I’m Wael, CEO of MOVA.
If I had to summarize the industry climate in 2025 in one sentence, it would be this: crypto’s narrative center is shifting from “asset prices” to “the flow of money.” In past years, people explained everything through market cycles. But this year, more and more of the decisive variables came from outside price action—policy boundaries, geopolitical aftershocks, and TradFi’s pragmatic “takeover” of blockchain through real use cases.
When these forces compound, blockchains are no longer just infrastructure for a speculative market. They are increasingly being asked—like power grids, clearing systems, and communications networks—to deliver certainty and responsibility for the real world.
This change isn’t incremental. It’s structural. It makes many old questions obsolete: shouting “TPS” isn’t enough; ecosystem hype isn’t enough; even the habitual “on-chain equals freedom” framing isn’t enough. The new questions are harder:
· Can a chain run reliably across continents, time zones, and regulatory regimes?
· Can it deliver settlement speed acceptable to traditional payments without sacrificing compliance and audit requirements?
· Can asset issuance, fund clearing, and risk control become system capabilities, not application-layer patches?
We built MOVA to answer these questions.
Geopolitics and Regulation Reprice the Market: Financial Infrastructure Is Becoming Part of National Capability
The most important thing for the industry to keep chewing on this year wasn’t a protocol going viral—it was how policy is repricing financial infrastructure.
A U.S. National Security Strategy document released toward year-end was widely interpreted by observers as a more explicit “cost–benefit” posture: more caution in external commitments, more burden-sharing pressure on allies, and a greater focus on keeping strategic priorities within controllable boundaries. Many media analyses highlighted shifts in language and prioritization—reassessing traditional alliances and reordering the level of engagement in global issues.
You can read this as “strategic contraction,” or as “pulling the fist back to strike again.” Either way, it points to the same reality: once a state begins to view finance and payments through a security-and-competition lens, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and on-chain clearing stop being “industry innovation” and start looking like extensions of national capability. They will be brought under rules—and sometimes into the arena of strategic contest.
Stablecoins are the most penetrating carrier of this change. In 2025, the U.S. signed stablecoin-related legislation, widely seen as a key step moving stablecoins from “market-led growth” into an institutionalized channel. Around the same period, the U.S. also issued executive actions and policy moves related to crypto assets, further reinforcing the position of crypto infrastructure in national strategy.
In the Middle East, we saw a different but equally clear direction: treating digital assets as a lever to upgrade finance and trade infrastructure. In 2025, discussions and progress around local-currency stablecoins and licensing frameworks in the UAE continued to accelerate, often framed by international media as part of a broader financial digitization strategy.
In South Korea, policy signals were also clear: a more proactive embrace of institutionalization—seeking a new balance between “regulatory clarity” and “industrial competitiveness.”
Put together, these shifts lead to one conclusion: cross-border payments and asset tokenization are entering a new phase of institutional competition. A chain’s value will no longer be determined primarily by community sentiment. Increasingly, it will be determined by auditability, governability, and sustainable operational capability.
Why Stablecoins Become the “Default Option” for Cross-Border Payments—and Why Compliance Becomes the Bottleneck
Many people truly understand stablecoins for the first time not through exchanges, but through cross-border remittances.
Traditional cross-border payments are, fundamentally, expensive and slow: fees can be painful, and settlement can take days. The more intermediaries and reconciliation complexity in the path, the less predictable time and cost become. Stablecoins flip this experience into something closer to “sending a message”: costs can be compressed dramatically, and settlement can reach minutes—sometimes faster.
So stablecoins naturally began replacing parts of cross-border payment flows: small-ticket e-commerce settlements, freelancer income, cross-border service fees, and pilot links in international trade. They didn’t win through narrative. They won through an experience people “can’t go back from” once they’ve used it.
But stablecoins also have a structural weakness: once they enter scaled commercial payments and institutional fund flows, identity, counterparty risk, AML, and sanctions compliance turn from “optional” into hard thresholds. In many on-chain systems, you can transfer quickly—but at the protocol level you can’t clearly answer three questions:
· Who is the payer?
