• Alexis Ohanian has teamed up with the team behind Polygon to raise $200 million to target the development of Web 3.0 gaming and social media projects.
• Ohanian believes that as Web 3.0 grows, gaming and social media present the biggest opportunities for growth.

Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of social media platform Reddit has teamed up with the team at Polygon for a $200 million initiative that will target gaming and social media projects building on Web 3.0. The fund will focus on projects that are building on the Ethereum Layer 2 platform as it seeks to pioneer the bold new world of user-owned and controlled Internet.

In a blog post, Polygon revealed that it had teamed up with Seven Seven Six, the venture capital firm started and led by Ohanian. The former Reddit CEO and executive chairman founded the VC firm in June this year and raised $150 million in its first fund, a year after leaving Initialized Capital which he founded in 2011.

Polygon stated that the new fund would “back projects at the intersection of social media and Web3, exploring better ways for humans to connect online.”

Web3 is the third iteration of the Internet. The first was in the early ’90s when people could just access massive amounts of information, but with little order or organization. Google pioneered Web2 with brought order to the chaos and allowed easy ranking and organizing of web content. Web 3.0 focuses on giving Internet users control of their data, and blockchain technology is at the heart of this revolution.

Pushing Web 3.0

Ohanian, who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams, believes that we’re just getting started with Web 3.0. As such, it’s critical to back the sectors that have the best chances of success, and for him, that’s gaming and social media.

We are still in the early days of Web3 and the most obvious opportunities right now are in gaming and social. This initiative will do just that, with a focus on gaming properties and social media platforms built on Polygon’s scalable infrastructure.

He added, “We’ve already seen some of the best product founders in our portfolio start building on Polygon and I’m excited for Seven Seven Six and Polygon to play a big role in shaping what the new internet looks like.”

Blockchain gaming is becoming among the biggest areas of growth and opportunities, up there alongside DeFi and NFTs. Gaming, by itself, is one of the biggest industries globally, being worth more than the movie industy, the music industry and the North American sports industry combined.

A report by DappRadar in October found that there were more than a million cryptocurrency wallets that were connected to a blockchain gaming app. This represented 55 percent of the overall blockchain industry’s overall activity. Gaming projects like Axie Infinity and Splinterlands have led this revolution and have exploded in value in the past year.

Sandeep Naiwal, the Polygon co-founder commented:

These past few years have brought a dawning realization that social media business models have a profound impact on our world. With Web3, users create value, control the network and reap the rewards. This is not just a different way to share lolcats online, though we love those. We are inventing new high-fidelity means of transmitting culture itself.