Two flagship funds from Solana Labs were unveiled at Breakpoint 2021: a $150 million fund to promote blockchain-based gaming and a $100 million fund devoted to decentralizing social media.
The gaming fund was in partnership with blockchain gaming company Forte and VC firm Griffin Gaming Partners. While the social media fund was in conjunction with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Both funds was schedule to deploy entirely within 18 months.
According to Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, who spoke in an interview earlier this month in Lisbon at Breakpoint 2022, the funds have only been primarily deployed a year after being raised. Additionally, the emphasis has been on making tiny seed-round investments. He claims that the amount of the social media budget used thus far is “nowhere near half.”
He further said:
We’ve done like a bunch of small investments like usually our seed level checks from Solana ventures are $100K or something like that. So we’re never a big lead.
In addition, Solana Labs has been able to be thrifty with its investments due to a prevalence of well-capitalized VC funds that takes an interest in the Solana ecosystem.
Yakovenko mentions several social media products he currently works on, including Dispatch, Squads, Dialect, and Wordcell. These are essentially decentralize versions of Reddit, WhatsApp, Twitter, and other popular social media websites.
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A spokesman for Solana Labs said additional money was put into the gaming funds. But the image is the same. Yakovenko claims that relatively few checks has send and that Solana Labs hasn’t need to use much of the money.
Yakovenko stated that 37 games are either operational or in the process of going live as it relates to the condition of blockchain gaming on Solana. He compared it with the former Breakpoint when there weren’t many gaming teams.
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