Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have launched a $100 million investment and grant fund to bolster the growth of South Korean web3 startups building on the Solana ecosystem, a report revealed on Wednesday.
Solana Launches $100M for South Korean Web3 Startups
The investment fund, which is aimed at supporting the growth of gaming studios, GameFi, NFTs, and decentralized finance (DeFi), is backed by capital from Solana Ventures and the project’s community treasury.
Johnny Lee, the Head of Games Business Development at Solana Labs, commented on the development, noting that most interactions South Koreans make with the Solana blockchain come from gaming and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
“A big portion of Korea’s gaming industry is moving into web3. We want to be flexible; there’s a wide range of project sizes, team sizes, so some of [our investments] will be venture-sized checks,” Lee said.
He went further to give a scope on how the gaming industry will be integrated more into the Solana mainnet, highlighting that “high-quality and fun games” will be launched in the second half of this year.
While there has been negative feedback from players and game developers pertaining to the adoption of blockchain applications in gaming, the Games boss revealed that he is long-term bullish on web3 gaming adoption, saying:
“Free-to-play adoption probably took eight years, so if we say it’ll take four years for web3 games to be the dominant revenue model, I’m pretty comfortable with that.”
Solana Partners PUBG Makers
The latest development is not the first time Solana Labs will explore the blockchain gaming industry.
In a March report, Coinfomania reported that Solana Labs partnered with Krafton, the game maker behind the popular multiplayer battle royale game, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). The partnership was aimed at enabling the introduction, design, and marketing of play-to-earn (P2E) NFT games and services built on the Solana ecosystem.
Meanwhile, there are other projects building on the Solana blockchain that have equally thrived. A recent example is STEPN, a move-to-earn platform built on Solana, that has attained 2.3 million users since its launch in December 2021.