· Who is the payee?
· What is the risk status of this money?
If those answers rely on after-the-fact tracing, institutions can’t treat the system as a primary highway.
This is the core contradiction of the PayFi era: users want payments “as fast as the internet,” while institutions need risk control and compliance “as strict as a financial system.”
And MOVA v2 is designed to resolve that contradiction at the protocol layer.
MOVA in 2025: From “Performance Proven” to “Real Money Carried,” to “Rebuilding the Stack for PayFi and RWA”
For MOVA, 2025 was the year we moved from engineering validation to a coherent system narrative.
In v1, we first had to prove one thing: high throughput, low latency, and deterministic finality are not lab slogans—they are system capabilities that can run continuously under real network conditions. Through long-term stress testing across multiple global regions, under high-concurrency transfer models, we achieved a peak processing capability of 110,547 and finality within approximately 1.5 seconds, while maintaining high availability over extended operation. For institutions, the key behind these numbers isn’t “fast”—it’s “stable.” When a chain must plug into payment or clearing routes, stability and consistency matter more than occasional peaks.
More importantly, we didn’t want MOVA’s performance to live only in reports. We validated it through products.
This year we launched MOVA Liquid, using a near-professional trading-system product form to pressure-test on-chain matching, settlement, concurrent execution, and state verification. We also launched MarsPump, pushing the network into real high-frequency interaction environments through a more community- and liquidity-native mechanism. One leans toward “professional liquidity,” the other toward “community liquidity,” but both validate the same point: MOVA is not a chain that only talks architecture—it is a settlement network that can carry real funds and real trading behavior.
As of now, MOVA’s ecosystem TVL is approaching $20M. For an L1 still in infrastructure expansion, this is a more meaningful signal: when the market deploys real money on-chain, system reliability and usability are being “voted for with feet.”
Going Global in 2025: From Abu Dhabi to Hong Kong, Seoul, and Dubai—Putting the Vision into Real Commercial Context
If v1’s keyword was “engineering,” then 2025’s outward-facing keyword was “context.” A chain that aims to serve payments and RWA can’t remain self-consistent only within the technical community. It must enter real-world commercial contexts—regulation, institutions, partners, business routes, and regional differences.
In August, we disclosed strategic financing progress, including a strategic investment at an approximately $100M valuation, with institutions such as Aqua1 and GeoNova participating. The significance wasn’t fundraising itself—it was that it pulled MOVA’s path forward into an institutional lens of verifiable delivery. You’re no longer building “a chain that might be fast.” You are building infrastructure expected to deliver long-term, remain compliant, and integrate into real business.
On August 29, we hosted Mova Gala: Mainnet Activation in Hong Kong, presenting mainnet capabilities, ecosystem direction, and cooperation pathways on one stage. We also advanced the collaboration narrative with Join the Planet, connecting “chain capability” with “IP and asset forms” that broader audiences can intuitively understand.
Moving into September and the Korea window, we made Korean localization a clear agenda during KBW: Korea’s regulatory and financial system is a classic “trust and auditability” environment. It forces any infrastructure project to turn “compliance, risk control, and SLA” from slogans into deliverable standards.
In October, within Dubai’s Vision 2030 context, we brought RWA and payment discussions into more “policy-and-industry-at-the-same-table” settings. In the Middle East, digital assets are often viewed not merely as financial innovation, but as part of upgrading trade, payments, clearing, and capital markets—which naturally demands more determinism, stronger governance structures, and executable cross-institution collaboration.
In December, at venues like TokenPost Gala in Seoul—where industry and media intersect—we connected our 2026 roadmap, PayFi and RWA technical landing points, and v2’s institutional capability building to broader financial and industrial networks. In a year of accelerating institutionalization, what matters is whether partners believe: you can’t just run a demo—you can run the compliance and operations lifecycle of a long-term partnership.
