Social token infrastructure company, Roll, announced it has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by IOSG Ventures with participation from Animoca Brands, Alchemy, Huobi Ventures, Weekend Fund, Mischief Fund, Audacity and more. IOSG joins existing backers in Roll, which includes Galaxy Interactive, Hustle Fund, Gary Vaynerchuk, Trevor McFederies, Ryan Selkis and Balaji Srinivasan. This new round of financing brings the company’s total funds raised to $12.7 million since it launched in 2019.
“Roll is at the forefront of the new world of social interactions, communities and DAOs. Bradley and Sid have a clear vision on how they want to bring Web3 to the mainstream and change the way we form and interact with communities today,” said Jocy Lin, Founding Partner of IOSG Ventures. “Through Roll, DAOs and communities can tokenize, trade and gate-keep content for those that are part of the community. Anyone holding a community’s social token is welcome to join and contribute.”
Social tokens are branded digital currencies that represent a core piece of the creator economy. Powered by blockchains such as Ethereum, social tokens enable creators with the ability to make a market that belongs to them and their audience without third-party intermediaries, like platforms.
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“The future of the web is all about shared ownership. Roll is empowering new business models for creators where incentives are aligned,” said Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund.
Similar to Stripe, Roll provides developers with the infrastructure and APIs to seamlessly create and integrate social tokens into new or existing web applications. These applications can range from marketplaces to streaming, audio, gaming, chat, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and much more.
“We see an internet where hundreds of social token applications will emerge. Most platforms will use social tokens in one way or another this decade,” says Sid Kalla, co-founder and CTO of Roll. “They’ll all require the right infrastructure to be successful and interoperable across the web.”
To date, Roll is being used by 350 creators from NFT innovators like Whaleshark to household names like Terry Crews. In the past month, Roll’s social tokens have eclipsed $250MM in market value and over $2MM in daily trading volume.
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“Shepherded by the explosive growth and popularity of NFTs is a cultural bull market that’s become a renaissance for artists, musicians, and creators from all over the world,” said Bradley Miles, co-founder and CEO of Roll. “Social tokens help bridge this cultural renaissance with decentralized finance, and have resulted in a 650% increase in trading volume on Roll’s social tokens alone.”
By using Ethereum smart contracts to develop social token infrastructure, Roll’s social tokens can interact with both traditional web platforms and smart contract applications that others have built, including DeFi protocols which collectively hold over $90 billion in total locked value. Some of Roll’s social tokens like $WHALE from creator Whaleshark are beginning to list on major exchanges like Huobi, an incoming investor in the round via Huobi Ventures and a top 3 cryptocurrency exchange by 24hr trading volume.
“Roll’s platform for social tokens has stepped on the two relatively clear trends of influence tokenization and a new emerging economy for communities,” said Jerry Yip of Huobi Ventures. “We expect Roll to play an important position in Web3.”
“Roll is a bet that social tokens are critical to the fabric of a community-owned social web and they’re at the vanguard of this revolution,” shared Yat Siu, the co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands.
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