Solana Optimistic Network (SOON) Closes Funding Round for Its Solana-Based Layer-2 Scaling Solution

Funding for Web3 startups is stabilizing after a year-long decline that started in 2023.

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

The funding round, dubbed the “co-builder” round, only solicited funds from individuals, notably excluding venture firms. Participants in the round included executives from Solana Foundation, Celestia, Avail, Coinbase Ventures and Solana Labs.

The funding round marks a relative recovery in funding for Web3 startups, which has seen a year-long decline since 2023. According to Crunchbase, crypto ventures locked up some $2 billion in financing in Q2 2024.

SOON describes itself as an “efficient, high-performance rollup that allows for settlement on any layer-1, using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) as the execution layer.”

The funds from the round will support building SOON's core products, including SOON Mainnet and SOON Stack, the announcement noted. The specific 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 Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cosmos.” Meanwhile, 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, SOON's co-founder and CEO.

SOON is designed to integrate with data availability (DA) layers, including EigenDA, CelestiaDA 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 attempted to address this issue with temporary offchain data stores called “blobs.” Other protocols, such as EigenDA and Celestia, offer competing solutions.