Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation introduced a $100 million investment and grant fund to aid the development of cryptocurrency projects in South Korea. The initiative could also amass developers and companies to the Solana blockchain, which recently went through some serious technical difficulties, including a six-hour outage.
Trying to Revive the South Korean Crypto Ecosystem
The multi-million fund will be mainly distributed towards projects based on Solana and Terra. The latter made the headlines last month after the prices of its native token LUNA, and its algorithmic stablecoin UST crashed to virtually zero. As such, many Korean platforms mitigated from Terra to other blockchain networks.
Johnny Lee – General Manager of Games for the Solana Foundation – said those developers need to receive some help as they are not to be blamed for what happened:
“The developers did nothing really wrong, but they’re left in the lurch.”
In addition, projects based on Solana also need support. Earlier this month, the network experienced an outage that left it out of order for more than six hours, and the team explained the core of the problem:
“Earlier today, a bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing.”
In November last year, Solana partnered with the crypto exchange FTX to launch another $100 million fund focused on blockchain-based games. The initiative, called GameFi, will support start-ups that integrate the Solana blockchain into video games on desktop and mobile platforms.
Korea Still Wants to Be a Crypto Hub
It is safe to say that the South Korean cryptocurrency scene has been significantly harmed by the recent negative events surrounding Terra. However, the country has displayed its ambitions to establish itself as a center of the digital asset industry.
The newly-elected President Yoon Suk-yeol presented himself as a keen proponent of the sector, vowing to allow initial coin offerings (ICOs).
He also promised to increase the minimum threshold for paying capital gains on earnings from crypto investments. Currently, investors are required to pay taxes if they generate profits above $2,000 annually, while the leader insisted this should happen if profits exceed $40,000 per annum.
Last month, the President’s administration revealed it will finalize its crypto-friendly regulatory framework in 2023 and enforce it in 2024. The lawmakers also said “yes” to the Bank of Korea’s ambition to release a central bank digital currency (CBDC) next year.