Interview: Cassidy, PANews
Written by: Nancy, PANews
In the crypto world, which is an arena without rules, the stories of dropouts’ counterattacks are not uncommon. Behind these names are people who dare to break the rules and seize the trend of the times. Cooper Scanlon, one of the co-founders of Movement, is also one of the microcosms of the era in which crypto technology enables individuals to break through class constraints.
PANews interviewed Cooper at the recent GMove Cooper: Movement's APAC Tour 2025 in Taipei. In this in-depth conversation, he shared his experience of dropping out of school to join the crypto industry, analyzed Movement's unique advantages and future plans in the fierce competition, and combined with the US regulatory environment, put forward unique insights into the future development of the industry.
Cooper was born in a poor family and tried to change his fate through education, but the traditional employment path made him disappointed and he eventually chose to drop out of school, betting everything on himself and devoting himself to the crypto market. In the interview, Cooper revealed that Movement has raised at least $55 million in venture capital so far, and after the developer mainnet was launched, it will fully accelerate the construction of the ecosystem.
As a potential player in Ethereum L2, Cooper said frankly that the current L2 market is severely homogenized and lacks real innovation. The core competitiveness of Movement lies in using the Move language to improve security, executability and audit efficiency. He firmly believes that Move will replace Solidity and become the mainstream language for the next generation of smart contracts. At the same time, he emphasized that the community is the lifeline of the project, and issuing tokens before the mainnet is a key step to ensure decentralization and avoid excessive concentration of power.
Looking ahead to crypto regulation, Cooper said that although Trump is crypto-friendly, policy changes take time, and policies may gradually benefit local projects in the next four years.
A school dropout enters the bear market and targets the Move language to seize the "big opportunity" against the trend
Cooper grew up in a remote town in the United States, where there were few career opportunities. Coming from a poor family, he has been under heavy financial pressure since he was a child, having to make a living and take care of his family. In high school, he started working, but soon realized that this hard work could only provide him with food and clothing, and could not really turn his life around. In order to break the predicament, Cooper placed his hopes on getting high ACT scores, firmly believing that a top university was the key to changing his destiny. In the end, he entered Vanderbilt University as he wished. Confused about his future career direction, he chose a unique and practical major in human and organizational development, a subject similar to business psychology, and minored in computer science and philosophy. He believed that this skill could be applied to multiple fields.
However, college life did not show Cooper a clear path. Because he was still young, he missed the golden age of the Internet and social media, but he kept thinking: Where is the next big opportunity? And how can we seize it? The rise of cryptocurrency made Cooper's eyes light up. He keenly realized that there was a lack of real experts in this emerging field, and as a college student, he could quickly become a "relative expert" through self-study. So Cooper began to cooperate with large funds, teaching them knowledge about tokenization and blockchain, and learning their operating models.
He recalled in an interview, "Every week, I would organize what I learned into a presentation and explain it to them. In this way, for a few hours a week, I could communicate face-to-face with the managing partners of large funds. I gradually realized that if I followed the traditional career path, it might take me decades to have the opportunity to sit in the conference room of these people. Emerging technology allowed me to do it during college."
At the same time, Cooper got an internship at Bloomberg. At first, he thought that joining a large company would change his destiny. However, reality shattered his fantasy. The ridiculously high rent and fierce competition for renting in New York made him breathless. Even if he interned at a top company, his salary could hardly support basic living. This experience made him completely disappointed with the traditional career path. He began to realize that the real opportunities lie in emerging technologies and applying them to real-world scenarios, and these skills can be mastered without a college degree. On this day, Cooper made a bold decision: to quit his internship at Bloomberg and drop out of Vanderbilt University. But behind Cooper's decision was that he had already cooperated with the fund on a project and used the Move language to develop structured products.
At the moment of dropping out, Cooper was not afraid, but excited. In the previous few weeks, the heavy workload made him breathless, and there were more things he wanted to do but no time to complete them. "To be honest, relying on others for a living is more terrible than dropping out of school. The market environment has been deteriorating, and I think this situation will continue. I don't want to go back to the days of worrying about the next meal. So, I decided to bet everything on myself, which is the best decision I have ever made." Cooper said frankly.
In November 2022, Cooper co-founded Movement with another co-founder, Rushi Manche, who also dropped out of school. However, this was during the crypto bear market after the collapse of FTX, when market liquidity dried up and investor confidence fell to the bottom. At the same time, Move language, as an emerging blockchain programming language, has not yet been widely accepted. The market's perception of it is more focused on the performance of Move chains such as Aptos and Sui, which also failed to show sufficient resilience in the deep bear market after the collapse of FTX.
