Major investors see an opportunity to make Solana the social chain.
Announced Tuesday at the Solana conference in Lisbon, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six and Solana Ventures are committing $100 million to grow decentralized social media projects on Solana. Originally, the commitment was for $50 million, but at an onstage discussion, Ohanian increased it to $100 million.
A key ingredient: Ohanian’s early work in building Reddit from the ground up.
“With a high performance blockchain like Solana, there is an unprecedented opportunity to fuse social and crypto in a way that feels like a [Web 2] social product but with the added incentive of empowering users with real ownership,” Ohanian said in a statement.
The announcement comes a day after FTX CEO and vocal Solana backer Sam Bankman-Fried signaled his support for social on Solana.
“Social media on the blockchain,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview with this reporter, “I continue to think this could be absolutely huge.”
Decentralized social media platforms exist on a number of other blockchains, including Twetch on BSV and DLive on Tron-owned BitTorrent.
“Web 3 turns users and creators into owners and stakeholders, a change that can’t come soon enough to social media,” Solana Labs COO Raj Gokal said in a statement.
Oddly enough, the announcement comes a day after Gokal was suspended from Twitter. “Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules,” a banner on the blanked-out @rajgokal account read Monday.
Twitter sleuths indicated it could have stemmed from a presumably tongue-in-cheek death threat over the “gm” greeting meme.
UPDATE (Nov. 9, 15:32 UTC): Updated with increase in commitment to $100 million.