MOVE Surges Amid Trump-Linked Purchases and Musk Talks

Movement Token (MOVE) Sees Price Surge Amid Rumors of Potential Talks with Elon Musk’s DOGE

The price of MOVE, the utility token for the Ethereum layer-2 network Movement, surged on Tuesday, reaching $0.89 and notching notable gains. This spike followed a significant purchase of $1.9 million worth of MOVE tokens by World Liberty Financial, a DeFi platform affiliated with President Donald Trump and members of his family.

Despite retracing slightly, MOVE is up 7% on the day, leading the crypto market among the top 100 tokens tracked by CoinGecko. The Trump-linked DeFi project's purchases were made on Tuesday morning, according to on-chain data visible via Arkham Intelligence’s blockchain analytics platform.

World Liberty Financial's spending spree comes after a previous purchase of $47 million worth of wrapped Bitcoin last week, coinciding with Trump's inauguration. Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs, expressed surprise at the purchases, stating that the team was focused on the Developer Mainnet Launch and had no involvement in the Trump-linked DeFi project's purchases.

The Movement Network Foundation announced that Movement's developer mainnet had gone live, allowing developers to begin deploying applications on the Ethereum layer-2 network. Eric Conner, founder of the Ethereum information site ETHHub, raised concerns about the timing of World Liberty Financial's purchases, which took place just minutes before influential accounts claimed that Movement Labs was in talks with the government.

Rumors suggest that Movement Labs is in talks with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) about possibly implementing blockchain technology. A Bloomberg report from last week mentioned that individuals involved in Musk's cost-reduction initiative were evaluating the application of a public blockchain to enhance transparency in government spending.

As a layer-2 network built on Ethereum, Movement seeks to offer users faster and cheaper transactions than its underlying blockchain. The network was built using the Move programming language, pioneered by the developers of Facebook's defunct stablecoin project Diem. Those endeavors eventually led to the creation of Aptos and Sui, which also use Move but operate as standalone networks.