Solana Ventures sets up $100M fund for GameFi and DeFi in South Korea

cointelegraph.com:

Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have formed a $100 million fund to help support the growth of nonfungible token (NFT), blockchain gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects in South Korea.

In addition to supporting projects built on Solana (SOL), the fund will help keep some Terra-based projects afloat following the collapse of that ecosystem last month.

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

The new fund helps solidify Solana’s aim to become an ideal blockchain for gaming. Solana Ventures launched a similar $100 million gaming fund with crypto exchange FTX and Lightspeed Ventures last November. It also has a $150 million fund with game-focused firms Forte and Griffin Gaming Partners.

South Korea is expected to become a hotbed of NFT and Metaverse development this decade with the government pledging $187 million to build its own metaverse ecosystem. The Korean metaverse will mainly focus on the growth of digital content and digital corporations within the country.

The Solana Foundation is banking on interest in gaming finance (GameFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi) to increase in the country as companies begin to vie for grant money.

Competition to build the best platforms quickly is underway with several South Korean platforms already offering NFTs or access to DeFi, such as the Klaytn layer-1 blockchain and Upbit exchange.

Klaytn’s biggest DeFi platform is KlaySwap which has $274 million in total value locked (TVL) according to DeFi ecosystem tracker DeFi Llama. Upbit, the country’s largest