Investment firm RockawayX has successfully secured $125 million for a new early-stage venture capital fund, intended to support crypto-focused communities, particularly those centered around Solana.

The investment firm plans to direct its newly raised funds toward discovering and financing projects that enhance the growth of the Solana ecosystem, recognized as the second-largest Layer 1 by total value locked, according to a statement by RockawayX. 

“Rather than investing in more L1s, we focused on building applications on Solana and being the first user for our founders—from providing liquidity to running solvers and operating hardware services,” RockawayX CEO and founder Viktor Fischer said in the statement.

It is not immediately clear which firms are serving as liquidity providers for RockawayX’s new venture capital fund. Fund managers typically do not identify their liquidity providers to the public. 

A source familiar with the matter told Decrypt that the Solana Foundation is a significant liquidity provider for the fund. 

RockawayX first invested in the Solana ecosystem in 2018, when it supported the network’s seed raise, the firm said. Since then, the company has partnered with more than 15 projects on Solana, including Kamino, Squads, Exponent, and DoubleZero. 

RockawayX’s collaboration with the network and the upcoming launch of the Dubai-based Solana City accelerator hub with the Solana Foundation and Helius Labs enables the firm to identify high-potential projects on Solana, according to a representative. 

The investment firm’s push to bolster building on Solana comes as adoption of the once-popular network, the center of last year’s meme coin craze, slows.

Solana’s total value locked — a metric that often serves as a proxy for user engagement on a given blockchain — has dropped roughly 30% to $9.16 billion over the past three months, according to DeFi Llama data.  

Meanwhile, the layer 1’s native token has fallen 41% to $148.26 over the past three months, as meme coin trading cools, according to CoinGecko data.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair