Solana will invest up to $100 million in South Korean crypto startups in order 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 fast network’s ecosystem, will seed investments and grants “across all Web 3 verticals,” according to a press release. Their target, nevertheless, will be to court South Korea’s crypto games development sector.
The weeks-old funding round vies Solana versus Polygon, Avalanche, and more smart contract platforms vying for Korea’s trove of orphaned crypto developers. It’s uncertain how many Terra developers will be back to the ecosystem after the ecosystem crumpled in May, wiping out billions of dollars in wealth.
It’s not just because of the drastic crash in the twin tokens terraUSD and LUNA, said Jaemin Park, a growth manager at DeSpread, that developers are wary of Terra 2.0. But also people’s perceptions of the chain’s ‘key person’ risk, as well as doubts about whether their dapps would have any meaningful user base now that the fundamental community has almost vanished.
According to Austin Federa, head of communications for the Solana Foundation, while the Solana funding will be spread across Web 3 projects, it will have a special focus on bolstering Korea-based blockchain game developers. In 2021, the South Korean gaming industry’s value was more than $15 billion. The plan is to use at least some of that potential in crypto games as well.
They know how to construct things over there. Large and lovely games. It’s something to see, a former Solana Labs employee told CoinDesk.
Solana also has ideas to contact Korea’s developer community at a hacker house in early August.
