By
Kseniia Klichova
April 18th, 2024
Decentralized social network protocol, Grape Network, has now raised $1.8 million. Last week, the company raised $600, 000 during its token sale. Now, it has raised an additional $1.2 million in a new funding round led by Multicoin Capital.
During the initial IDO offering, which held on Solana’s Raydium platform, Solana servers crashed. This was shocking considering Solana is touted to be the fastest blockchain there is. An estimated 400,000 transactions per second can be handled by the project. And it did, during the IDO offering. Eventually, the server was overloaded and went offline for about 17 hours. About the incident, Grape Network founder, Dean Pappas said “We didn’t break it out of intention but we may be part of the reason it got broken.”
It remains unclear how a niche protocol like Grape Network broke down the entire Solana chain. This has caused significant concerns about the capacity of Solana‘s tech stack. A definitive analysis will be conducted to determine the actual cause of the crash. However, preliminary assessments from the Solana Foundation point to Grape’s IDO as the cause.
Pappas is nonplussed by this development. He claimed that if previous IDOs were anything to go by, the same should have been expected of Grape. Before the public sale, prospective $GRAPE buyers indicated $8.7 million in interest – even though the maximum sale needed was $600,000.
With the fresh capital injected, Pappas is looking to expand his developer team. He said, “The demand for our toolset has surpassed every expectation, and we need to double the team size to handle the demand and still develop towards our roadmap.”
Grape’s team has been building tools to help decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) better manage their communities. Currently, most use Telegram or Discord. “The goal of our tools is to direct attention, organize groups and committees more efficiently, and incentivize work that directly advances a community’s mission,” Pappas added. Again, Pappas announced the team was building more tools for DAOs. One of these is the “Intra-DAO payments system” that will help DAOs program quicker token payments.
Effect on Solana Token
The SOL token has been appreciated recently. This is even as projects on it gain increased funding. Apart from the Grape protocol, another project, Orca, also got funding. Orca recently raised $18 million in a Series A funding round. Many believe that the rise in the value of the tokens is traceable to these projects. John Iadeluca, Founder & CEO of multi-strategy fund Banz Capital stated, “I think Solana’s token price is benefitting strongly from the surge in demand for Solana-built platforms.”
At the time of writing, the SOL token had a market value of $135 and a market cap of $40.32 billion