Movement, a project originally designed to link blockchains built using the Move programming language with Ethereum, focuses on cross-border payments, remittances and dollar savings products, reflecting a broader shift in the increasingly crowded layer 2 landscape.
The company behind the blockchain said on Tuesday it had secured access to licensed payment systems in the US, Canada and the European Union and would focus on building stablecoin-based settlement infrastructure for emerging markets.
The change in direction comes as a number of tier 2 projects reassess their original scale-focused roadmaps amid increasing competition and decreasing differentiation between networks. With dozens of Ethereum scaling chains competing for users, liquidity, and developer attention, some projects are turning to payments and real-world financial applications as a path to growth.
One of the first Ethereum-scale projects, Polygon has placed an increasing emphasis on payments and stablecoin infrastructure in recent years, pursuing projects with fintechs and payment providers as transaction fees and rollup technology become commonplace.
While Layer-2 networks were initially presented as a solution to Ethereum’s scaling challenges, the industry’s rapid expansion has led to many projects looking for more specialized use cases. For Movement, this increasingly means that they do not compete with other blockchain networks, but with traditional payment systems and lenders.
The team behind Movement said it plans to deploy licensed payment partners alongside blockchain settlement infrastructure to target the approximately $685 billion money market serving low- and middle-income countries.
As part of the transition, the Movement Network Foundation said it has bought back approximately 19% of the tokens previously allocated to investors, representing 4.1% of the total token supply. $MOVE recently traded around 14.35 cents.
“Billions worldwide are financially disenfranchised and underserved,” CEO Torab Torabi said in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “Our mission is to combine licensed payment rails with on-chain settlement to modernize financial services worldwide, especially in emerging markets.”
Read more: Movement Labs ends Rushi Manche next $MOVE Token deals