Lightspeed Venture Partners, cryptocurrency exchange FTX and blockchain investor Solana Ventures on Friday said they’re teaming up on a $100 million fund to support blockchain-based online gaming.
Sam Bankman-Fried is the richest person in crypto, thanks to his FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading firm. FTX is a Bahamian-based cryptocurrency exchange platform that allows users to trade cryptocurrencies.
Solana Ventures is the investment arm of Solana Labs. Solana’s blockchain provides the underlying technology for a range of decentralized finance, gaming and nonfungible token projects.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on multi-stage investments in the enterprise technology, consumer, and health sectors. Over the past two decades, the firm has backed more than 400 companies, including Snapchat, Affirm, MuleSoft, and AppDynamics.
The initiative is one of the largest capital investments ever in the growing Web 3 gaming space. This venture will invest in gaming studios, platforms and companies that build the underlying technologies for “Web3” gaming. Moving forward, this initiative has already resulted in its first investment with FTX and Lightspeed leading a $21 million funding round for gaming studio Faraway.
Amy Wu, a partner at Lightspeed, said in a tweet Friday. Web3 refers to what some see as the next version of the internet, which relies heavily on decentralized and distributed infrastructure rather than centralized servers. “We believe gaming is one of the best opportunities to onboard the next billion users onto Web3.
