In Brief:
- Neon Labs raised $40 million via token sale to bring EVM functionality to Solana.
- This will help developers in migrating Ethereum distributed apps, or dApps, onto Solana without the need to change any code.
Neon Labs, a crypto startup, has raised the funds amounting to $40 million via token sale. The aim is to rapidly scale its current team of 15 to over 30 in categories such as research, core development, marketing, and business development. The fundraising round was led by Jump Capital, along with IDEO CoLab Ventures, Solana Capital and others.
Although Ethereum and Solana blockchains are often perceived as rivals, through this project investors raised tens of millions of dollars to bring Ethereum functionality to Solana. This will allow Ethereum-based decentralized applications (dApps) to deploy on Solana more efficiently.
According to Marina Guryeva, Neon labs’ CEO, EVM is currently live on Solana testnet and devnet and will soon be launched on mainnet. She further added that Sushi, Aave, and many more dApps are also interested in deploying on Neon EVM. The first priority is to enable integrations with the infrastructure providers in addition to the mainnet launch.
Once launched, developers can seamlessly migrate Ethereum distributed apps, or dApps, onto Solana without the need to change any code. Aave and other dApps can deploy Solana through Neon EVM without needing to know Solana’s Rust programming language.
Aave flounder Stani Kulechov commented on the launch saying – “The ability to finally use Solidity [Ethereum’s programming language] smart contracts to access the Solana ecosystem is a game-changer for us, and will drastically improve time to deployment,”
Neon Labs aims to involve more dApps and their users via liquidity mining incentive programs. The Ethereum computation engine could lead to the implementation of popular DeFi protocols on the blockchain. Recently, many projects are considering bringing EVM to different blockchains. This week, Cromos announced the launch of its mainnet beta in collaboration with crypto.com beginning the Cosmos EVM chain.
