Revel.xyz raises $7.8 million to create “a cross between Instagram and Robinhood”

The founders of a new startup are reveling after raising a seed round. Revel.xyz, a blockchain-based platform that creates an entire economy out of its users’ posts, has raised $7.8 million in funding.

Revel’s CEO, Adi Sideman, describes his company as “a cross between Instagram and Robinhood, wrapped in social game economics.” A video shared on the Revel YouTube channel explains how that combination works. Revel users share photos on the app, and their uploads are converted into scarce assets, which live on the blockchain.

Through purchases, sales, and trades with other users, Revelers collect assets from their favorite creators. Each asset is given a rarity, and the overall goal is to collect three assets with the same creator but different rarities. That set — which Revel calls a “Series” — entitles the Series holder to collect bonus assets every time the Series creator mints new assets.

Long story short: Revel is looking to turn its community’s posts into a shared economy, which is powered by a “social trading game” based on the blockchain. “Personal media asset ownership, shared between creators and their followers will drive the next generation of social networks,” Sideman said. “People connect with people by collecting their digital media.”

Revel has already attracted some notable users, including influencers like Cyrus Dobre, Natalie Friedman, and Mira Szalama. Thanks in part to the contributions of those creators, Revel reached the top of the rankings on Product Hunt.

Through its seed round, which was led by Dragonfly, Revel will look to expand its homegrown products. It has already started that initiative — through a pact Stability AI, Revel is bringing generative AI authoring to its user base.

The plan is for Revel to invigorate the Web3 landscape by delivering a unique combination of social media and asset management. “What is not here yet, and is inevitable, is that the media published on social media, by users, personal media, will all be ownable and collectible,” Sideman told TechCrunch. “This triggers a new breed of services, services that are part social networks, part marketplaces and part social games.”

Revel is not the first platform to mix the financial model of trading card games with Web3 technology. During Bitcoin’s early days, much of its trading took place on Mt. Gox, which had initially launched as a service for buying and selling Magic: The Gathering cards.