The first layer 2 gaming infrastructure protocol developed in Solana, Sonic, raised $12 million in a series A investment that drew interest from several startup capital firms.
After raising $4 million in its initial funding round for the treatment in early 2022, Sonic has now raised a total of $16 million. Sonic is an L2 for sovereign game economy that is compatible with Solana Virtual Machines and was developed by Mirror World Labs, a GameFi infrastructure platform.
This ecosystem is powered by HyperGrid, a key technology Sonic creator Mirror World developed. Sonic hopes to propel Solana’s gaming environment with various features, including Web2 and Web3 login options, an NFT marketplace, a wallet, and an NFT Launchpad. Additionally, the Mirror World team plans to introduce specially-made rollups on Solana.
“For the past two years, we’ve worked with hundreds of games in the Web3 gaming ecosystem, helping them with monetization and listing,” Chris Zhu, founder and CEO of Sonic, said in a statement.
“Solana was our biggest focus, with a whole suite of tools and frameworks for games. We believe Sonic SVM will be the key to unlocking the Solana gaming summer, onboarding thousands of games to launch and go to market with our support.”
Mirror World plans to use the additional funding for projects to propel Sonic’s expansion. The distribution of Sonic awards to facilitate the onboarding of new developers into Solana’s gaming ecosystem is one of the anticipated uses.
A surge in meme coins has given Solana much traction in the blockchain environment in recent months. The gaming industry has yet to see a similar trend on the top retail-friendly blockchain.
The company said BITKRAFT Ventures, a venture capital firm, led Sonic’s series A investment round today. Among other investment businesses focusing on cryptocurrency, Galaxy Interactive, and Big Brain Holdings also participated in the funding. BITKRAFT Principal, Justin Swart, however, stated that they anticipate Sonic SVM becoming the preferred network for game producers.