Jack Kubinec

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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Crypto’s new viral app isn’t very new at all.



Solana-based social project Clout saw its downloads take off after launching an iPhone app that lets users buy tokenized versions of social media profiles. This is very similar to the premise behind the viral 2023 app friend.tech, which was itself a rehashing of BitClout, a Crypto Twitter tokenization app that went viral in 2021. Friend.tech’s founding team <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/frienddottech-relinquishes-platform-control">already stepped away</a> from the platform, while BitClout’s founder was just <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sec-doj-charge-bitclout-creator-crypto-fraud-social-media">charged with fraud</a> by the DOJ and the SEC.



Clout hasn’t leaned away from its forefathers. The project posted a meme today riffing on Justin Timberlake’s famous line as Sean Parker in The Social Network: “Drop the ‘Bit.’ Just ‘Clout.’ It’s cleaner.”



“Integrity and healthy tokenomics!” was Clout founder Ben Pasternak’s reply when I asked him what sets his app apart.



At the time of writing, Clout was #34 on the App Store’s finance chart. The app is so congested that I haven’t been able to land a transaction all day. And Clout isn’t the only so-called SocialFi app grabbing Solana users’ attention.



Tribe.run — which is still in invite-only mode — has also seen some momentum for a tokenized X profile app that creates token-gated group chats called tribes. I managed to snag an invite and have been enjoying the app, which features a nostalgic Windows 98-esque design. Tribe comes with an airdrop feature built in where I was able to send some of my token to my group chat members. This feature is enabled by Solana <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-zk-compression-solana-data-storage">zero-knowledge compression</a>.



When I asked Tribe founder Bill Zheng why he thinks his app can succeed where friend.tech, for instance, failed, he said the former app had a “fundamental flaw” in that creators had no incentive to stay engaged. Tribe employs a subscription model where tribe members must pay a certain amount of SOL to stay in the group chat — giving the tribe creators a reason to stick around.



Outside of Solana, Kaito AI has seen success with its Yaps platform that doles out points for users who are active — or who yap a lot, in internet parlance — on Crypto Twitter.&nbsp;



SocialFi’s resilience underscores the resilience of Elon Musk’s social media platform. X remains the center of the online crypto world, and until that changes, crypto social apps will keep testing out new ways to monetize Crypto Twitter.



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<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown">The Breakdown</a>: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance">Forward Guidance</a>: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/0xresearch">0xResearch</a>: Alpha directly in your inbox.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: All things Solana.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">The Drop</a>: Apps, games, memes and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock">Supply Shock</a>: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.</li>
</ul>

Lightspeed Newsletter

SocialFi makes its return on Solana

Sebastian Sinclair

Less than a month after its launch, Web3 social app Friend.tech has stumbled.



Activity on the network, whose dapp allows users to speculate on and gain access to individuals and their personal brands, topped out at around 38,000 transactions last week.



That figure has since fallen 96% to just 1,663 as of 5:00 am ET, according to a <a href="https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/friendtech">Dune Analytics</a> dashboard. At the same time, protocol inflow to the app has also dropped more than 90%, from $1.9 million witnessed on August 20 to $89,000.



Built on Coinbase incubated <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/optimism">optimistic rollup</a>, Base, Friend.tech tokenizes users’ social profiles, creating a gated chat room accessible through “keys” (initially known as “shares”) and allowing holders to engage with influencers and creators.



After signup each linked X account, formerly Twitter, gets keys purchasable on a bonding curve, so early holders gain entry to a particular chat space cheaply, while subsequent keys are progressively more expensive. Each time a profile’s keys are purchased, that user receives a fee.



The communication flow is asymmetric, meaning users can directly message an influencer, but their responses are broadcast to all keyholders.



The app’s potential over the last three weeks has attracted a range of industry participants, including traders and social media personalities. Some experts said the app <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/friend-tech-financialization-goldentre">could potentially provide a trading edge</a> by gaining knowledge within private chat rooms to accrue alpha, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/friend-tech-bullish-bearish">while others have remained skeptical</a>.



Despite <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/friendtech-social-token">initial interest following its launch</a> on Aug. 10, on-chain activity shows almost all traders have <a href="https://dune.com/queries/2845442/4754698">sold more shares than they have bought</a>, indicating a preference for liquidating positions, data shows.



The drop in activity calls into question the longevity of the platform and its ability to generate revenue. Friend.tech, which was once pulling in $1.68 million in fees per day, has seen revenue fall to a little over $161,000, on-chain data from <a href="https://defillama.com/fees/friend.tech">DeFi Llama</a> shows.



