BlockEden.xyz data from February 2026. DefiLlama puts total bridge TVL at $3.2 billion as of May 2026. The network has processed over 2.1 billion lifetime transactions and saw more than 1.2 million smart contracts deployed in the first half of 2025 alone. For Move developers, these numbers represent liquidity and infrastructure that has been inaccessible without a full rewrite of their core contract logic in Solidity.

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Regional Relevance

The toolchain carries practical weight outside North America and Europe. In Africa, the Arbitrum Foundation's HackerBoost initiative has trained more than 450 builders, and Sui has opened the continent's first dedicated developer hub in Lagos. A number of African DeFi and fintech projects have been increasingly drawn to Aptos and Sui as lower-cost alternatives to Ethereum mainnet. One illustrative example is moove.xyz, which expanded its stablecoin money-movement platform to Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America in May 2026, reflecting the alignment between Move-style asset safety and the compliance requirements common in emerging-market financial products.

A compiler that lets those teams target Arbitrum L2 without abandoning Move-based code is a concrete option for stablecoin projects, cross-border payment protocols, and microfinance applications where Move's asset controls align naturally with compliance requirements.

In South Asia, India ranks first globally in overall crypto adoption by some measures, and Aptos and Sui have made deliberate inroads through university hackathons and regional developer programs. Move developers in India and neighboring countries, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, now have a documented path to build for Arbitrum without learning Solidity from scratch.

One caveat applies in both regions: the toolchain is still in beta and requires working knowledge of WASM compilation pipelines, Move's resource model, and the Stylus SDK. That is not a beginner-level stack. Regional developer programs would need to incorporate this toolchain explicitly for it to reach broad grassroots adoption.

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What This Means for the Ecosystem

Move's broader ecosystem is expanding. Sui reported 954 monthly active developers as of early 2026, a 219 percent year-over-year increase, while Aptos counted 465. Newer chains like Movement and Initia are extending Move's footprint further. That expansion coincides with continued infrastructure improvements on Arbitrum itself: the ArbOS Dia upgrade in January 2026 introduced improved gas predictability through multi-resource metering and added enterprise authentication support, making the network a more stable target for teams porting from other ecosystems.

Rather Labs' compiler means that growth in the Move ecosystem increasingly has a direct outlet to EVM liquidity. Whether that translates to a meaningful wave of cross-ecosystem deployments on Arbitrum will depend on how quickly the toolchain matures past beta and how aggressively the Arbitrum ecosystem supports onboarding for Move-native teams.