Ethereum blockchain still has the upper-hand when it comes to community, Solana is gradually catching up due to the rise of blockchain-based play-to-earn games — known simply as GameFi.
Game developer and publisher Faraway, which is founded by the veterans at Scopely and Glu Mobile, is working on its flagship title Mini Royale: Nations on the Solana blockchain. Prior to this, the company has developed popular games like WWE Champions, The Walking Dead and Disney’s Sorcerer’s Arena.
Faraway co-founder Alex Paley said the company picked Solana over Ethereum because the latter has slower transaction times and costly gas fees. “We were specifically looking for a blockchain with fast and cheap transactions, strong ecosystem momentum, and a team behind it that we could trust from a technical excellence standpoint,” said Paley.
Game developers appear to be more familiarised with Rust, the programming language of Solana, than Ethereum’s Solidity as well. Although Paley acknowledged that Ethereum has a larger community, he remarked that it is harder to cash out the earned tokens on most Ethereum layer-two solutions. Solana, on the other hand, offers speed and access to native liquidity on the platform.
Additionally, Solana is dedicated to building tools and infrastructure that specifically meet the needs of game studio building games with intricate real-time economies and systems.
Faraway recently completed a $21 million Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and FTX. The company has now accumulated $30 million funding from well-known crypto ecosystem investors such as a16z, Sequoia Capital and Solana.
