PUBG Developer Krafton Seals Business Deal with Solana Labs

Key Insights:

• Krafton has struck a strategic deal with Solana Labs.
• The deal would see the firm building blockchain-based games, among other things.
• Krafton’s 2021 revenue stood close to $1.57 billion. 

Krafton, the firm behind the immensely popular battle-royale style game, PUBG announced on Wednesday that it had signed a business deal with Solana Labs. 

PUBG Could See NFT Inclusion

Krafton is a South Korean firm specializing in developing and distributing video games and was the developer of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, popularly called PUBG. The firm penned a deal with Solana Labs, the team building the Solana blockchain, on March 23. 

The gaming developer will collaborate with Solana to build games based on blockchain technology, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The partnership will also see the two firms jointly marketing, designing, and investing in projects. 

In a press release shared by Krafton, the firm says that it would continue to ‘work closely with blockchain companies like Solana Labs’ as they work towards establishing their Web 3 ecosystem.

HyungChul Park, lead of Krafton’s Web 3 division, further added, 

“Solana represents the best of the Web 3.0 ecosystem and its technologies. Through this cooperation, Krafton will acquire the insight needed to accelerate its investment in and output of blockchain-based experiences.”

Krafton’s last year’s revenue was close to $1.57 billion, according to data revealed by the firm in February. Interestingly, the firm’s free-to-play battle royale game PUBG Mobile alone earned $1.18 billion in revenue. 

Notably, PUBG is one of the all-time top downloaded games on the Steam platform and was reported to have close to 696,000 active users playing concurrently in early 2022. The game comes second in popularity in the battle-royale genre, next only to Epic Games’ Fortnite.

Solana in the Midst of Deals and Hacks

While collaborations and strategic deals usually mark a bullish turn of events for blockchains’ native tokens, Solana seemed to be amid positives and negatives.

Apart from the recent agreement with Krafton, crypto investment firm CoinShares joined hands with FTX to launch a physically-backed Solana exchange-traded product (ETP).

However, in another news, Solana-backed stablecoin protocol Cashio lost millions in a hack bringing the total value locked (TVL) on the protocol down to the lowest ever and the token’s value to near zero. 

Nonetheless, at press time, SOL was trading at $94 as the cryptocurrency seemed to be moving towards $100. as it went up by 2.01% in the last 24 hours.