Solana Invest $100 Million In South Korean Web3 Startups

According to a report released on Wednesday, Solana Ventures and Foundation have announced a $100 million investment and grant fund to support the development of South Korean web3 firms built on the Solana ecosystem.

The investment fund is sponsored by Solana Ventures and the project’s community treasury and aims to assist the expansion of game studios, GameFi, NFTs, and decentralized finance (Defi).

Johnny Lee, Solana Labs’ Head of Games Business News, remarked on the development, adding that the majority of contacts South Koreans have with the network’s blockchain are via games and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

A significant section of Korea’s gaming business is shifting to web3. They want to be adaptable; there are a variety of project sizes and team sizes, so some of their contributions will be venture-sized checks, according to Lee.

He went on to explain how the gaming sector would be linked further into the mainnet, stating that high-quality and entertaining titles will be released in the second part of this year.

While there have been some unfavorable responses from users and game creators over the adoption of blockchain applications in gaming, the Games CEO said that he is long-term positive on web3 gaming acceptance, saying:

Free-to-play acceptance probably took eight years, therefore I’m very certain that it will take four years for web3 games to be the main business model. This is not the first time Solana Labs will investigate the blockchain gaming sector.

According to a March article, Solana Labs teamed with Krafton, the game developer behind the famous online battle royale game Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). The collaboration sought to facilitate the introduction, creation, and marketing of play-to-earn (P2E) NFT games and services based on the Solana ecosystem.

Meanwhile, other enterprises built on the Solana blockchain have prospered as well. A recent example is STEPN, a Solana-based move-to-earn platform that has 2.3 million members since its introduction in December 2021.