Move: The React Of Programmable Money
How Facebook’s Failed Libra Gave Birth to Move
Exponent Labs
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Last week, something completely unexpected happened that’s shaking up the entire Ethereum community…but it’s not Ethereum.
It’s Facebook and The React For Programmatic Money … kind of.
Welcome to Not Fireship, where we cover the latest news in crypto programming that Fireship hasn’t gotten to because The Genius & Clarity legislations haven’t passed yet.
But first…let me set the stage.
The Facebook Code Crisis (2012)
The year is 2012, and Facebook is drowning in its own code. Zuck & Friends have pushed jQuery and PHP as far as they can, even writing HipHop , a PHP-to-C++ transpiler that compiled PHP code into native binaries to squeeze every ounce of performance from their servers.
But it wasn’t enough. Facebook’s user interface was a nightmare of imperative DOM manipulations, spaghetti JavaScript, and performance bottlenecks that made the News Feed stutter and chat windows lag. With billions of users clicking, liking, and messaging simultaneously, Facebook’s frontend was crumbling under its own success.
Without the ability to manage concurrency in the billions, Facebook would need to develop its own language. Out of that frustration, Jordan Walke creates React , the framework that changes everything. Instead of telling the browser how to update the interface step by step, React let developers simply describe what the interface should look like. The Virtual DOM handled the rest automatically and efficiently.
That invention didn’t just save Facebook—it powered the modern internet. Today, apps like Netflix , Instagram , and Airbnb still run on it. React was Facebook’s first great gift to developers.
The Next React
But this isn’t a story about React. It’s about The Next React. Introducing Move , a new programming language for smart contracts born out of Facebook’s now defunct Facebook Coin project.
The year is 2019 , and David Marcus (fmr. PayPal) has just been put in charge of a project called “Facebook Coin”. When they formally announced Facebook Coin as Libra , all hell ensues. Up until this point, Bitcoin was still hovering around the **100k+. Blockchain was still a joke then. But now that a FAANG was interested? Uh oh.
In comes The Fulcrum , also known as the political, legal, regulatory and compliance eye of sauron. Senate Hearings ensue. Elizabeth Warren grills everyone. Jerome Powell expresses deep concerns. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin calls for investigations.
In truth, Facebook was too early. But they did achieve something nobody else could: they got the conversation started amongst the FAANGs. This wasn’t just some Michael Saylor Bitcoin Rube Goldberg Machine anymore. If blockchain couldn’t scale…then why was Meta interested?
Libra eventually got squashed, rebranded to Diem , and finally shut down in 2022. But the vision lived on.
The Underground Revolution
You see, while Zuck was in The Senate battling Senators, Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh were working on making Facebook Coin actually work. In fact, they built their own smart contract language called Move because none of the other blockchains could handle Facebook’s scale.
At Meta, Avery’s job was to be the overall tech lead of all of Meta’s batch processing teams, including Apache Spark , graph processing ( Apache Giraph ), Facebook Hive/Hadoop (Corona), distributed scheduling, and the unified programming model for pipelines. So you might say that he was the right person for the job.
Move was revolutionary because it treated digital assets as resources rather than just data. In languages like Solidity, you could accidentally duplicate tokens or lose them forever through programming bugs. Move made this impossible —assets could only be moved between accounts, never accidentally created or destroyed. It was like having compile-time guarantees that your money couldn’t vanish into the ether.
Turns out, the Move programming language might do for programmatic money what React did for web development.
The Phoenix Rises
Together, Mo & Avery created Aptos , a layer-one blockchain leveraging the same innovations created at Meta: a consensus mechanism called DiemBFT and the programming language Move for smart contracts, designed to mimic the safety and performance of Rust.
Today, after receiving $350M+ from the likes of a16z , Multicoin and friends, Aptos is not only a force in the real-world asset space but also the astronomically-profitable stablecoin space, processing thousands of transactions per second with sub-second finality.
The Meta Mafia
Now here’s the interesting part I didn’t expect to learn while writing this: Aptos isn’t the only popular crypto project to be created by ex-Meta talent.
The surging Sui network? That was created by Evan Cheng , who was also a part of Meta Diem project and is also leveraging the same smart contract programming language that Aptos is: Move. In fact, many people look at Sui and Aptos as different ways to unlock the value of the Move-oriented approach—the speedy, scalable and secure smart contract design.
Both use Move , but with different philosophies:
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Aptos focuses on sequential execution with parallel processing optimizations
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Sui built parallel execution into its core from day one
And it doesn’t just end there. The popular OP_CAT Proposal on Bitcoin? That’s Xiaohui Liu , also formerly of Meta.
Here’s the truth: success leaves clues, and visions don’t die when people say no.
In fact, it’s the people who handle rejection the best who often prosper.
The New Leadership
Today, after Shaikh’s recent departure for personal health reasons, Solmón Tésfaye leads the charge with Avery Ching. Avery’s job is to do what he did at Meta—scale systems to handle billions of operations seamlessly.
These technologies power analytics for all of Meta’s products and scale to hundreds of thousands of machines. Solmón’s background is Investment Banking , which is key to unlocking the partnerships in Web2 to really turn on daily transaction volume, total value locked, new stablecoin issuance and daily new wallet generation.
The Perfect Parallel
Move represents something bigger than just another programming language—it’s Facebook’s second gift to developers. Just as React revolutionized web development by making complex UIs predictable and safe, Move is revolutionizing smart contracts by making digital money safe and impossible to lose through programming errors.
The parallel is perfect:
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React solved the frontend state management crisis by making UI a pure function of state
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Move solves the smart contract security crisis by making assets impossible to duplicate or destroy
Both emerged from Facebook’s need to handle massive scale. Both prioritize safety and predictability over flexibility. Both became the foundation for entire ecosystems.
The irony is delicious: Facebook’s biggest regulatory failure became the seed for the next generation of decentralized finance. Libra died so that Move could live.
And just like React conquered the frontend world one component at a time, Move is conquering the blockchain world one safe transaction at a time.
The revolution that began in Facebook’s regulatory graveyard is building the future of money itself.