- Social token infrastructure company Roll recently announced it raised $10 million in Series A funding. These are the details.
Social token infrastructure company Roll recently announced it raised $10 million in Series A funding. This round of funding was led by IOSG Ventures with participation from Animoca Brands, Alchemy, Huobi Ventures, Weekend Fund, Mischief Fund, Audacity, etc.
IOSG joins existing backers in Roll – which includes Galaxy Interactive, Hustle Fund, Gary Vaynerchuk, Trevor McFederies, Ryan Selkis and Balaji Srinivasan. And this new round of financing brings the company’s total funds raised to $12.7 million since it launched in 2019.
Social tokens are known as branded digital currencies that represent a core piece of the creator economy. Powered by blockchains like 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.
Similar to Stripe, Roll is known for providing developers with the infrastructure and APIs to seamlessly create and integrate social tokens into new or existing web applications. And these applications can range from marketplaces to streaming, audio, gaming, chat, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and much more.
So far, Roll is being used by 350 creators from NFT innovators like Whaleshark to household names like Terry Crews. And in the past month, Roll’s social tokens have eclipsed $250MM in market value and over $2MM in daily trading volume.
By using Ethereum smart contracts for developing 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.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
— Jocy Lin, Founding Partner of IOSG Ventures
“The future of the web is all about shared ownership. Roll is empowering new business models for creators where incentives are aligned.”
— Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt and Weekend Fund.
“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. They’ll all require the right infrastructure to be successful and interoperable across the web.”
— Sid Kalla, co-founder and CTO of Roll
“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. 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.”
— Bradley Miles, co-founder and CEO of Roll
“Roll’s platform for social tokens has stepped on the two relatively clear trends of influence tokenization and a new emerging economy for communities. We expect Roll to play an important position in Web3.”
— Jerry Yip of Huobi Ventures
“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.”
— Yat Siu, the co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands
