One of the most famous blockchain, Solana, pledged a $100 million investment and grant fund for South Korean crypto startups as it seeks to penetrate the developer market. Remember that the market is still recovering from the Terra debacle from last month.
Two chief players in Solana’s ecosystem, Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation, have said that it will seed investments and grants “across all web 3 verticals,” according to a press release.
However, their focus will be on South Korea’s crypto games development sector including gaming studios, GameFi, NFTs and DeFi as well.
Because all of them are aiming for Korea’s wealth of orphaned crypto developers, this investment push pits Solana against Polygon, Avalanche, and other smart contract platforms.
It is still not clear how many Terra developers will come back to the ecosystem after its collapse in May after it was revealed that South Korean authorities are investigating Terra Staff to assess Terra’s fall to suspect its price manipulation angle.
The fund is backed by capital from the Solana community treasury as well as the venture arm’s pool of capital, as per the head of communications at Solana Labs, Austin Federa.
While the Solana funding will spread across many Web 3 projects, its chief focus will be on bolstering Korea-based blockchain game developers, Federa revealed. South Korea’s gaming sector overall was worth more than $15 billion during 2021.
The idea is to utilize at least some of that potential for crypto games, too.
“They know how to build stuff over there. Big beautiful games. It’s really something to see,” a source close to the matter said.
“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,” the general manager of games at Solana Labs, Johnny Lee said.
In general, gaming and NFTs are responsible for the majority of activity Solana has observed in South Korea, which makes the sectors a perfect fit for web3, Lee stated.
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