Solana Labs Raises $314 Million Through Private Token Sale

The funds will be used to accelerate the launch of new Web3 and DeFi projects in the Solana ecosystem.

Solana Labs, the technology company behind development on the Solana blockchain, announced yesterday that it had raised $314,159,265 through a private token sale. The funding round was led by Polychain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, with the support of Alameda Research, ParaFi Capital, CoinShares, CMS Holdings and 1kx, among others.

The Mainnet Beta of Solana launched last March and the project has broken records for the most participants in a hackathon. Tens of thousands of developers have already joined the ecosystem, attracted by the design of the protocol, which facilitates the deployment of fast, low-cost applications that are secure and energy-efficient.

CEO and Co-founder of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko, explained, “Solana is build-ready today. After seeing explosive growth in global developer uptake, we are convinced that scalability and throughput in blockchain are now a solved problem. This is an inflection point akin to the moment that PC’s became widely accessible in the 1970’s.”

While many blockchains suffer with congestion issues, Solana minimises the problem through its Proof of History mechanism. This enables the protocol to process on-chain transactions at the speed of Nasdaq matching engines.

Managing Partner at Polychain Capital, Olaf Carlson-Wee, commented, “We’ve been following Solana for a long time and believe it could massively scale the DeFi ecosystem. In our view, Solana is a compliment to Ethereum, and we’re thrilled to see strong developer activity and a continually expanding community grow around the project.”

Solana’s technology opens up possibilities in a wide range of use cases, and projects already being powered by Solana include USDC, Serum, Audius, Raydium and Maps.me. So far, Solana ecosystem projects have collectively processed over 19 billion transactions on-chain.

Yakovenko added, “The next phase is onboarding a billion users. Solana was built from the ground up to accommodate this scale. With this funding, Solana Labs is now positioned to bring in the right partners and capital to build products and tooling to get there.”

Indeed, Solana Labs expects to launch more Web3 and decentralised finance projects with new resources following the token sale. This will involve launching an incubation studio to accelerate development, as well as the creation of a trading desk and a venture investing arm.