Social tokens are just getting started
We’re excited to announce that Roll has raised $10M in Series A funding. With this round of investment, we’re planning on growing the team and expanding the technical capabilities of what Roll can do.
Since 2018, we’ve believed that social tokens will increase the GDP of the creator economy. With this round of funding, we’re investing in our social token infrastructure and APIs to double down on this thesis.
The round was led by IOSG Ventures with participation from Animoca Brands, Alchemy, Huobi Ventures, Weekend Fund, Mischief Fund, Audacity, Longhash Ventures, Ruttenberg Gordon, Red Beard Venture and Blue 9 Capital as well as new angels Wei Zhou (Binance), Jeff Zirlin (Axie Infinity), Michael Karnjanaprakorn (Otis), Hyung Kim (Line), Max Bernstein (Crowned Records), James Beshara (Tilt), Greg Isenberg and more. They join existing backers in Roll, which includes Galaxy Interactive, Hustle Fund, Gary Vaynerchuk, Trevor McFederies, Ryan Selkis, Balaji Srinivasan and others. This new round of financing brings our total funds raised to $12.7M.
Building the Stripe for social tokens
We think ownership as a feature of communities is going to be one of the biggest plays of the decade and social tokens will be right at the center. There will be thousands of platforms that mint, integrate and utilize social tokens. They’ll all require the right infrastructure to be successful and interoperable across the web.
Similar to Stripe’s positioning within e-commerce, Roll is developing the API infrastructure for creators, social platforms, fintechs, DAOs and whatever comes next to integrate social tokens seamlessly into their systems. We’ve built a financial operating system for social tokens in a way where a robust application layer can emerge within the next few years.
The innovations we discover across platforms and communities in the sector will immediately become APIs that can be utilized by millions of developers worldwide. Our mission over the next few years is to make social tokens the backbone of the social web. Our community, financial infrastructure and APIs will make this a reality.
Social tokens and DeFi grow the creator economy
As a first principle, we pride ourselves on reimagining community as a digital asset. We see decentralized finance (DeFi) as the best way to grow these communities and Ethereum as the most reliable DeFi layer one solution for Roll.
We wrote about the intersection of social tokens and DeFi in January and have now seen over $680M in social token trading volume across all exchanges so far this year, an over 650% increase on the $85M in total trading volume we saw all of 2020.
By using Ethereum smart contracts for our social token infrastructure, we’re able to have Roll-powered platforms and creators interact with existing applications and smart contracts that others have built, including the multibillion dollar DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum.
Users won’t just own their community, they’ll own liquidity positions in those communities, its governance via DAOs and the ability to operate anywhere Roll APIs or Ethereum exists.
We feel the integration of DeFi, social tokens and Roll APIs are fundamentally enough to grow the GDP of the creator economy and we’re so excited to do that with an incredible set of investors.
Connect with us
Engineers and operators: If you’re excited about our vision and how this category is emerging, ping us at [email protected]. We’re looking for some outstanding people to join our engineering team and support roles.
Developers: You can learn more about our APIs by filling out our typeform here
Creators: Join 350 others and launch on Roll here
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