“When we started, the market liquidity was extremely low and it was in a deep bear market,” Cooper recalled. “A lot of people questioned me, ‘Will you go back to school? Give it a try and go back when it’s over.’ The biggest challenge was getting people to bet on us and the Move language. Move was very new at the time and most people had no experience. All they saw was the terrible state of the Move chain after the FTX crash. Even the best teams in the Web3 field—like the Swedish team that came straight out of Facebook Libra, with elite backgrounds from the world’s top companies—didn’t succeed. So people would think: If they can’t do it, how can these two young college dropouts do it?”
In the face of doubts, Cooper and Rushi chose to prove themselves with actions. "The way we deal with this situation is to work hard. For example, there was a time when we wrote 50 pages of documents in one weekend, detailing the white paper, marketing plan, and ecological development plan. We have to invest a lot of energy to show people that we are worth betting on and inspire their confidence."
"We pitched to hundreds of people and were rejected hundreds of times before we got the first 'YES'. Keeping working hard is also the key to where Movement is today." Cooper advises young founders to be ready to prove themselves and be willing to take that extra step. The hardest thing is to get the first group of people to believe in you. Success often depends on time and passion - believe in what you are doing and keep working hard, even if the rewards are not immediately apparent. As long as you get the first support, you can get the snowball rolling. "
Despite a difficult start, Movement has gradually won market recognition. Today, Movement’s FDV has reached billions of dollars, and Cooper also disclosed that it has received $55 million in financing support from investors including Polychain Capital, YZi Labs, Hack VC, Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Aptos, etc.
The developer mainnet is launched to accelerate the pace of ecological construction
In February this year, Movement announced the launch of the developer mainnet, a key step for this Ethereum Layer2 solution based on the Move language. This launch not only opened up the core infrastructure, but was also accompanied by the release of technical documentation and developer resources, as well as the deployment of selected partners and DeFi protocols.
In Cooper's view, the mainnet launch is like a carefully prepared party for Movement - DJ, lights, balloons, none of them can be missing. At present, Movement's focus is on integrating all elements to ensure the smooth operation of the ecosystem, including a multi-asset liquidity program called Cornucopia. The program was launched simultaneously with the public mainnet Beta, and aims to achieve deeper market efficiency by providing basic support for DeFi applications. In the interview, Cooper likened this plan to replacing a "mechanical hard drive" with a "solid-state drive", aiming to inject strong liquidity when the mainnet is officially launched, and ensure that the DeFi ecosystem operates seamlessly when the incentive mechanism is activated.
For any emerging blockchain, liquidity is the lifeblood of ecological development, especially in the core scenarios of DeFi, such as indexes and lending. Cooper knows this well. He said, "Our goal is to prepare liquidity for core applications and ensure that the DeFi ecosystem can operate seamlessly when incentives are activated."
This plan not only focuses on technical optimization, but also looks at the integration of real-world assets (RWA) and institutional capital. Cooper said in an interview, "What excites me most is that RWA and institutional products are integrating with our network. These products used to be limited to ultra-high net worth individuals, and even American citizens like me have difficulty accessing them because their yields far exceed ordinary products, sometimes even up to twice as much." Cooper mentioned that this is exactly the original intention of Facebook to develop the Move language - to provide institutions with secure and efficient blockchain solutions, and the limitations of the Solidity language in security and speed can no longer meet this demand.
Movement's vision is to bring these high-quality financial products to global users through the DeFi ecosystem. "We hope that users will not only have access to U.S. financial products and dollars, but also use RWA for on-chain innovations, such as lending or derivatives trading, to create a truly powerful financial environment," Cooper added.
In addition to injecting Cornucopia liquidity into applications to enhance the vitality of the ecosystem, Movement also plans to launch application incentives, similar to the "Move annualized rate of return" mechanism to encourage users to participate deeply, and will soon launch the second phase of the Parthenon testnet.
In addition, in order to further attract and retain developers, Movement is accelerating its global layout, including a recent tour focusing on Asia. "Asia is the future of programming, with the largest developer base and the fastest growth rate." Cooper said in an interview that by holding events in various places, Movement brings together developers, investors, community members, KOLs and traders to provide resources, market support and funding channels for new developers. This puzzle-like ecological construction method not only accelerates the implementation of the project, but also lays the foundation for future global hackathon plans. Cooper revealed that following the successful holding of Movement Mania, the next stage of global events is already in preparation, aiming to further stimulate the creativity of the developer community.
