SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Solana, the world’s first web-scale blockchain, announced today it has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Distributed Global, Blocktower Capital, Foundation Capital, Blockchange VC, Slow Ventures, NEO Global Capital, Passport Capital and Rockaway Ventures.
Solana completes the raise as it prepares to launch the first ever “web-scale blockchain” – the first blockchain solution that is capable of hosting applications with the computational bandwidth akin to the modern internet. Solana is the only blockchain in existence with the capability to power decentralized versions of Nasdaq, Facebook, Twitter and all other existing blockchains – with room to spare.
With the close of this raise, Solana will allocate additional funds toward continued engineering excellence and project management, as the company wraps up work to launch its mainnet and its public DevNet. Developers can already download the Solana software development kit (SDK) – and immediately start building applications on the most scalable blockchain available.
“Solana is the closest thing to the ‘world computer’ blockchain developers conceptualized in the early days of crypto,” said Kyle Samani, Cofounder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital. “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. We’re very proud to lead this round, and we encourage developers everywhere to take a serious look at Solana.”
Solana is a layer 1, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain with a pBFT-derived consensus mechanism and 200 nodes operating around the world, offering support for 50,000 transactions per second (TPS) speed. Solana achieves such strong performance via a set of coordinated optimizations. Transactions are also processed in parallel by GPU hardware natively, which is a first for blockchains. Previously, all blockchains were single-threaded – Solana is the only blockchain that is multi-threaded.
“We’ve seen the challenges that developers are facing with layer 2 and sharding solutions, and we’re excited to give them an incredibly simple alternative that doesn’t sacrifice performance,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder and project lead. “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. 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.”
You can read more about the technical specifications HERE.
Solana is an open source project that is stewarded by the Solana Foundation and Solana Labs, Inc., a development consultancy dedicated to building solutions with the Solana blockchain. Solana, Inc. was founded in 2017 by a group of senior ex-Qualcomm employees that specialize in CPU and GPU chip design and optimization, and have worked together for more than a decade. Additional project information and technical documentation are available on the Solana Website and blog at https://solana.com/.
About Solana
Solana is the world’s first web-scale blockchain that delivers layer 2 performance with layer 1 security and simplicity.
Until now, blockchains have been single-threaded computers, guaranteeing no two transactions conflict if executed in parallel. Solana unlocks concurrent GPU-parallelization for the first time, using Proof of History (PoH), delivering high speed, low latency, and inexpensive transactions, all at layer 1 without sharding.
Originally developed by a team of engineers with deep experience in distributed systems and GPU optimization, Solana is stewarded by The Solana Foundation and is advanced by a loyal community of decentralized developers around the world. To learn more, please visit https://solana.com/.
About Multicoin Capital
Multicoin Capital is a thesis-driven investment firm that invests in tokens and companies reshaping entire sectors of the global economy.
Blockchain technologies will create trillions of dollars of value over the next decade. But investing in tokens is fundamentally different than investing in companies. New tools, heuristics, and security measures are required to responsibly invest in this ecosystem.
We believe in making decisions based solely on first principles and deep understanding of technology. We rigorously research blockchain protocols, teams, and market opportunities to deliver venture capital economics with public market liquidity. To learn more, please visit https://multicoin.capital.