That decline in fees translates into a roughly 99% hit to daily revenue, from around $840,000 to just over $80,000, data shows.



A peak of active buyers, which topped out at 3,315 compared to 1,423 active sellers, on August 21, has also dropped to just 361 and 262, respectively. USD volume of keys bought, meanwhile, has sunk to $38,000 per day, from an initial peak of $1 million.



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<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: All things Solana.</li>



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</ul>

Base

Friend.tech momentum stalls

Bessie Liu

Friend.tech has drawn the interest of over 100,000 users in less than a month of launching.



Users, who all seem to have something to say about it, are now parsing the possibilities of the fast-growing on-chain social app, which sells “shares” of social media profiles and employs social tokens.



In a sign of its popularity, the new on-chain social app has banked $1.42 million in fees in the past 24 hours, according to <a href="https://defillama.com/fees">DeFiLama</a>. This figure makes it the third-most profitable crypto platform, behind the liquid staking protocol Lido and the Ethereum blockchain itself.



Friend.tech launched on <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/coinbase-l2-base-mainnet">Base</a>, Coinbase’s layer-2 network, on Aug. 10. So far, Friend.tech has seen over <a href="https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/friendtech">1.3 million transactions</a>, earning over <a href="https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/friendtech">$2 billion </a>in revenue derived from fees.



More broadly, the platform builds on the concept of so-called social tokens.&nbsp;



Token-powered social media apps have existed for some time, with such tokens providing some kind of incentive or benefit to the holder, as is the case with fan tokens. Some of those platforms have <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/rally-leaves-social-token-nfts-in-limbo-after-abrupt-exit">struggled alongside other token projects</a>, however.&nbsp;



Friend.tech, however, stands out for its viral moment this weekend and the apparent speed at which it has attracted activity.&nbsp;



When a Friend.tech user signs up, they grant consent to the app to create shares on a <a href="https://basescan.org/address/0xcf205808ed36593aa40a44f10c7f7c2f67d4a4d4#code">smart contract</a> that is tied to their account on X, formerly known as Twitter. The project, according to its website, does not yet have a privacy policy.&nbsp;



Other users can purchase shares (or social tokens) of user profiles, enabling them to join group chats and message that particular user. Every time a person’s share is purchased, that user will receive a “subject fee.”



The product also enables participants to spot up-and-coming users by listing trending trades and sharing an activity feed for shares owned within a given network.&nbsp;



Currently, users can only sign up to Friend.tech with a referral code. Crypto influencers on X have jumped at the opportunity to share personal referral codes to earn “points,” which bring about airdrops every Friday.&nbsp;



As of Aug. 21, there were over 80,000 unique <a href="https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/friendtech">buyers</a> on Friend.tech, and over 30,000 unique <a href="https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/friendtech">sellers</a>, according to Dune Analytics data.&nbsp;



However, it is unclear how many of those users are trading bots.&nbsp;



Jim Chang, the co-founder of Catalyst AMM, said in a post on X that MEV bots began speculating on his shares immediately after joining the app.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Okay no one told me that within seconds of joining <a href="https://twitter.com/friendtech?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@friendtech</a> that MEV bots would speculate on my shares lmao <a href="https://t.co/G0OVXNZKyx">pic.twitter.com/G0OVXNZKyx</a>&mdash; Jim (@0xJim) <a href="https://twitter.com/0xJim/status/1693570464759910872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 21, 2023</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



“It gives me dopamine immediately upon joining, which is what all social networks strive to do,” Chang told Blockworks. “I don’t know if the Friend.tech team did that on purpose, but it’s a great byproduct of being on-chain.”



Wrapped versions of Friend.tech shares are also available as ERC-20 tokens on Base — and users can track the <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/friend-tech">value</a> of their favorite crypto influencers.



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</ul>

Decentralized social media app Friend.tech is surging

Shalini Nagarajan

Social NFT platform Rally, roiled by a challenging year for the crypto industry, is shutting down and warned users that they may no longer be able to access their assets.&nbsp;



The firm told customers in an email Tuesday that its Ethereum <a href="https://www.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#sidechain">sidechain</a> will sunset from Jan. 31 onwards. The site will no longer be supported and users will find the service no longer functions, it added.



CEO Rob Collier told Decrypt, which first <a href="https://decrypt.co/120285/social-token-platform-rally-shutting-down">reported</a> the shut-down, that the move was due to lack of ongoing support, adding that maintaining the sidechain was too expensive compared to other recently launched layer-1 tech stacks.



