Solana Ventures, FTX, and Lightspeed launch $100 million blockchain gaming fund

Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and FTX announced Friday a $100 million fund to invest in startups focused on building blockchain gaming studios.

The announcement comes at a time when the concept of metaverse or virtual worlds is growing in popularity. Last week, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta as the company has been developing new technologies that will help people connect and explore in the metaverse.

According to some reports, the metaverse will also play a key part in gaming's future. Essentially, a theory is that the metaverse will allow users to meet, chat and play games together.

To that end, blockchain gaming startups have been raising a lot of cash recently. Venture capital firms believe that gaming will help bring more people to the crypto world.

"Gaming has a massive opportunity to bring the next billion users to web3," said Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "We are excited to partner with FTX and Solana Ventures to play a leading role in growing this ecosystem."

Lightspeed has invested in several gaming startups like Epic Games, 1047 Games, TripleDot Studios, and Faraway Games. It invested in Faraway Games along with FTX and Solana Ventures as part of the new $100 million fund and as the first investment. 

The fund is denominated in dollars, meaning cash will be invested in startups focused on web3 gaming on Solana and other blockchains, a spokesperson for Solana Ventures told The Block.