Sonic Raises $12M to Scale Solana Gaming Ecosystem
New York, NY, June 18th, 2024, Chainwire
Sonic, the first gaming L2 infrastructure to launch on Solana, has raised $12 million in a recent Series A round led by BITKRAFT and joined by Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings and others. Sonic is built by Mirror World Labs, a GameFi infrastructure firm active for more than two years.
The freshly raised funds will be deployed to fuel further growth for the Sonic protocol, the first atomic SVM layer-2 on Solana built for gaming. The protocol has built-in mechanisms designed specifically for game development and execution on Solana — such as a sandbox environment, customizable gaming primitives, and extensible data types, all while boasting the fastest on-chain-gaming experience.
Sonic will contribute to onboarding new developers to the Solana gaming ecosystem with Sonic grants and acceleration programs, focusing on easing existing game producers and developers into the Sonic SVM and HyperGrid Framework. HyperGrid is designed to let developers seamlessly deploy new game engines and virtual machines within the Solana environment. It acts as the grid deployment kit to spin up new SVM environments, creating individual space attached to the Solana blockchain for each new game.
Solana is currently the most retail-friendly blockchain thanks to its ease of onboarding and strong motivation for using the chain thanks in large part to its memecoin boom. However, gaming on Solana has not seen similar levels of success, which is where Sonic becomes particularly relevant thanks to its technology stack. Developers can now deploy their own lightning fast SVM chain to support projects and narratives in GameFi or other projects seeking a home 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,” said Chris Zhu, CEO and Founder of Sonic. “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.”
“We expect the Sonic SVM to become the go-to destination for any gaming studio that wants to build games within the Solana ecosystem,” added Justin Swart, Principal at BITKRAFT. “Over 1M active addresses have been added to Solana over the past year – the Sonic HyperGrid is where some of the best games can be built for these new users. We’re proud to back this incredible team.”
The $12M fundraise follows an earlier $4M seed round raised in early 2022, bringing total funds collected to $16M. Mirror World Labs focused on developing Solana gaming infrastructure, focusing on all stages of the game lifecycle including onboarding developers, gamers and the technical solutions required to make games run smoothly.
About Sonic
Sonic is the first atomic SVM L2 built to enable sovereign game economies that finalize on Solana. It is powered by HyperGrid, a core technology developed by Mirror World to enable Solana grids, enables developers to deploy custom Sonic Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chains that offer tremendous scaling advantages for developers.
About Mirror World Labs
Mirror World Labs is the team behind Sonic — their goal is to expand the possibilities of gaming on Solana ecosystem, by building necessary tools and platforms related to all aspects of the GameFi lifecycle: from Web2/Web3 login methods to NFT marketplace integration, wallet integration, and NFT launchpad, all the way to custom-built rollups on Solana.
