Solana eyes gaming sector with $100m Korea fund
07:04, 8 June 2022
The backers of the ninth largest digital token by market capitalization are investing $100m in South Korea’s Web3 sector as it looks to revitalize an industry hit by the failure of algorithmic stablecoin UST.
Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have established a $100m fund for the country’s Web 3 sector.
In a press release Solana (SOL) said that the cash would be used across “all web 3 verticals”, but it would focus on South Korea’s burgeoning gaming sector.
SOL to US Dollar
Korea has one of the highest crypto adoption rates globally, the Korean won (KRW) is the fourth largest fiat to crypto currency, and this is a decline from 2018 when the country's regulators' started to crack down on crypto use.
But the tech-savvy country has been left reeling by the collapse of the Terra ecosystem last month, which was fouunded by South Korean national.
Solana, along with Polygon (MATIC) and Avalanche (AVAX), has been a leading player in the blockchain games sector and the Korean investment is part of move by the blockchain to capitalize on a sector which is slated for mass expansion.
What is your sentiment on SOL/USD?
Terra developers stranded
While Terra has rebooted itself with the launch of LUNA2 it is unclear whether the developers will return in force to the ecosystem.
According to media reports Solana is looking to recruit developers stranded by the collapses of the original Terra blockchain.
AVAX to US dollar
Solana’s fund appears to be a bet that South Korea’s wealth of crypto development talent will now be looking at alternative blockchains.
Solana itself is not without problems, having experienced two outages in June alone and a total of 12 in 2022 so far.
The 1 June outage saw SOL fall 12% after its network was down for over four hours. This is a particularly acute issue for Solana given that the hybrid blockchain is designed to handle 65,000 transactions per second and intended for financial applications.
SOL hacked in February
The SOL token is currently trading at just over $39, a far cry from its November 2021 all time high of $260.
SOL also suffered a major hack earlier this year, when digital thieves made off with $320m worth of digital tokens after attacking Wormhole, a bridge between the Solana and Ethereum (ETH) networks.
The token's prices fell by 14% as a result.
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