The Solana Foundation, the grants program behind the Solana high-performance blockchain, has inked partnerships with cryptocurrency exchanges OKEx and MXC to launch two strategic investment funds designed to fuel the ecosystem’s expansion.
The two funds, which are collectively valued at $40 million, will help Solana bring more of its decentralized applications and protocols to market.
Anatoly Yakovenko, president of the Solana Foundation, said the blockchain platform has “grown multitudes in the past few months” both in terms of volume of projects and active developers. He said the Solana team will work alongside its new funders to “support the next wave of killer dApps.”
OKEx’s contribution comes by way of the Block Dream Fund, which was founded in February 2021 with $100 million in starting capital. Block Dream Fund has already invested in multiple projects, including Cook Protocol and Plasma Network.
Funding from OKEx will go toward Solana’s international marketing and endorsement efforts. Dora, the founder of Block Dream Fund, said the investment firm “looks forward to providing continued support to companies building on Solana.”
An executive at MXC Exchange, an Asian spot-trading cryptocurrency platform, explained that the Solana partnership “ties in naturally with our vision and market position.”
Solana says over 50 market-ready projects launched on its platform last month, including DeFi applications and NFT markets. Solana is looking to draw more DeFi actors to its network as competition with Ethereum — the premier DeFi builder protocol — heats up. In pursuit of that goal, the project recently announced $200,000 in seed funding as part of a DeFi hackathon.
As of Thursday, more than $61 billion has been locked into DeFi projects, according to the latest industry data.