Highlights:

  • Sideman said that letting people own personal assets like artwork and videos will open a new generation of digital media, and that’s where NFTs are going.
  • Despite this decline, Revel believes that NFTs still have a bright future and has partnered with Stability AI.

Crypto “social collectibles” startup Revel.xyz recently said that it has raised USD 7.8 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly Capital to extend its product line, which it describes as a mix of Instagram and Robinhood.

Other investors in the seed round include Polygon, USV, Sfermion, 6th Man Ventures, Hansa Labs, Alumni Ventures, Wagmi Ventures, Global Impact Ventures, Gaingels, and others.

Revel provides a social media platform for people who collect Nonfungible Tokens (NFTs). It is a type of blockchain-based cryptocurrency asset that can be used to prove ownership of digital assets like artwork, photos, and videos.

With Revel, they will have a marketplace where they can create their own NFTs and then buy, sell, trade, and share them.

Adi Sideman, chief executive of Revel, said, “Think of Revel.xyz as a cross between Instagram and Robinhood, wrapped in social game economics.”

Sideman said that letting people own personal assets like artwork and videos will open a new generation of digital media, and that’s where NFTs are going. This has been something that NFTs have wanted for a long time.

Sideman said, “Personal media asset ownership, shared between creators and their followers, will drive the next generation of social networks; people connect with people by collecting their digital media.” He also said that letting fans buy the art that creators make gives them a stake in the community in which they participate.

The value proposition of Revel is that it opens up to a new audience of small creators by making it simple to mint and create NFTs on a platform that can scale up to millions of users.

Haseeb Qureshi, the managing partner at Dragonfly, said, “Today, digital collectibles are primarily issued in controlled rollouts by artists and brands. But what happens when you allow ordinary people to issue digital collectibles and to become collectors of the smaller creators they love?”

This year, social networks have integrated NFTs into their platforms, such as Instagram, which began experimenting with displaying the collectibles after Twitter introduced NFT profile images.

Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, has created an NFT marketplace with social networking capabilities, while in May, Revel’s NFT social market competitor, Bubblehouse, announced a nine-million-dollar investment.

The NFT market boomed in 2021, exceeding USD 17 billion in sales volume for the year, but has subsequently experienced a substantial decline in 2022. The period has been dubbed “crypto winter.”

According to a report by Reuters, interest in NFTs has waned recently, with revenues decreasing to USD 3.4 billion in the third quarter of 2022, down from USD 8.4 billion in the second quarter. This indicates a decline in interest in the assets.

Despite this decline, Revel believes that NFTs still have a bright future and has partnered with Stability AI. This artificial intelligence text-to-image generator service enables the creation of digital collectibles on its platform. Users can now design their own digital collectible NFTs in a few minutes utilizing AI and their imaginations.

Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, commented on the news, “AI promises to be a huge part of the future of humanity. It made a lot of sense to work with Revel.xyz, who is bringing the Web2 principles of social networking and user-generated content to the world of Web3.”

The iOS App Store and the Google Play store provide downloads of Revel’s mobile application.