The recent collapse of the Terra USD (UST) stablecoin from Terra and, by extension, the cryptocurrency LUNA, has affected many projects in South Korea that were based on the Terra network. Based on this, Solana launched a $100 million fund to help these projects. In fact, the initiative is from Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation.
The organizations launched the endowment fund to invest capital in South Korean Web 3.0 startups. It is worth noting that some developers chose to switch from Terra to Solana even after the network restructuring plan went live. So Solana Ventures wants to tap into South Korea’s growing gaming community.
Johnny Lee, general manager of games at Solana Labs, said the fund will focus on game studios, GameFi, NFTs and DeFi in South Korea.
As Austin Federa, head of communications for Solana Labs, reports, Solana’s community treasury capital supports the fund in addition to the venture arm’s capital pool.
“A large part of Korea’s gaming industry is migrating to web3,” Lee said. “We want to be flexible. After all, there are a wide variety of project sizes and team sizes. So some of our investments will correspond to the size of an enterprise.”
Focus on NFTs, DeFi and play to earn games
Lee further said that, generally speaking, gaming and NFTs are responsible for most of the activity Solana is seeing in South Korea. According to him, this makes the sectors a natural fit for Web3.
He also predicts that there will be more “fun, high-quality games” on the Solana blockchain in the second half of 2022.
The executive noted that these games will have the potential to change the current perception that play-to-win games are not fun:
“We are confident that this is about to change,” he said.
Furthermore, Lee pointed out that in the long term, users will adopt Web3 games at the same rate as free-to-play games that run on mobile devices. He considered, however, that this adoption will be even faster than the adoption of “free” games.
“Free-to-play adoption probably took eight years. So if we say that it will take four years for Web3 games to be the dominant revenue model, I am quite comfortable with that.”
Will Solana bear it?
The big challenge is whether the Solana network will support a large number of devs. After all, at the beginning of June, the network recorded its fifth outage in 2022 alone.
The team had to stop producing blocks for a few hours due to the runtime bug. Then managed to fix the bug earlier this week.
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