SOON closes funding round for Solana-based layer-2

Solana Optimistic Network (SOON) has closed on a funding round for its Solana-based layer-2 scaling solution, according to an Aug. 27 announcement. 

The so-called “co-builder” round only solicited funds from individuals, not venture firms. Participants include executives from Solana Foundation, Solana Labs, Coinbase Ventures, Celestia, and Avail. 

Funding for Web3 startups is stabilizing after a year-long decline that started in 2023. According to Crunchbase, crypto ventures locked up some $2 billion in financing in the second quarter of 2024. 

Related: Web3 venture funding stabilizes after rocky 2023 — Crunchbase

SOON is designed to be an “efficient, high-performance rollup that allows for settlement on any layer-1, using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) as the execution layer,” according to the announcement. 

SOON’s “co-builder” round solicited individuals, not venture firms. Source: SOON

SOON said the funds from the round will support building its core products, SOON Stack and SOON Mainnet. The amount of financing raised was not disclosed. 

SOON Stack is “a modular framework that combines the SVM and OP Stack, allowing an SVM layer-2 to be deployed on any layer 1, such as Ethereum, Bitcoin and Cosmos.” Soon Mainnet is a general purpose SVM layer-2 deployed on Ethereum. 

“Our vision with SOON is to combine the power engine of Solana, SVM with liquidity and user base from other L1s, and to make SVM the standard for every L1 ecosystem - so every developer who has been constrained by the execution environment can bring the best UX to users,” said Joanna Zeng, co-founder and CEO of SOON.

SOON is designed to integrate with data availability (DA) layers including CelestiaDA, EigenDA, and Avail.

The cost of securely storing and accessing transaction data has been a serious bottleneck for layer-2 scaling chains. Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade in March sought to address this issue with temporary offchain data stores called “blobs.” Other protocols, such as EigenDA and Celestia, offer competing solutions . 

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