Movement, the blockchain project caught at the center of a token-dumping scandal that began in December 2024, has completed a formal restructuring and relaunched as a sovereign Layer 1 network under a new operating company called Move Industries. The network completed its technical transition to a standalone L1 on September 17, 2025, what Move Industries describes as the first L2-to-L1 evolution in the Move VM ecosystem. The governance separation between Move Industries and the Movement Network Foundation was finalized on December 29, 2025, capping approximately eight months of leadership changes, delisting events, and public fallout that wiped out most of the MOVE token's market value.

The relaunch comes with new technical benchmarks. Movement now claims throughput of 10,000 or more transactions per second with block finality under one second, up from roughly 500 TPS when it operated as an Ethereum Layer 2. A network upgrade called Monza reduced finality latency from 12 seconds to approximately 1 second and contributed to a 61% increase in total value locked, which sits at around $165.5 million as of early June 2026, according to DefiLlama.

What Happened and Why It Matters

The MOVE token launched in December 2024 at a reported $3 billion valuation target. The day after launch, approximately 66 million tokens representing 5% of total supply were sold by an entity called Rentech, generating around $38 million. Binance banned the account involved. A CoinDesk investigation published April 30, 2025, found that Rentech appeared on both sides of the market-making contract, once as a subsidiary of Chinese market maker Web3Port and once as an agent of the Movement Foundation. Movement Foundation's own general counsel, YK Pek, had described the agreement before it was signed as "possibly the worst agreement I have ever seen." Crypto expert Zaki Manian told CoinDesk the incentive structure was designed "basically to manipulate the price… dump on retail."

Coinbase delisted MOVE on May 15, 2025. The token fell 50% in the following week. Co-founder Rushi Manche was suspended on May 2 and later terminated. Co-founder Cooper Scanlon publicly stated that "Movement is a victim in this situation." Additional documents leaked the same month showed Movement had quietly promised two undisclosed advisers access to as much as 10% of the token supply, a disclosure that had never been made to investors or the public. The project had launched with reported backing from Trump's World Liberty Financial and was pursuing a $3 billion valuation target at the time.

The Foundation has since repurchased approximately 19% of investor tokens, equivalent to 4.2% of total supply, as part of cleanup efforts. MOVE currently trades near $0.0141, giving it a market cap of roughly $54 million and a fully diluted valuation of around $141 million. That compares with the $3 billion valuation target at launch.

New Leadership, New Structure

Torab Torabi, a founding member with prior roles at Salesforce, Sensor Tower, and Marinade Finance, replaced Manche as CEO of Move Industries. The company's CTO, Dr. Young Yang Liauw, was previously Head of Move at Aptos and an engineering lead on Meta's Libra/Diem initiative.

Torabi has been direct about the recovery challenge. "Trust is hard to build, but rebuilding it is even harder," he said in an interview with HTX Insights. "Our car has no rearview mirror. We only look forward." On the L1 transition, he framed it this way: "The biggest difference is going from being a passenger to being the driver."

The Emerging Markets Argument

Move Industries has tied its commercial strategy closely to cross-border remittances and financial access in markets where traditional banking infrastructure underserves most of the population. The World Bank estimates global remittance flows at $685 billion annually, with an average transaction cost of 6.36%. Corridors including Nigeria-to-UK, Pakistan-to-Gulf, and Kenya-to-diaspora routes see some of the steepest fees. Pakistan alone receives more than $27 billion in annual remittance inflows, according to World Bank figures, underscoring the scale of demand in one of the project's named target markets.

Circle has deployed USDCx, a stablecoin backed 1:1 by USDC, on the Movement L1 via its xReserve infrastructure, enabling native cross-chain transfers across more than 30 blockchains without a third-party bridge. Move Industries has also secured access to licensed payment rails covering the US, Canada, and EU for cross-border settlement; no equivalent licensing covering African or South Asian markets has been announced.

Sorted Wallet, a Move Industries portfolio company backed by a $4.4 million seed round led by Tether and Gnosis, runs a 10-megabyte app designed for phones as cheap as $20. The wallet has passed 500,000 downloads across 160 countries, with its largest user bases in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Pakistan. Chainalysis data shows Sub-Saharan Africa processed $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-over-year increase. Nigeria alone received $92.1 billion in crypto over the same period, according to the country's securities regulator.

Move Industries has also partnered with Replit on a mobile-first development environment targeting builder communities in Nigeria, Kenya, and Pakistan, markets where mobile web traffic accounts for roughly 60% of internet access.

Risks That Remain

The recovery thesis carries real structural risks. Roughly 6.33 billion MOVE tokens, or 63% of total supply, remain locked and not yet in circulation. Large unlocks would create significant selling pressure, undermining the Move Alliance program through which ecosystem projects commit 50 to 100% of their revenue to repurchasing and holding MOVE tokens, with buyback activity tracked via on-chain quarterly dashboards.

The licensed payment rails announced by Move Industries cover US, Canada, and EU corridors only. No equivalent licensing has been announced for African or South Asian markets, meaning the project's emerging markets pitch currently runs ahead of its regulatory footprint. Nigeria's SEC has issued more than 90 public advisories against unregistered crypto schemes. South Africa's FSCA requires formal licensing for product distribution, a process that could be lengthy given Movement's governance history.

Move Industries' next public milestones will test whether the technical relaunch translates into sustainable builder and user adoption, particularly in the markets it has placed at the center of its pitch.