Solana gaming studio Mirror World Labs has secured $12 million in its inaugural Series A funding round. The investment was led by Bitkraft, Galaxy Interactive, and Big Brain Holdings, among others. This funding aims to advance the development of Mirror World’s gaming rollup protocol, Sonic.
The Sonic Protocol: A New Era for Solana Gaming
Launched in March, the Sonic protocol is the first gaming rollup on Solana, enabling developers to create Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chains for their GameFi projects. Chris Zhu, CEO and founder of Sonic, emphasized the studio’s dedication to the Web3 gaming ecosystem, particularly on Solana. He stated, “For the past two years, we’ve worked with hundreds of games in the Web3 gaming ecosystem, helping them with monetization and listing. 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.”
Utilization of Funds
The newly raised funds will be used to enhance the Sonic protocol with additional features, including sandbox environments, customizable gaming primitives, and extensible data types. Sonic aims to attract new developers to the Solana gaming ecosystem and assist existing game producers in adopting the Sonic SVM and HyperGrid Framework. This framework is a rollup deployment kit that enables developers to deploy new game engines and virtual machines within the Solana environment.
Addressing Solana’s Gaming Growth
Developers at Mirror World Labs noted that while Solana has experienced growth in the memecoin and decentralized application markets, its gaming sector has not seen the same level of success. They believe that the Sonic protocol can help other developers deploy SVM chains to support their GameFi projects, thereby boosting Solana’s gaming ecosystem.
Initial Success and Future Plans
The Sonic protocol, launched on March 29, has already been deployed to 50 gaming clients as initial distribution nodes. Games such as Mahjong Meta, Matr1x Fire, and Seraph/ActozSoft have collectively generated over 200,000 traffic and transaction engagements since incorporating the Mirror World SDK.
Founded in 2022, Mirror World Labs focuses on developing gaming infrastructure on Solana, supporting all stages of the game lifecycle. With the recent funding, the firm aims to further its mission of enhancing the Solana gaming ecosystem and has now raised a total of $16 million in venture capital funding.
