Revel raises $7.8 million to become the Instagram and Robinhood of NFT platforms • TechCrunch

Revel, an NFT or “social collectibles” platform, raised $7.8 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly Capital, the startup’s CEO, Adi Sideman, told TechCrunch exclusively.

“One way to describe Revel is a cross between Instagram and Robinhood, wrapped in social gaming economics,” Sideman said.

Instagram is known as a social media platform while Robinhood is known as an investment and trading platform. Revel blends them both, helping consumers build a “portfolio of media [and] of the people they collect,” Sideman said. (As a side note, Instagram announced earlier this month that creators on the platform will soon be able to create their own NFTs and sell them directly to fans, both on and off the visual social network.)

Revel’s marketplace allows users to create NFTs for their followers, friends or communities and also allows people to own issues of the media they like and follow, Sideman said.

“Followers have a stake in the community they participate in, and it’s a powerful new experience,” Sideman said. “It’s nuanced, but it’s powerful.”

Image credit: Revel (opens in new window)

And it’s not just a financial effort, he added. “I’m talking about the emotional stake, the community stake, the status, the new paradigm where people become partners for other people’s personal brands.”

The platform leverages “social game economics” through game design and simple rules to manage economic concepts such as supply and demand as well as inflation, among others, Sideman said. At the heart of Revel’s economics is a gaming concept that limits supply and asset disclosures to “healthy inflationary levels,” he added.

“We call it ‘Proof of Demand Minting,’ where anyone can mint their first collection, but only people who get collected can mint more,” Sideman noted. “We gamify it to simplify it and obscure economic complexities. The results are that people trade in a marketplace, helping to manage efficient economies, by playing a collectible.”

Early adopters on the platform are both web3-savvy people as well as young people “who have more time to engage with new platforms and figure out new games,” Sideman said. The platform has also attracted content creators like Cyrus Dobre, who has nearly 10 million TikTok followers and “regularly puts his art” on the market, Sideman said.

The raise included investors from Union Square Ventures, Sfermion, 6th Man Ventures, Gaingels, Wagmi Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Global Impact Ventures, Hansa Labs and Polygon, among others. The capital will be used to expand Revel’s web3 interoperability, generative and collaborative AI functionality and social features, Sideman said.

As it stands, it’s not a robust social media aggregation ecosystem. Some marketplaces aren’t very social, like OpenSea or Magic Eden, and aggregator platforms like Sorare and NBA Top Shot aren’t social media-focused, Sideman said.

“What’s not here yet, and is inevitable, is that the media published on social media, by users, personal media, will all be able to be owned and collected,” Sideman said. “This is triggering a new type of service, services that are part social network, part marketplace and part social game.”

Revel is a cross between a social network and a marketplace. It is intended to be a simple trading platform that is gamified, allowing individuals to create photos and videos as collectibles. But whether the concept will catch on among smaller creators and average people is yet to be determined.

“The average person won’t ‘buy’ your image, but it’s more nuanced than that,” Sideman said. “The lead to the creative economy is getting longer and longer… [and] we have created a free economy that we expect most people will not open their wallets for. They can trade and say, ‘Give me three of these for one of those.’ In many ways it is a media game.” Some people may offer assets only, or they may offer assets plus cash to get a trade, Sideman added.

There are other projects centered around individual creators on the market today – one new entrant is making particular noise – but if the digital collectibles genre can grow despite a generally weak NFT market, Revel could be on to something interesting: a real blockchain use case .