Rally told its community that the team had been impacted by the concerns surrounding the crypto industry and it had tried to find a way forward, but the “challenges and macro headwinds are too overwhelming to overcome in the current environment.”&nbsp;



“Additionally, since NFTs on the Rally side chain are not transferable to [Ethereum’s] main net, these will not be accessible once the site shuts down,” Rally said.



The platform <a href="https://rally.io/articles/introducing-nfts-on-rally-and-why-were-focusing-on-utility-over-scarcity">launched</a> in Aug. 2021, attracting users for not charging fees for exchange of NFTs.



“Feeless exchange of NFTs will allow more revenue to be captured by the creator, who will take home more of the value of their NFTs immediately upon sale, while also earning more over time through feeless, ongoing royalties and by increasing demand for their social tokens,” Rally said at the time.&nbsp;



Crypto VC Mike Dudas said on Twitter that Rally is “completely rugging owners of assets on the chain — not transferrable to [E]thereum.”



Holders of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ftx-nftx-are-mia">NFTs on the bankrupt FTX similarly learned</a> the hard lesson that a lack of permanent NFT storage on-chain can result in a loss of assets. In this case, Rally NFTs relied on the continuation of the Rally sidechain, rather than the immutable Ethereum mainnet.



Other projects that store NFTs on sidechains, such as Gnosis’ (formerly xDAI) <a href="https://www.poap.delivery/">POAP</a> project allow users to <a href="https://www.one37pm.com/nft/what-are-poaps-and-why-are-they-important">migrate</a> NFTs to Ethereum at any time.



Data from <a href="https://www.tradingview.com/chart/Joio31kT/?symbol=GEMINI%3ARLYUSD">TradingView</a> shows Rally’s native token RLY has dropped nearly 95% in the last 12 months.



It appears that Rally is still exploring whether it can build other products to empower creators, but it isn’t yet clear whether it has the resources to do so.



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</ul>

Ethereum

Rally Leaves Social Token NFTs in Limbo After Abrupt Exit

<div id="highlights-block_626c01b2a93a8" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>The TON Foundation announced Tuesday a new bot for use within social app Telegram, enabling users to send and receive Toncoin to one another</li>
 <li>It marks the first time Telegram has added crypto functionality onto its platform following a bout with the SEC in 2019</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Cryptocurrency functionality has been added back into the social app Telegram following a more than two-year hiatus stemming from a lengthy bout with the SEC in 2019.



Users can now send and receive Toncoin, as well as make bitcoin purchases via the app, according to a Tuesday <a href="https://twitter.com/ton_blockchain/status/1518940393370537985?s=20&amp;t=evqVezCJYaL_Bc2JpMOnUw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweet</a> by The Open Network (TON) Foundation. Telegram boasts more than 550 million active users and is one of the world&#8217;s most popular social networks.



The foundation is responsible for the development of the TON blockchain which enables the crypto infrastructure for use within the social app. Last week, the foundation announced that it had raised $1 billion in donations to further its development efforts.



Following that announcement, Toncoin rose 14.3% from around $2.03 on Tuesday to $2.32 by Wednesday before succumbing to sell-side market pressure. As of press time, the token is down 10% over a 24-hour period and is changing hands for $2.06, data by provider <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/the-open-network" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CoinGecko</a> shows.



Users are not required to pay transaction fees and will no longer need to enter long crypto addresses with wallet functionality embedded into the app, according to the announcement.



It marks the first time the app has restored crypto functionality since its battle with the SEC in October 2019. Telegram abandoned the project shortly after being requested by the securities regulator to cease the sale of its native &#8220;Gram&#8221; tokens. As part of <a href="https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-146" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a 2020 settlement</a>, Telegram was required to return the $1.2 billion the company raised in the token sale and ordered to pay an $18.5 million fine.



“Telegram’s active involvement with TON is over,” Telegram founder and CEO <a href="https://telegra.ph/What-Was-TON-And-Why-It-Is-Over-05-12" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pavel Durov</a> wrote at the time.



By May 2020, Telegram&#8217;s involvement with TON became less clear, and the development of the TON blockchain was overtaken by various enthusiasts and projects, who forked the original project&#8217;s open-source code.



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social tokens

Telegram Users Can Now Send, Receive Crypto Following 2-year Hiatus

On today&#8217;s episode of &#8220;<a href="https://youtu.be/xRpqjKV1ZV8" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Empire</a>,&#8221; Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Roel Santos are joined by Li Jin and Jesse Walden of Variant. Bringing their specific expertise on the creator space, Li and Jesse discuss what it means to form a crypto creator economy that not only supports quality content but attracts players to actually invest in the concept. With Jason and Santiago, they cover mainstream adoption, NFTs, what it means to be an owner, and more.



