Solana Targets Blockchain Projects in South Korea with a $100M Fund

Solana Foundation and Solana Ventures have collaborated to debut a $100 million fund set to foster the development of decentralized financed (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and gaming in South Korea. The raise comes barely a month after the Terra debacle, which stripped millions off Koreans with investments in the now relegated chain.

Not only were the investors plagued with losses, but projects building in the Terra ecosystem were affected too. With that, the new $100 million investment bundle will support both Solana and Terra projects.

Solana to support blockchain initiatives in South Korea

Furthermore, the fund expands Solana's incursion in the blockchain gaming space, having collaborated with Lightspeed Ventures and FTC to launch another $100 million fund targeting gaming projects at the tail end of 2021. There's also a $150 million fund it debuted with gaming-focused platforms Griffin Gaming and Forte.

Targeting to provide a new home for Terra projects in South Korea, Bloomberg says mid-last week the General Manager of Games for the Solana Foundation, Johnny Lee, came into the defense of Terra developers following the down spiral, arguing that they are “left in the lurch” despite doing nothing wrong.

While Solana targets to host even more projects, the network is still battling seemingly never-ending downtimes that are now becoming more of a trait than an occurrence. Most recently, the durable nonce transactions feature had to be disabled to restore network consensus.

Laden with the systemic technical risk, Solana ranks nearly last in risk score

Solana's reputation as an Ethereum killer has taken repeated hits following the characteristic frequent downtimes that have classed the network as unreliable, despite a significantly higher throughput than the Ethereum mainnet.

Now DeFiSafety, a platform that provides process quality reviews (PQRs) in DeFi and cryptocurrencies, has released a new technical risk score report, and it ranks Solana second-last of the 15 chains it reviewed, owing to repeated downtime. The chain only ranked above the Ronin Network.

DeFiSafety flagged several concerns that led to its ranking of the network. To begin with, the platform bemoaned Solana's subpar network infra despite having proper documentation. DeFiSafety noted that it remains undefined where chain history for the network is stored, owing to a lack of updates of the Solar bridge after archives were abandoned in 2021.

Unaudited Software

Further, DeFiSafety observed that Solana is currently running on unaudited node software, given that its last audit, in 2019, was architecture-focused and didn't delve into node software. The platform concluded this means the critical status of the chain given that its currently informal structure allows upgrades on Solana by any core contributor who gets the associated push request.

Therefore, it posited that Solana runs on a single point of failure, leaving user funds in the high-risk territory.

Centralized validation

DeFiSafety also added that despite lucrative validator incentivization on the network (it ranks highly here), the role of said validators is undefined. With a group of 25 validators selected to complete network restarts, the security experts argued centralized control breeds grounds for high manipulation.

The DeFiSafety team said that Solana ought to improve the node implementations offered to validators to march other layer ones chains, which offer at last five implementations. Also, the security firm advised that Solana, which currently prioritizes a bounty program, employs full-time security researchers. This would yield higher efficacy and lower payouts than the current model.

Block explorer deficiencies

Solana's ‘Ethereum killer' status also came into question owing to a highly deficient blockchain tracking platform in the form of SolScan. DeFiSafety noted that the tracker is decidedly deficient compared to Etherscan. It argued common 404 errors and unreturned searches, all of which raise concerns about the network's verifiability.