Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation will commit up to a total of $100M in a new fund supporting South Korean-based projects dedicated to non-fungible tokens and decentralized finance as well as blockchain gaming, Johnny Lee, general manager of games at Solana Labs, told TechCrunch on Tuesday.
The Solana (SOL-USD) community treasury and Solana Labs’ pool of capital are backing the fund, said Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs, as reported by TechCrunch.
“A big portion of Korea’s gaming industry is moving into web3,” lee told TechCrunch. “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,” he added.
Looking forward, Lee said there will likely be more “high-quality and fun games” launching on the Solana (SOL-USD) blockchain in the second half of this year. Those games will make play-to-earn games a more fun concept, he added. For the long-term, Lee noted that web3 games will become just as popular as free-to-play mobile games. “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.”
The move comes even though a slew of crypto firms are taking steps to cut costs amid crypto winter. Earlier in June, crypto exchange Coinbase Global (COIN) said it will extend its hiring pause. And Winklevoss-led crypto exchange Gemini recently said it’s slashing 10% of its workforce.
Meanwhile, Solana (SOL-USD -3.5%) tokens are sliding to $39 in afternoon trading, as the broader crypto market faces some selling pressure.
In the beginning of June, Solana slumped after an outage.
Source : seekingalpha.com
