Proof-of-stake protocol Solana (SOL), which is being touted as another alternative to Ethereum (ETH), has announced two strategic investments today, from crypto exchanges OKEx and MXC, with the combined funds to be used for the growth of projects in the Solana ecosystem, as well as expanding the resources required to bring new decentralized apps (dapps) and protocols to market, they said.
Per the emailed press release, the Solana Foundation has partnered with the two exchanges in order to launch strategic investment funds that will bring USD 40m of new capital. This will be put towards faster development of what Solana considers key projects in its ecosystem and the expansion of go-to-market resources for dapp and protocol development.
Projects building on Solana will therefore be able to access strategic resources and services through OKEx’s investment arm, Block Dream Fund, and which are vital in community activation and adoption, ranging from publicity and endorsements to international marketing support. Dora, the Founding Partner of Block Dream Fund, said that the partners will work together to “expand the market size and user volume of the blockchain industry, and continue to create value.”
Meanwhile, MXC said its goal is to bring resources and provide guidance to projects looking to access the Asia institutional and retail markets. Per Vice President Katherine Deng, the exchange “aims to foster closer collaboration with the most promising blockchain ecosystems, and this investment sets forward our belief and commitment to shepherding the success of the dapps and platforms built on Solana.”
MXC was established in 2018, and it has compliance licenses in five countries with 752 pairs and a daily trade volume of approximately USD 4bn, they added.
As for Solana, its ecosystem “has grown multitudes in the past few months with the volume of projects and active developers skyrocketing quarter over quarter,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, Founder of Solana and President of the Foundation.
Solana’s network “has grown at an exponential rate,” with more than 560 active community validators globally producing over 70m blocks and processing over 14bn transactions, according to the announcement.
Since the 2020 launch of its mainnet beta, Solana has worked with projects like Serum (SRM), Chainlink (LINK), Terra (LUNA), USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT), and others to deploy on its blockchain. Over 50 market-ready projects launched on it in the last month, including decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, markets for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and infrastructure that supports the next generation of Web 3 companies.
The Solana x Serum DeFi Hackathon had more than 100 project submissions from 3,000 builders, it said, while automated market maker (AMM) and liquidity provider built on the Solana blockchain for the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX), Raydium, surpassed USD 160m total value locked, with an increase of more than 3,000% in less than two months.
Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm and parent company of crypto derivatives exchange FTX, announced Serum last July as “an antidote to DeFi struggles” which natively lives on Solana and is interoperable with Ethereum.
At 13:44 UTC, SOL, ranked 29% by market capitalization, is trading at almost USD 13. It dropped 11% in a day and 9% in a week.
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Learn more:
– Solana Founder On Critical DeFi Challenges and How To Fix Them
– Ethereum Fees To Stay High Even With EIP-1559 – Another Analyst Says
– Ethereum Moves Ahead With Plans for Earlier Transition to Proof-of-Stake
– Ethereum Developers On Why They Don’t See Cardano & Binance Chain As Rivals
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