They cover mainstream adoption, NFTs, and what it means to be an owner, while also bolstering listeners on how exactly to get involved. 



Plus, hear more on:



<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>NFTs vs Fungible Tokens</li><li>how to reach progressive decentralization</li><li>and so much more!</li></ul>



Check out what they had to say in the video below.👇



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="The Creator Economy Playbook | Li Jin, Jesse Walden" width="1024" height="576" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xRpqjKV1ZV8?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">About the show</h3>



&#8220;Empire&#8221; is a twice-a-week show. On Thursdays, Jason interviews crypto industry movers and shakers to talk about their struggles, bold moves and tough decisions. Friday&#8217;s weekly roundup episodes feature <meta charset="utf-8">co-host Santiago Roel Santos and cover the top news from the past week.



For any NPR or Guy Raz fans out there, you can think of &#8220;Empire&#8221; as a &#8220;How I Built This&#8221; for the bitcoin and crypto industry.



Subscribe to &#8220;Empire&#8221; today on&nbsp;<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/empire/id1554930038" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Apple</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4UTePv1CR3APdKOiosR3Iq" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Spotify</a>. Watch episodes on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvER9nHSRN3wPkrDGTT5_8VC4Hjcq0f9U" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">YouTube</a>.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your inbox every evening.&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://cms.blockworks.co/newsletter/?source=end" rel="noreferrer noopener">Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter</a>&nbsp;now.



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creator economy

Podcast: The Creator Economy Playbook | Li Jin, Jesse Walden

Morgan Chittum

<div id="highlights-block_61bcd9ff02dfb" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Morgan Stanley sees the metaverse as an $8 trillion market</li>
 <li>Goldman Sachs said blockchain is one of the most “disruptive technologies” since the 1990s</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street giant that manages<a href="https://www.investmentnews.com/morgan-stanley-will-reach-10-trillion-in-aum-gorman-205368" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> $6.4 trillion</a> in assets, said the metaverse will be “the next big investment theme” in a note to clients last month. On Tuesday, Goldman Sachs then described blockchain as being key to Web3 development in a report.&nbsp;



More and more behemoth financial institutions are addressing the metaverse to clients and investors.&nbsp;



&#8220;[The metaverse] can fundamentally change the medium through which we socialize with others,&#8221; Edward Stanley, an Equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, said.&nbsp;



Stanley added that certain stocks in gaming and tech sectors such as Roblox and Meta (formerly Facebook), along with those concentrated on augmented reality like Alphabet Inc., can benefit from growing adoption of the concept as well.&nbsp;



Goldman Sachs sees blockchain as one of the most “disruptive technologies” in the past several decades, including the advent of the internet.&nbsp;



&#8220;We believe that the metaverse is likely to be an amalgamation of different 3D spaces and that users will move between these regularly,&#8221; Rod Hall, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, said. &#8220;If any virtual goods or services are unable to move from one space to another with the user, we believe their value is likely to be more limited.&#8221;



Atomic Form co-founder Garrette David described the banks’ reports as “a huge positive,” adding it signals further adoption by institutions who have been historically skeptical of cryptocurrency as an asset class at all.



“Given the speed at which they&#8217;re reporting it, I would say we are definitely mainstream. It took banks years to publicly sell interests in, or comment on, economics behind public networks and blockchains,” David said, who runs a startup that develops non-fungible token displays and a Web3 platform.



According to Goldman, it will take “many years” and &#8220;cross-company collaboration” to seamlessly onboard millions of users into the virtual augmented world.&nbsp;



“Investment implications are hard to predict at this juncture, but companies who are dependent on centralized control of user identity will likely find their business models challenged by the adoption of blockchain,” Goldman said.



<hr class="wp-block-separator">
Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your inbox every evening.&nbsp;<a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/newsletter/?source=end" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter</a>&nbsp;now.
<hr class="wp-block-separator">

Alexis Ohanian

How Megabanks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Are Talking About the Metaverse

Jacquelyn Melinek

<div id="highlights-block_61bcd9ff02dfb" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>&#8220;We are still in the early days of Web3 and the most obvious opportunities right now are in gaming and social,&#8221; said Alexis Ohanian, general partner and founder of Seven Seven Six</li>
 <li>Earlier this month, Polygon acquired a zero knowledge startup Mir in a $400 million deal to scale Ethereum and bring more users to Web3</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Polygon and Seven Seven Six partnered to launch a $200 million initiative to support social media projects on Web3, the companies shared on Friday.&nbsp;



Over the past few years, there has been a realization that social media businesses have a profound impact on society, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder &amp; chief operations officer at Polygon said in a statement. “With Web3, users create the value, control the network and reap the rewards. This is not just a different way to share lolcats online, though we love those. We are inventing new high-fidelity means of transmitting culture itself,” Nailwal said.



