As Solana ecosystem expands, co-founders tackle VC funding criticism

At press time, Solana was the fifth biggest blockchain by market cap, and changing hands at $180.84. The alt rose by 2.86% in 24 hours, but has also been seeing growth for the past week. In fact, it went up by 5.19% in seven days.

It has been a busy time for the Solana community, which is seeing rapid development in diverse parts of its ecosystem. One example of this was Solana Labs launching a new directory so that users could share and vote on projects.

Source: Solana.com

To take part, users need to log in through Twitter, submit the needed information, and wait for approval. Once approved, supporters can boost the project’s popularity by voting for it. At press time, the NFT war game Aliens VS People was a top contender.

1/ 📣The Solana ecosystem has grown incredibly quickly — faster than any one page can keep up.

Introducing a new, community-led ecosystem directory from @SolanaLabs. Now users can submit their projects, discover new ones, and vote for their favorites. https://t.co/E9JOZd6dWr

— Solana (@solana) December 17, 2021

A trip down memory lane

While Solana appears to have come a long way, its founding story isn’t without controversy. In fact, many crypto watchers are still against the initial allocation of its tokens, and the help the project received from venture capitalists.

Token distribution is critical in determining the distribution of power in blockchains.

Concentrated insider ownership may permanently impair projects’ ability to become credibly neutral public infrastructure.

Oligarchy is the system we’re suppose to be disrupting.

1/ pic.twitter.com/140092y1mu

— Ryan Watkins (@RyanWatkins_) May 17, 2021

Things came to a head when a Twitter user pointed this out to Solana co-founder Raj Gokal. The exec replied,

“If there were a way to get a layer 1 built from scratch with less VC funding, less allocation for insiders, and more allocation for the public, we would have done it. The market was very different back then, and we barely scraped by.”

For his part, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko responded,

“Foundation is distributing tokens to those who put in the work of maximizing censorship resistance over long period of time and demonstrate the operational skills of running an honest replica that can participate in recovery from catastrophic failures. Wtf else should it do?”

Scan my soul

While on the subject of VCs, Solana News reported that the block explorer Solscan had secured $4 million in seed funding to launch Solscan Analytics and enhance its services. Multicoin Capital and Electric Capital led the funding round.

this is bigger than the seed round we barely scrounged together in 2018https://t.co/DuVWjxCW19

— Raj Gokal (@rajgokal) December 17, 2021

It’s interesting to note that Solana raised $20 million during its own series A funding round, with Multicoin Capital taking the lead.