We’re so excited to bring some new friends to Roll and announce our $1MM round extension. The additional capital brings our total funding to $2.7MM.
We’ve looked up to so many people in the blockchain space and personal friends that have helped us along the way, it’s incredible to have them along for the ride. Some of our new investors include Galaxy Interactive, Balaji Srinivasan, Fabric Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Lionschain Capital, The LAO, Sam Cassatt, Julien Bouteloup, Bobby Ong, William Mougayar, George Lambeth, Sebastien Borget, Drew Stone and Dillon Chen, Trevor Delves, Jon Ma and Hideo Suguri.
Jocy Lin, Managing Director of IOSG Ventures gives some insight on the investment below:
Granting creators the access to easily mint branded ERC20 tokens that could represent their platforms and be used to reward community unlocks the potential of social money for many use cases, Roll lets each creator have the freedom to determine the rules within its social economy, empowering them to create the business models most suitable to the interest of their community.
A new type of capital for creators
We see ourselves as leading a shift from user-generated content to what we identify as the next phase, “user-generated capital”. We’re positioning social money as the foundation of this shift. Bradley Miles, co-founder and CEO of Roll says:
Posts, videos, streams and other social media are forms of user-generated content. Social money like WHALE and CHERRY are forms of user-generated capital. Social money introduces these radically different relationships between creators and their audience where they both get to own the value they create across all platforms.
Creators don’t just go to Roll to make social money, the platform gives them the ability to send, spend and now even trade social money through a Uniswap integration. Creators like Cherry (CHERRY), Whaleshark (WHALE), Andrew (KARMA) and many others are beginning to see social money market values expanding from the hundreds of thousands into the millions and in some cases tens of millions. Sid Kalla, co-founder and CTO of Roll states:
The rise of social money markets, cumulatively in hundreds of millions today, will enable the building of the entire DeFi stack and more for traditional Web2 communities. This marks a fundamental shift towards user-generated capital as the basis of evolution of the social web.
Monthly trading volume for social money on Roll is around $3.25 million, the highest of any social application on Ethereum according to Dapp.com. Max Mersch, Partner at Fabric Ventures elaborates on new implications of new business models below:
Social money allows for more inclusive and equitable collaborations, with a reduced role for ad-driven business models, which is one of the many reasons we are excited by the positive impact Bradley, Sid and the team at Roll can have.
How creators are using social money today
Creators as diverse as Whaleshark, a noted NFT collector, and Cherry, an OnlyFans creator are using social money to build up the dollar value of their communities and give it back to their users.
Whaleshark in particular has taken a few lessons from DeFi and started a liquidity mining program for WHALE holders. Users can provide liquidity for the WHALE/ETH pair on Uniswap and receive WHALE rewards as a result. The community is now moving on to mining NFTs in exchange for WHALE.
Creators like Whaleshark and Cherry use tools like Roll earn codes to spread social money broadly across their audience, as well as a set of third party tools to create permissioned access on messaging services like Discord and Telegram.
You’ll need to hold 200 CHERRY to get into the Club Cherry discord server and about 550 WHALE to access some of the private channels on Whaleshark’s discord.
As the utility of each group grows, it’s not uncommon for users to buy more than enough social money needed to access the group in order to speculate on its value and or own a larger stake in the success of the group itself.
Cherry shares her experience so far with social money and creating Club Cherry below:
My social money CHERRY links all members of my community from Twitter, OnlyFans and Discord. For me, it’s a way to give more value to my content as well as memberships.
Taking social money mainstream with Akon and other creators
The types of creators on Roll range from digital artists to streamers to youtubers to journalists and community builders, and now multi-platinum superstars like Akon are getting involved.
His Akoin organization has partnered with Roll to introduce social money to a more global audience. Sid provides more detail on the partnership below:
To grow the Web3 pie, it is important to reach beyond the immediate crypto-native and DeFi audience and start thinking deeply about how everyday people will really use and embrace Ethereum. We are excited to build tools at Roll that bring Web3 infrastructure to massive Web2 communities.
A new base layer for culture
Roll sees social money as a “layer one” or “base layer” for digital communities, it’s where the value proposition starts between a creator and their audience.
“The market value of several digital communities on Roll is larger than some protocols in the space, we’re building for a world where digital communities can and will be the biggest thing in Web3. The goal is to use social money as a bridge between traditional social and decentralized finance, opening up a new paradigm of features for digital communities” says Bradley.
Token Summit producer, author of The Business Blockchain and Roll investor William Mougayar explains further:
Roll is lowering the adoption barriers for consumers and entrepreneurs, allowing them to innovate and create new economic activity by tokenizing value creation within their own communities, one of the most exciting opportunities in Web3 applications.
To learn more about Roll, sign up to our mailing list on tryroll.com or follow us on twitter @tryrollhq.