Social currency startup Roll raises $1.7M to bring monetization opportunities for content creators

Social currency startup Roll has secured $1.7 million investment in a seed round, led by BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes with participation from Gary Vaynerchuk, Techstars Ventures, Hustle Fund, and Techstars NYC, CoinDesk reported.

According to the report, the funding will be used to help content creators, who are online personalities on Youtube and other social media platforms, gain more control in monetizing relationships with their fans.

“We’ve seen creators over the last few years become unsatisfied over the level of control they have over the platforms,” Bradley Miles, Roll’s Co-founder, said.

Described as a blockchain protocol and platform that creates "social money," Roll enables content creators to make their own ethereum-based currency to allow them to carry their own brand. The goal is to allow content creators to provide different ways to engage with their fans irrespective of the platform they are using.

“Social money gives them a simple way to repeatedly generate social activity,” Miles said.

Using Roll, content creators can make their own supply of customized tokens with a limit imposed by its smart contract. Then, they can create a market with their users for earning and spending their tokens.

For instance, fans can earn tokens if they post a podcast episode of the creator on Twitter and can then spend or redeem the tokens with interesting perks like cutting the line at a live event.

This way, the tokens are not only revolving around the creators but also having a real value set by the creators themselves.

Recently, crypto analytics firm Coin Metrics has teamed up with Social Market Analytics (SMA) to incorporate feed of real-time sentiments toward cryptocurrency based on data from social networking sites like Twitter.