Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, is investing in building a decentralized social media on the Solana blockchain.

According to the announcement made during Solana conference Breakpoint currently being held in Lisbon, Ohanian said his venture firm Seven Seven Six would invest $50 million in partnership with Solana Ventures, which will invest $50 million. Ohanian said in a statement,

“With a high-performance blockchain like Solana, there is an unprecedented opportunity to fuse social and crypto in a way that feels like a Web2 social product but with the added incentive of empowering users with real ownership.”

“We are at a pivotal inflection point in these early days of Web3.”

Heavy Solana backer FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried also said this week that social media on the blockchain could be “absolutely huge.”

“I think it solves a lot of existing pain points, which are really coming to the forefront of society right now.”

Meanwhile, Raj Gokal, COO at Solana Labs, Web3 turns creators into owners and users into stakeholders.

“Social media in the metaverse will be a collection of millions of self-sufficient communities.”

Solana blockchain’s native token SOL, the 5th largest crypto with its market cap of $73.5 bln, has been seeing substantial institutional adoption. Solana investment products have attracted $154 million in investor money so far this year, while overall, it pulled in $246 million in AUM, according to data from digital asset manager CoinShares.

Meanwhile, SOL is trading at $243, up 12,954% YTD, after hitting its new all-time high at $260 over this past weekend.

Amidst the ongoing development on Solana, Neon Labs announced that it had raised $40 million in a private token sale round led by Jump Capital with other participants, including Solana Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, and others.

The crypto startup is building an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on Solana and will use the fresh capital to increase its headcount to 30, from 15, in the next few months.

The EVM is currently live on Solana testnet and devnet and will “soon” be launched on the mainnet. Once released on mainnet, it will allow Ethereum-based dapps to be deployed on Solana easily.

Popular DeFi projects like Aave, Sushi, and others have already shown interest in deploying on Neon EVM. Neon Labs is also looking to attract and onboard more dapps and users through liquidity mining incentive programs.

“Aave Protocol coming to Solana,” wrote Aave founder Stani Kulechov on Twitter.

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