Solana blockchain secures $20M Seed A investment led by Multicoin Capital

Web-scale blockchain Solana has secured $20 million in a Series A funding to develop a blockchain designed to operate on the mass scale of the world wide web.

As per a press release, the funding round was spearheaded by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Distributed Global, Blocktower Global, Foundation Capital, Blockchain VC, Slow Ventures, NEO Global Capital, Passport Capital, and Rockaway Ventures.

Solana claims that it is the first platform to offer solution capable of hosting applications with computational bandwidth similar to the modern internet. Its network can reportedly support 50,000 transactions per second. To compare, Tron and Ripple can only handle 2,000 and 1,500 transactions per second, respectively.

“While many developers have proposed sharding solutions for scaling existing layer 1 solutions, all of those solutions introduce a tremendous amount of complexity and create new user experience problems. Solana has done it differently — and is one of the most compelling layer 1 platforms we’ve evaluated to date,” Kyle Samani, Multicoin Capital Co-founder and Managing Partner, said.

Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder and project lead, noted that developers often face challenges with layer 2 and sharding solutions. They wanted to offer an alternative while ensuring that performance is not compromised.

“Every other blockchain is a single-thread processor — that is, they can only make one state update at a time. This is the single greatest challenge holding back the industry today,” Yakovenko added.

“By architecting a system designed to support concurrent processing, and by optimizing computation for massively parallel GPUs, Solana can process 50,000 TPS across a network of 200 nodes — and it does so without creating any additional pain in terms of UX, latency, or composability for developers.”

Solana will use the proceeds to allocate additional funds for its engineering team and project management and wrap up work to launch its mainnet and its public DevNet. Solana's software development kit is already available for developers to download and build applications.

Last month, Multicoin Capital also led the oversubscribed seed round of blockchain data startup dfuse, which aims to develop its cross-blockchain technology platform and expand its engineering and customer success teams.