Solana Completes $20 Million Raise Led by Multicoin Capital

The Solana team completes the raise while working rapidly towards launching the first ever web-scale blockchain

Solana, the world’s first web-scale blockchain, 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.

The Solana team completes the raise while working rapidly towards launching the first ever web-scale blockchain — the only distributed ledger solution capable of hosting applications with the computational bandwidth comparable 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 computational room to spare.

“Solana is the closest thing to the ‘world computer’ blockchain developers conceptualized in the early days of crypto,” explains 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.”

The Solana team — comprised of pioneering technologists from Qualcomm, Intel, Netscape, and Google — has built a technology stack hinged around 7 key innovations. The core of these are Proof of History, a solution to the computational bottleneck found in existing blockchain networks, and parallel processing, which unlocks heretofore unseen speed capacity. The result is the most performant blockchain network in the world, one that can already handle 50,000 transactions per second on a network of 200 nodes running GPUs on current testnet iterations.

“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,” says 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.”

With the close of this raise, the Solana team will allocate additional funds toward continued engineering excellence and project management, as the team wraps up work to launch Solana mainnet and public DevNet. Developers can already download the Solana software development kit (SDK) and immediately start building applications on the most scalable blockchain available.

“Expect to see a lot of movement from Solana in the coming months,” explains COO Raj Gokal. “Starting with the Tour de SOL, for which we’re challenging the Solana Community to test the limits of the network, we’re going to hit the ground running as a web-scale blockchain with exceptional transactional capacity, usability, and security. We think this will initiate a new phase in blockchain tech.”