Roll is a social token platform that bills itself as the “Stripe for social tokens.”  What do they mean by that?  Well, on the consumer facing side, the company is giving creators the ability to mint their own tokens which can be branded and distributed in whatever way the creator decides.  Roll is betting that social tokens become the backbone of the emerging creator economy and wants to be at the center of that trend.

Early traction.  So far, so good – Roll says in a press release that its platform is being used by 350 creators, including the biggest social token creator in the world, the NFT collector known as Whaleshark, as well as celebrity Terry Crews.  The collective value of tokens issued on the Roll platform is in excess of $250M in market value and over $2MM in daily trading volume, per the company’s release.

CEO Bradley Miles says in a blog post that there’s been “$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 [in] all of 2020.”

The infrastructure play.  Roll thinks that there will be thousands of platforms that mint, integrate and utilize social tokens in the future.  So, Roll is developing the APIs that will let creators, social platforms, fintechs, DAOs and the like to integrate these social tokens seamlessly into their respective systems.  The startup calls this “a financial operating system for social tokens.”

$10M Series A financing closed.  Hong Kong-based IOSG Ventures led the round; other participants include Animoca Brands, Alchemy, Huobi Ventures, Weekend Fund, Audacity, and Mischief Fund.  That brings the total raised by the company since inception to $12.7M; prior investors included Galaxy Interactive, Hustle Fund and Gary Vaynerchuk.

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