Roll Raises Another $1M to Make Money Social

Social money startup Roll is announcing the raising of $1 million from Fabric Ventures, IOSG, William Mougayar and others. The additional capital brings its total funding to $2.7 million.

Launched in summer 2019, Roll allows people with followings to create their own currency and define the usefulness of that currency. For example, users might be able to redeem the social currency for access to the currency’s creator.  

In a press release, IOSG’s Joyce Lin wrote, “Roll lets each creator have the freedom to determine the rules within their social economy.” 

As one example, the musician Harrison First announced his social money, $FIRST, in August, promising it would allow people guest-list access when he’s on tour. 

As of this writing, one $FIRST trades for about $0.05 in ETH on Uniswap. By buying an artist’s token early, though, a fan can theoretically make a bet on that creator’s future success (provided, of course, they continue to support the token). 

One of Roll’s new investors, Mougayar, gave another example. Roll has a partnership with blockchain development platform Abridged that makes it possible to gate Discord communities with its tokens, so that only people who hold a certain one can get in. 

“That’s an emerging use case I like,” Mougayar wrote in an email. “This is interesting because a Roll wallet is more user-friendly and more mainstream-looking in its experience.” 

According to the team, there’s $500,000 worth of daily volume moving through the Roll system, which is now used by 250 creators, including one current member of CoinDesk staff and two alums.

“This marks a fundamental shift towards user-generated capital as the basis of evolution of the social web,” Roll co-founder Sid Kalla wrote in a press release.