Solana Ventures Launches $100M Fund for GameFi and DeFi in South Korea

Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have launched a $100 million fund to help support the growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain games and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects in South Korea.

In addition to supporting projects built on Solana, the fund will also help some Terra-based projects stay afloat after the ecosystem collapsed last month.

The Solana Foundation believes that developers from Terra should not be held responsible for what happens on the blockchain network. In an interview reported by Bloomberg on June 8, Johnny B. Lee, general manager of games at the Solana Foundation, said:

"The developers didn't do anything wrong, but they got stuck."

The new fund helps solidify Solana's goal of being an ideal gaming blockchain. Last November, Solana Ventures launched a similar $100 million gaming fund with cryptocurrency exchange FTX and Lightspeed Ventures. It also launched a $150 million fund with gaming-focused firms Forte and Griffin Gaming Partners.

South Korea is poised to become a hotbed for NFT and metaverse development this decade, with the country’s government committing $187 million to build its own metaverse ecosystem. Korea’s Metaverse will focus primarily on the development of domestic digital content and digital businesses.

The Solana Foundation is banking on the growth of GameFi and DeFi in the country as companies start vying for funding funding.

The race to quickly build the best platform is on, and some Korean platforms already offer NFT or DeFi services, such as Klaytn layer-1 blockchain and Upbit exchange.

Klaytn’s largest DeFi platform is KlaySwap, which has $274 million in total value locked, according to DeFi ecosystem tracker DeFi Llama. The country’s largest exchange, Upbit, also has its own NFT marketplace.

However, it may be difficult for companies to launch blockchain-based games in South Korea.

The law currently prohibits games from offering monetary rewards, including cryptocurrencies. In December, the South Korean government asked Apple and Google to remove play-to-earn (P2E) games from their Korean stores.

NFT trading and DeFi activity on Solana has been on the rise in recent months. Solana's top NFT marketplace, Magic Eden, is the second-largest in the world with 35,526 daily traders and $7.31 million in daily trading volume, according to decentralized application (Dapp) tracker DappRadar. OpenSea.

By funding the growth of the ecosystem, Solana may also address the rare network instability seen since last year.

According to CoinGecko, the SOL price is currently flat, down just 0.5% over the past 24 hours of trading to $39.05 as of this writing.