Sonic raises $12m to drive Solana gaming ecosystem

Sonic, Solana’s first layer 2 gaming infrastructure protocol, has secured $12 million in a series A round that attracted multiple venture capital investors.

The round increases Sonic’s total raise to $16 million after the protocol’s $4 million seed round raised in early 2022.

Solana’s first L2 gaming platform

Sonic, built by GameFi infrastructure platform Mirror World Labs, is an atomic Solana Virtual Machine-compatible L2 for sovereign game economies.

HyperGrid, a core technology by Sonic developer Mirror World, powers this ecosystem. Sonic aims to drive Solana’s gaming ecosystem via an array of tools that include Web2 and Web3 login methods, an NFT marketplace, a wallet, and an NFT Launchpad.

The team at Mirror World also envisions the introduction of custom-built 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.”

Sonic SVM as go-to protocol for gaming on Solana

Mirror World expects to deploy the new funds into initiatives to drive further growth for Sonic. Among projected utilization is the distribution of Sonic grants to boost the onboarding of new developers to Solana’s gaming ecosystem.

Solana has seen great traction in the blockchain ecosystem in recent months, thanks to a boom in meme coins. The same trend has not materialized for the gaming sector on the leading retail-friendly blockchain.

Sonic today announced that venture capital firm BITKRAFT Ventures led the series A funding round. The funding also attracted the participation of Galaxy Interactive and Big Brain Holdings, among other crypto-focused investment firms.

However, Justin Swart, Principal at BITKRAFT, said that they expect Sonic SVM to grow into the go-to network for gaming studios.