Solana gaming studio Mirror World Labs has raised $12 million in its inaugural Series A funding led by Bitkraft, Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings and others to further the development of its gaming rollup, Sonic. 

“For the past two years, we’ve worked with hundreds of games in the Web3 gaming ecosystem, helping them with monetization and listing,” said Chris Zhu, CEO and founder of Sonic, on June 13, continuing:

“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.”

The funds will be used to accelerate the Sonic protocol with features such as sandbox environments, customizable gaming primitives and extensible data types. Sonic will contribute to onboarding new developers to the Solana gaming ecosystem as well as focus on easing existing game producers into using the Sonic SVM and HyperGrid Framework. The latter is a rollup deployment kit that allows developers to deploy new game engines and virtual machines within the Solana environment. 

Developers said that while Solana has benefited from the memecoin boom and decentralized application market growth, its gaming aspect “has not seen similar levels of success.” They believe that the novel Sonic protocol could help other devs in deploying Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chains to support their own GameFi projects.

The Sonic protocol was first launched on March 29. It has been deployed to 50 gaming clients as initial distribution nodes. Three games — Mahjong Meta, Matr1x Fire and Seraph/ActozSoft — saw more than 200,000 traffic and transaction engagements generated during their gaming sessions after incorporating the Mirror World SDK.

Founded in 2022, Mirror World Labs focused on developing Solana gaming infrastructure, focusing on all stages of the game lifecycle, including onboarding developers, gamers and technical solutions. The firm has raised a total of $16 million in venture capital funding.

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