Solana To Focus On South Korean Web3 Startups With Launch Of $100M Fund

Solana, a highly functional open source project that provides decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions, plans to invest in South Korean Web 3.0 startups and bring new money into the crypto sector even as the market remains bearish.

Solana Ventures and Solana Foundation together have launched the $100 million investment and grant fund, Johnny Lee, general manager of games at Solana Labs, told TechCrunch.

“A big portion of Korea’s gaming industry is moving into Web3,” Lee said. “We want to be flexible; there’s a wide range of project sizes, team sizes, so some of [our investments] will be venture-sized checks.”

Additionally, the fund is backed by the Solana community treasury and Solana Labs' pool of capital, as per Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana's venture arm, and aims to develop gaming studios, GameFi, NFTs and DeFi in South Korea.

Gaming and NFTs account for most of the activity seen in South Korea, which "makes the sectors a natural fit for Web3," according to Lee. “Free-to-play adoption probably took eight years, so if we say it’ll take four years for Web3 games to be the dominant revenue model, I’m pretty comfortable with that.”

Solana has suffered several network outages recently and the SOL coin has dropped by nearly 85% from the all-time high of of $260 reached Nov. 6. As of 11:01 pm ET, the SOL coin has down more than 2.2% at $39.