&#8220;We are still in the early days of Web3 and the most obvious opportunities right now are in gaming and social,&#8221; Alexis Ohanian, general partner and founder of Seven Seven Six, said in a statement. &#8220;This initiative will do just that, with a focus on gaming properties and social media platforms built on Polygon&#8217;s scalable infrastructure,” Ohanian added.&nbsp;



Polygon and Seven Seven Six were not available for additional comment when requested by Blockworks on Friday.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Playing the long game</h3>



Ohanian co-founded Reddit in 2005 and Initialized Capital in 2010. While at his first venture firm, he was a seed investor in Coinbase, Instacart, Patreon and other major businesses. Ohanian founded Seven Seven Six in 2020 and has formed a portfolio of 35 companies, including the makers of <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/axie-infinity-developer-scores-152m-in-series-b-funding-nearing-3b-valuation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Axie Infinity</a>, Sky Mavis. 



Polygon has an Ethereum-based proof-of-stake sidechain network that scales and powers some of the biggest DeFi and NFT projects including Aave, SushiSwap and OpenSea. The number of decentralized applications, or dApps, on the platform rose 9,900% from 30 in November 2020 to 3,000 in November 2021, Nailwal previously told Blockworks.



“We’ve already seen some of the best product founders in our portfolio start building on Polygon, and I’m excited for Seven Seven Six and Polygon to play a big role in shaping what the new internet looks like,” Ohanian said.&nbsp;



Polygon is also developing multiple alternative scaling solutions for Ethereum using zero-knowledge proof technology.



Earlier this month, Polygon acquired a zero knowledge startup Mir in a <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/polygon-acquires-mir-in-400m-deal-to-scale-ethereum-and-web3/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$400 million deal</a> to scale Ethereum and bring more users to Web3. At the time, Nailwal said to Blockworks, “We want to be the AWS of [the] Web3 platform for developers to build on by providing a spectrum of solutions.”



Separately, last month, Seven Seven Six joined Solana Ventures in a $100 million initiative to help fuel decentralized social media platforms on Solana’s blockchain, Blockworks previously <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/solana-and-seven-seven-six-double-initiative-to-100m-to-build-decentralized-social-media/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>. 



“The baggage of Web2 infrastructure and Web2 precedent is that you know you’re ultimately just harvested for an advertiser and that factors into product decisions and that factors into design decisions,” Ohanian said at the Solana <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/the-solana-summer-never-ends/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Breakpoint</a> conference. 



“What’s really exciting is there’s a whole new slew of founders who have a chance to jump into a very energized community and start building something with a very different business model in mind…that’s compelling. We could see new platforms emerge very fast,” Ohanian added at the time.



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Polygon and Seven Seven Six Launch $200M Social Media Web3 Initiative

<div id="highlights-block_61534adab7a77" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Merkle Science has seen strong demand from financial institutions and law enforcement agencies</li>
 <li>Immutable X’s $12.5M 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</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Roll, a blockchain infrastructure for social money, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by IOSG Ventures, the company said on Tuesday.&nbsp;



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.&nbsp;



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.&nbsp;



“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.&nbsp;



Roll has over 350 creators, up 250% from 100 creators a year ago, Miles said. The creators range from websites like <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/weekly-roundup-binance-onlyfans-and-jay-clayton/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">OnlyFans</a> 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&#8230;We’re seeing the markets grow, we’re seeing the demand grow,” he added.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Kraken Ventures and others invest in $5.75M round&nbsp;</h3>



A predictive cryptocurrency risk and intelligence platform, Merkle Science, has raised $5.75 million in a Series A round led by Darrow Holdings.&nbsp;



Other participants in the round include Kraken Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Token Bay Capital, Kenetic, and Lunex Ventures, the company said.&nbsp;



The funding will be used to prioritize product development, expand its token coverage and customize solutions for DeFi and NFT platforms, the company said.&nbsp;



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.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Token sales galore&nbsp;</h3>



On Tuesday, a crypto fund managed by Republic Capital, the multi-asset investment platform, announced its participation in AVAX&#8217;s <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/avalanche-closes-230m-token-sale-backed-by-three-arrows-capital-polychain/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recent $230 million private token sale</a> 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.&nbsp;



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 <a href="https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/1442481019601309703" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweet</a> 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.&nbsp;



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 <a href="https://www.immutable.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">elements</a>. 



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 <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/layer-2-solution-immutable-closes-60m-series-b-round/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>.



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