Major investors see an opportunity to make Solana the social chain.
Announced Tuesday at the Solana conference in Lisbon, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six and Solana Ventures are committing $50 million to grow decentralized social media projects on Solana.
A key ingredient: Ohanian’s early work in building Reddit from the ground up.
“With a high performance blockchain like Solana, there is an unprecedented opportunity to fuse social and crypto in a way that feels like a web2 social product but with the added incentive of empowering users with real ownership,” Ohanian said in a statement.
The announcement comes a day after FTX CEO and vocal Solana backer Sam Bankman-Fried signaled his support for social on Solana.
“Social media on the blockchain,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview with this reporter, “I continue to think this could be absolutely huge.”
Decentralized social media platforms exist on a number of other blockchains, including Twetch on BSV and DLive on Tron-owned BitTorrent.
“Web3 turns users and creators into owners and stakeholders, a change that can’t come soon enough to social media,” Solana Labs COO Raj Gokal said in a statement.
Oddly enough, the fund announcement comes a day after Gokal was suspended from Twitter. “Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules,” a banner on the blanked-out @rajgokal account read Monday.
Twitter sleuths indicated it could have stemmed from a presumably tongue-in-cheek death threat over the “gm” greeting meme.
- Account
- Announcement
- BitTorrent
- blockchain
- Building
- ceo
- change
- Co-founder
- Conference
- continue
- coo
- crypto
- day
- decentralized
- Early
- empowering
- FTX
- fund
- Grow
- High
- HTTPS
- huge
- Including
- Interview
- Investors
- IT
- Key
- Labs
- launch
- Lisbon
- Media
- meme
- million
- Monday
- Opportunity
- Other
- owners
- performance
- Platforms
- Product
- projects
- reporter
- rules
- SIX
- Social
- social media
- social media platforms
- Solana
- Statement
- support
- users
- Ventures
- web
- Work