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Roll, a blockchain infrastructure for social money, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by IOSG Ventures, the company said on Tuesday.
Participation in Roll’s investment round includes Animoca Brands, Alchemy, Huobi Ventures Weekend Fund and Mischief Fund. Additionally, IOSG joins existing investors, including Galaxy Interactive, Hustle Fund, Gary Vaynerchuk, Trevor McFederies, Ryan Selkis and Balaji Srinivasan. The company said it has raised a total of $12.7 million in funding since it launched in 2019.
Roll is a financial operating system and network for social tokens, which are branded digital currencies that creators can use to “make a market that belongs to them and their audience without third-party intermediaries, like platforms,” the company said.
Additionally, Roll’s network mints branded social tokens unique to individuals so they can control and coordinate its value across platforms. Roll’s social tokens can use Ethereum smart contracts to develop a social token infrastructure that can interact with web platforms and smart contract applications.
“We’re at the point now where Roll uniquely allows them to mint these social tokens through the Ethereum blockchain; it can be plugged into anything anyone else is building on Web3,” Bradley Miles, co-founder and CEO of Roll said to Blockworks in an interview.
Roll has over 350 creators, up 250% from 100 creators a year ago, Miles said. The creators range from websites like OnlyFans and Youtube to NFT artists and celebrities like Terry Crews. In the past month, Roll’s social tokens have reached $250 million in market value and over $2 million in daily trading volume, the company said.
“We’ve really experienced this explosive growth last year and this year,” Miles said. “We seem to be in a cultural bull market…We’re seeing the markets grow, we’re seeing the demand grow,” he added.
Kraken Ventures and others invest in $5.75M round
A predictive cryptocurrency risk and intelligence platform, Merkle Science, has raised $5.75 million in a Series A round led by Darrow Holdings.
Other participants in the round include Kraken Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Token Bay Capital, Kenetic, and Lunex Ventures, the company said.
The funding will be used to prioritize product development, expand its token coverage and customize solutions for DeFi and NFT platforms, the company said.
Merkle Science has seen strong demand from financial institutions and law enforcement agencies “as crypto-related illicit activity and regulations have taken center stage,” Mriganka Pattnaik, the company’s co-founder and CEO said.
The company has clients across Asia, Europe and North America and has grown its revenue over 900% in the past two years, it said. “In the past six months, institutional interest for cryptocurrencies and compliance in the US has surged, which has prompted both the co-founders to move their base to New York as part of Merkle Science’s expansion plans,” it added.
Token sales galore
On Tuesday, a crypto fund managed by Republic Capital, the multi-asset investment platform, announced its participation in AVAX’s recent $230 million private token sale alongside previously announced lead investors Polychain and Three Arrows Capital. Although the sale was closed in June, it was not publicly announced until mid-September.
The Avalanche Foundation says that it will use the proceeds to accelerate the rapid growth of DeFi, NFTs, and other new asset classes on the Avalanche blockchain, Blockworks reported.
Separately, the Ethereum-based Immutable X sold out its token sale and raised over $12.5 million in less than an hour, Immutable, the company behind the token, said in a tweet on Monday.
According to the tweet, Immutable X’s token sale brought in over 720,000 registrants but only about 3.6%, or 25,000, of those registrants were able to become new token holders through CoinList, which is a platform that showcases digital assets before they’re readily available on exchanges.
Immutable is an Australian company that focuses on the first layer 2 for NFTs on Ethereum and allows users to set their own trading fees, among other elements.
In mid-September, the company closed a $60 million Series B round co-led by BITKRAFT Ventures and King River Capital, with participation from Prosus Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Fabric Ventures, Alameda Research, AirTree Ventures, Reinventure, Apex Capital, and VaynerFund.
Immutable did not disclose what the token sale on Monday will be used toward. However, after the $60 million in funding the company said it would use the investment to primarily expand its global engineering and sales team, while strengthening partnerships with gaming companies, Blockworks previously reported.
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