Our rhythm this year expressed one thing: MOVA’s goal is not to become “a lively ecosystem,” but “deployable infrastructure.” When you step into different markets, you realize more clearly: the main battlefield for payments and RWA is never on a parameter sheet. It’s in verifiable reliability, compliance gates, and closed-loop risk control.
How We Differ from “Other High-Performance Chains”: Not Faster, but More Like a Globally Synchronized Machine
People often categorize us as a “high-performance public chain,” but I’m increasingly unwilling to stop at that label—because performance is a result, not the method, and not the goal.
Technically, a blockchain is essentially a global state synchronization machine. The hard part isn’t making a single machine fast. It’s getting many nodes, under the physical constraints of global networks, to converge on one shared state—fast, stable, and verifiable.
MOVA’s consensus design breaks the problem down: at the bottom layer, deterministic state synchronization and propagation paths; at the upper layer, incentives and governance that keep nodes participating reliably for the long term. In our DAG architecture, we adopt a design approach strongly correlated with the underlying P2P network topology—aligning “network propagation paths” with “consensus structure paths” as much as possible, so that propagation itself becomes part of the consensus process. This allows the system, even under cross-continent latency, bandwidth constraints, and node expansion, to maintain predictable broadcast delay and convergence.
For institutions, translated into plain language: we don’t “gamble performance” through aggressive parameters. We “buy determinism” through controllable propagation and verification paths. Payments and clearing don’t need occasional peaks. They need certainty—every single time.
That’s also why we emphasize parallel execution, batch signature verification, state proofs, and more efficient state structures (such as Verkle Trees and related proof systems). Once block speed increases, the real bottleneck moves to in-block execution and state verification. If execution can’t keep up with consensus, faster consensus only manufactures congestion. Our goal is to make consensus, execution, and verification advance together at the same throughput level.
MOVA v2: Turning Compliance, Identity, and Privacy from “Tools” into “Protocol Primitives,” So PayFi and RWA Can Run on the Main Highway
If v1 proved MOVA’s engineering capability, then v2 answers what the business world actually cares about: as stablecoins and RWA scale, how can a chain become infrastructure for compliant financial payments?
MOVA v2 is not about pushing TPS up another order of magnitude. It is about writing three things into the protocol stack:
· KYT
· KYC / DID
· Verifiable-but-non-revealing privacy computation
For users, this means future on-chain payments won’t require choosing between “fast” and “safe & compliant.” You can settle like internet payments, while the system completes necessary risk identification and permission checks in the background. For institutions, this means compliance gating can happen earlier in the transaction lifecycle—rather than after-the-fact remediation. And with a privacy layer, “meeting audit requirements” and “protecting business confidentiality/user privacy” can both be true at the same time.
The objective is very clear: let stablecoin cross-border payments—low fees, high speed—truly enter the institutionally usable main highway; and let RWA issuance, transfer, and clearing stop relying on fragmented contract assemblies, gaining sustainable protocol-level support.
Looking Ahead to 2026: Real Competition Will Happen in “Verifiable Financial Adoption”
If 2025 was the year stablecoins became institutionalized and cross-border payments accelerated, then 2026 is likely the year competition among on-chain financial infrastructures becomes fully visible.
Policy will be clearer, institutions will be more pragmatic, and the market will be more demanding. People will stop paying for concepts and start paying for verifiable adoption: real payment volume, real settlement routes, real asset issuance scale, and real closed loops of risk control and auditability. In the end, the winner won’t be the chain that tells the best story—it will be the system that runs most reliably in a complex world.
MOVA will stay on one path: we won’t build a “do-everything chain.” We will build a reliable settlement layer. When a transaction is no longer speculation, but salary, goods payment, invoicing, clearing instructions, bond redemption, and cross-border settlement—MOVA must be the infrastructure layer people trust the most.
That is our review of 2025—and our answer for 2026.
