Reddit Co-founder Pledges $100 Million Investment to Build Web 3.0 Social Media on Solana

The Solana blockchain has witnessed a staggering growth this year in 2021 with the SOL cryptocurrency grabbing in the spot in the top-five cryptocurrencies by market cap valuations.

Dubbed as the Ethereum-killer, the Solana blockchain has served as a major destination for DeFi players to host their protocols. Earlier this week on Tuesday, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian committed a $100 million investment for building a Web 3.0 social media platform on Solana.

The Reddit co-founder made the announcement at the Solana-focused conference Breakpoint. Speaking at the event, Ohanian said: “One of the reason why i’m here is to announce — I have a venture fund called 776 — we’re earmarking $50 million to invest in the next wave of social, built on Solana.”

However, he quickly added that $50 million won’t be enough and so he would like to increase the initiative to $100 million. The Reddit co-founder further added: “With a high performance blockchain like Solana, there is an unprecedented opportunity to fuse social and crypto in a way that feels like a [Web 2] social product but with the added incentive of empowering users with real ownership”.

Solana Labs COO Raj Gokal also added that “Web 3 turns users and creators into owners and stakeholders, a change that can’t come soon enough to social media. I do need to be freed from centralized social media, I want to get off Twitter. Help me do that. Build the next Twitter, build the next Facebook, build the next Instragam. I've got a special prize for whoever helps me get off and delete my accounts from those centralized services”.  Gokal’s statement came a day after his account was suspended on Twitter.

The announcement comes just a day after Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of crypto exchange FTX, declared his support for building a decentralized social media platform on Solana. The FTX CEO said: “Social media on blockchain, I continue to think this could be absolutely huge.”

Bankman-Fried believes that decentralized social media can solve a lot of pain points. Without naming them, he pointed out at some pre-existing social media sites with massive usernames. He also added that integrations with these sites can help to scale DeFi to millions of users.

The clamors for decentralized social media has been growing fast amid lot of controversies around user-data privacy over the last few years.