Nikolas Sargeant
Sonic, the first gaming L2 infrastructure to launch on Solana, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $12 million in a recent Series A round led by BITKRAFT. The funding round also saw participation from Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and others.
Sonic is built by Mirror World Labs, a GameFi infrastructure firm active for more than two years.
In a press release shared with Cryptowisser, Sonic said the funds would be used to fuel further growth for the Sonic protocol, the first atomic SVM layer-2 on Solana built for gaming.
Sonic 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.
The team said it would continue to onboard new developers to the Solana gaming ecosystem with Sonic grants and acceleration programs. Sonic will focus on easing existing game producers and developers into the Sonic SVM and HyperGrid Framework.
HyperGrid allows developers to 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.
While Solana has become a favorite destination for meme coins and DeFi protocols, it still needs to catch up in attracting gaming projects. Sonic intends to change this narrative by allowing developers to deploy their own lightning-fast SVM chain to support projects and narratives in GameFi or other projects seeking a home on Solana.
While commenting on this latest development, Chris Zhu, CEO and Founder of Sonic said,
“For the past two years, we've worked with hundreds of games in the Web3 gaming ecosystem helping them with monetization and listing. 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.”
Justin Swart, Principal at BITKRAFT added that,
"We expect the Sonic SVM to become the go-to destination for any gaming studio that wants to build games within the Solana ecosystem. 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.”
This funding round comes after Sonic raised $4 million in an earlier round in 2022. 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, enabling developers to deploy custom Sonic Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chains that offer tremendous scaling advantages for developers.
Meanwhile, Mirror World Labs is the team behind Sonic. Their goal is to expand the possibilities of gaming on the Solana ecosystem, by building necessary tools and platforms related to all aspects of the GameFi lifecycle.
