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Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and cryptocurrency exchange FTX today announced that they are partnering to invest US$100 million on gaming studios and projects building on the Solana blockchain.
Fast facts
- “Gaming has a massive opportunity to bring the next billion users to Web3,” said Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement. “High-performance blockchains like Solana are now capable of delivering the kind of Web2 experiences gamers expect while providing the advantages of decentralized Web3 systems.” Lightspeed Venture Partners, a multi-stage venture capital firm, has invested over US$300 million in a broad portfolio of early to late-stage gaming and crypto companies, including Epic Games, FTX and Wintermute.
- The first investment from this initiative is Faraway Games, a new Web3 gaming studio that recently completed a US$21 million Series A investment round.
- The global gaming market is set to generate more than US$200 billion by 2023, according to Newzoo. Blockchain gaming and the metaverse have also emerged as new trends in the gaming and crypto sectors.
- Solana, a high performance blockchain, is a rising alternative to Ethereum for decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). There are over 2.2 million NFTs and over 125 NFT collections built on the Solana blockchain, as well as more than a dozen blockchain-based games covering categories such as MMOs, RPGs and agriculture-simulation like Farmville, according to a media statement. Solana (SOL) — the native cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain — has increased in value by 16,000% this year and is currently the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market value, according to CoinGecko data.