Move aims to reshape Ethereum L2, emphasizing community-driven strategy
As an Ethereum L2 based on the Move language, the Movement Network aims to enhance blockchain security and high blockchain executability. However, the current Ethereum L2 market is oversaturated, with a significant head effect, and the problems of complex user experience and ecological fragmentation are becoming increasingly prominent.
"There are too many different blockchains now, especially L2. The market is so crowded because most L2s are just copies of the former. Apart from a 10% speed increase and new marketing packaging, there is no substantial difference and they still cannot get rid of the inherent defects of Solidity and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). "Cooper said that the key difference of Movement is to introduce the next-generation smart contract language Move directly into the Ethereum ecosystem. In Movement, users can have both security and performance, enjoy the convenience of writing smart contracts, and audit at a lower cost and faster speed, while increasing the pace of innovation on the chain. And all this does not need to leave the Ethereum ecosystem, and users can directly experience all the advantages brought by Move.
Cooper firmly believes that Move will become the mainstream language for smart contract development in the future. "Move is really our North Star. It is the future of smart contract development and will replace Solidity. Because millions of developers will learn Move in the future. If you look at emerging markets where the number of developers is growing rapidly, such as Vietnam and Nigeria, developers in these regions have switched from Rust to Move development."
But in the Move ecosystem, Movement is not unique. Projects such as Aptos and Sui are also based on the Move language, each with its own technical advantages. Cooper emphasized that Movement's layout in decentralization and community-driven makes it unique. Compared with most chains that maximize the retention of tokens for the team and investors at launch, including staking and locking positions to cause the circulation volume to be far lower than the pledged volume, thereby damaging the interests of token holders, Movement truly puts the community first. The tokens are jointly held by supporters, developers, builders and community members, and the team and investors do not participate in staking. This means that the circulating tokens belong entirely to the users, and there is no need to worry about insider selling. This decentralized, community-first model not only enhances user trust, but also lays the foundation for attracting developers and long-term supporters. At the same time, Movement maintains close communication with developers through channels such as Telegram, and helps the team in the ecosystem grow rapidly by holding AMAs, marketing and financial support.
Community culture is also what Movement has been emphasizing in the interview. In the world of Web3, the community is gradually becoming the core driving force for the success of the project. "Community is the lifeline of any project. Without the community, you might as well give up." Cooper pointed out in the interview that even if you have top technology, if no one uses it, the project will find it difficult to survive. Looking back at the history of the crypto market, some networks and tokens have maintained their prices and relevance despite mediocre technology with strong community support. This shows that in today's fierce competition between chains, technology is certainly important, but the activity and loyalty of the community are the key to winning. Especially now that there are too many chains competing for the same users, if everyone is competing for the same users, in the end, in my opinion, the key is who can best identify and reward their users and who can build the most organic and active community. It's not just about building cool technology, but giving people something to believe in, something to participate in. Movement I think it's great that people realize this, and I believe this will ultimately bring a better experience to users in this industry.
It is also out of consideration for the community that, unlike many crypto projects that choose to issue tokens after the mainnet is launched, Movement completed the TGE (token generation event) before the mainnet is launched. Cooper pointed out in the interview that any network that starts from scratch often faces potential risks of power concentration and malicious behavior. Pre-issuance of tokens helps to decentralize the network before the official launch and ensure smooth operation. This strategy has also received strong support from the community and partners, and the market is in a relatively positive state. Cooper said frankly, "Looking back, the timing is almost perfect, helping us to occupy a more advantageous position in the current difficult market."
The Trump family bet on the company and said that there has been no substantial change in crypto regulation.
Trump's friendly attitude towards the cryptocurrency sector and expectations of loose policies provide the industry with greater room for development. American-backed projects such as Movement may have more room for development.
Cooper commented, “As an American founding team, we are excited about this vision of ‘new centrism.’ Everything we do – expanding our user base, bringing in users from key emerging markets – is closely tied to the strategic interests of the United States. These markets are critical to the United States because they are not only the frontier of financial expansion, but also the place where the dominance of the dollar is contested. We have received a lot of support in this regard.”
However, Cooper also admitted that although the optimism about the future is real, the change of crypto regulation will not happen overnight. "So far, the regulatory environment has not actually changed substantially, which is one of the reasons why the market has cooled down slightly recently. The excitement is real, but it takes time for policies to be implemented. The current regulatory framework is the result of decades of evolution and cannot be changed overnight. However, we believe that in the next four years, the regulation of the US in the crypto field will gradually turn positive. Whether it is promoting the return of local teams or providing more support for cryptocurrencies, it will bring new opportunities to the industry."
