The social token infrastructure company Roll today announced it has raised $10 million in funding led by IOSG Ventures to expand the platform’s technical capabilities.

The Series A round also saw participation from Animoca Brands, Alchemy, Huobi Ventures, Weekend Fund, Mischief Fund and more. This new round of financing brings the company’s total funding raised to $12.7 million since it launched in 2019.

Roll provides developers with the infrastructure and application programming interfaces to create and integrate social tokens into web applications. Social tokens are branded digital currencies powered by blockchain technology such as Ethereum.

With Roll’s platform, users can mint what the company calls “social money” by creating tokens that are attached to a project or community. Applications for social money include using it as rewards for participation in streams, for buying music, in gaming, chat and many other opportunities.

For example, an author could mint a new social token a part of the promotion of a new book and use the tokens in order to reward people for signing up for newsletters, subscribing to livestreams, sharing tweets and referring friends.

“We see an internet where hundreds of social token applications will emerge. Most platforms will use social tokens in one way or another this decade,” says Sid Kalla, co-founder and chief technology officer of Roll. “They’ll all require the right infrastructure to be successful and interoperable across the web.”

Because Roll uses Ethereum smart contracts to develop its social token infrastructure, its social tokens can interact with both traditional web platforms and smart contract applications that others have built including decentralized finance protocols. Roll also said that some of its own social tokens, such as $WHALE from creator Whaleshark, are already beginning to list on major exchanges such as Houbi.

The company also said that in the past month, its tokens have eclipsed $250 million in market value and more than $2 million in trading volume. The platform is being used by more than 350 creators, including nonfungible token innovator Whaleshark and actor Terry Crews, who launched the $POWER social currency, which he hopes will empower artists.

“Roll is a bet that social tokens are critical to the fabric of a community-owned social web and they’re at the vanguard of this revolution,” said Yat Siu, the co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands.

Image: Roll