Solana (SOL) has announced a $100 million investment in South Korea as it attempts to break into a developer market still reeling from the Terra ecosystem collapse last month. Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation, two key players in the Solana blockchain, have formed a $100 million fund to help solidify the project’s goal of creating a suitable blockchain for gaming. Solana Ventures, along with cryptocurrency exchange FTX and Lightspeed Ventures, launched a similar $100 million gaming fund in November.
According to the press release, their primary focus will be on courting South Korea’s crypto games development sector. According to Johnny B. Lee of the Solana Foundation, it would also support Terra-based platforms, which were left stranded after the blockchain crash.
Solana enters the $1.6 billion web3 market in South Korea
Some of the world’s largest gaming companies, such as Netmarble, NCSoft, and Nexon, are headquartered in South Korea. The country is also a leading cryptocurrency trading market, with exchanges such as Bithumb and Upbit processing billions of dollars in daily trading volume.
Solana’s $100 million investment fund will be used to support the network’s NFT, gaming, and DeFi projects. The blockchain project will now compete against several other major protocols that have already established a presence in the South Korean market.
Solana announced a $100 million investment this week, pitting it against Polygon (MATIC), Avalanche (AVAX), and other smart contract platforms vying for Korea’s orphaned crypto engineers. It’s unclear how many Terra developers will return to the ecosystem after the company declared bankruptcy in May, wiping out billions of dollars in assets.
Solana recently announced that it is on track to surpass the Open Sea NFT marketplace, which is currently the world’s largest NFT marketplace in terms of transaction volume. The move comes as the blockchain seeks to establish itself as a dominant player in the rapidly expanding NFT space.
South Korea is expected to become a hotbed of NFT and Metaverse innovation, with the government committing $187 million to the development of its own metaverse environment. The primary goal of Korea’s metaverse will be to stimulate the development of digital material and digital firms.
Crypto gaming community in South Korea
Several South Korean platforms, such as the Klaytn layer-1 blockchain and the Upbit exchange, are already welcoming NFTs or access to DeFi. As organisations seek grants, the Solana Foundation expects interest in the game and decentralised finance (DeFi) to increase across the country.
According to Austin Federa, head of communications for the Solana Foundation, the Solana fund, which focuses on Web 3 projects, will provide significant assistance to Korean blockchain game developers. South Korea’s gaming industry is expected to be worth more than $15 billion by 2021. The goal is to apply some of that potential to blockchain games.
Solana’s NFT trading and DeFi usage have increased in recent months. Solana’s top NFT marketplace, Magic Eden, is the world’s secondlargest, according to decentralised app (Dapp) tracker DappRadar, with 35,526 daily traders and $7.31 million in daily volume.