Under the guise of VC, but selling marketing dog meat, digging deep into the capital game of Rollman Management

Author: Nianqing, ChainCatcher

Yesterday, the Web3 social media platform Wunder.Social announced that it had completed a $50 million financing, led by Rollman Management. The news came from CoinDesk, which also mentioned that Wunder.Social plans to launch a token later this month. Against the backdrop of the continued downturn in the primary market, this large amount of financing is quite eye-catching. In addition, the fact that both the project party and venture capital institutions are little known has further deepened people’s doubts about the authenticity of the financing.

This is not the first time that Rollman Management has appeared in the media. This institution, founded in 2022, has only started to make frequent investments since the end of 2024. In less than 5 months, Rollman Management has invested in 11 crypto projects, with most of the investment amounts exceeding 20 million. The cumulative investment amount exceeds 200 million US dollars.

At the same time, Rollman Management’s investment portfolio projects are less well-known, and most of the projects are located in Europe, Australia and other places. The only financing history is Rollman’s abrupt large financing. At the end of the financing press release, most of these projects are about to conduct IDO or token sales. In addition, Rollman Management almost always invests alone and has never invested in cooperation with well-known venture capital institutions.

Extensive business coverage

According to the official website, Rollman Management Digital is a global investment network and consulting firm that provides mergers and acquisitions, venture capital, real estate and digital asset services to family offices, high net worth individuals and entrepreneurs. According to the description, Rollman’s business covers a wide range of areas, including strategic planning consulting, investment and trading, marketing, customized banking consulting solutions, institutional-level Web3 services, etc.

Among them, the scope of institutional-level Web3 services is almost all-encompassing – covering over-the-counter (OTC), banking, hedge funds, venture capital, marketing, cryptocurrency/AI mining, financing, issuance platforms, market makers, liquidity providers, decentralized exchanges (DEX) and centralized exchanges (CEX) comprehensive solutions. Rollman Management also provides marketing strategies for projects to help them increase their visibility and promote customer interaction.

Portfolio and style analysis

According to data from RootData and Cryptorank, Rollman Management currently has 11 investment portfolios, as shown in the figure below:

“Investment commitment” is a term that needs to be used with caution. From the literal meaning, it means that the project party promises to invest a specific amount of money in the project party. But there is a lot of room for manipulation behind it.

Previously, ChainCatcher had exposed GEM Digital, a venture capital firm with a similar investment style to Rollman Management. A project manager once said that GEM Digital had contacted the project via email and promised to invest $50 million, but when signing the investment contract, the project party found that GEM stated in the contract that it would not pay the money directly, but would make up for the investment with the profits after selling the tokens.

Related reading: Behind the most “rich” crypto venture capital institution GEM Digital: a hidden and bizarre capital game

Rollman Management’s “investment commitment” may be different from GEM Digital, but its investment style is generally similar to GEM:

1. High-frequency, large-amount “investment commitments”: Rollman Management’s investments are relatively scattered, covering social, RWA, AI, infrastructure, and DeFi tracks, with a median investment amount of US$20 million. Among them, nearly half of the projects invested by VitalVeda, Tea-Fi, Candao, etc. are investment commitments rather than normal investments.

2. Choose low-profile projects: Among the 11 projects invested by Rollman, except for Elastos, which was founded earlier and has some popularity and dynamics in the Chinese-speaking region because it was founded in China, the other projects had almost no news before, and the released projects were almost not listed on mainstream exchanges.

3. Use the media to create momentum: Rollman Management-related investment news is mostly published on mainstream platforms such as Cointelegraph and CoinDesk. Most of them are published on Cointelegraph (with the word “sponsored” marked in the press release), and they are simply templates for financing news releases. The structure of the articles is highly similar, and it is obvious that they are from Rollman. (You can click here to feel the project names: AstraAI, Tea-Fi, Eventflo)

Rollman’s investment news has only one purpose – to promote tokens for the project. Rollman took advantage of the crypto community’s sensitivity to financing news. He spread the news of “huge investment” through authoritative media, attracted market attention and even pushed up the token price. Of course, even if the project has not issued a token, there will be plans for token sales such as IDO.

4. The tokens of the invested projects show a “pump-and-dump” pattern: The token prices of Rollman’s invested projects have shown a trend of rapid price increases and then declines after the news was released. For example, on November 21, 2024, the news of Rollman’s investment in AstraAI was released, and the token price rose from US$7.7 to US$25. The current token price is US$4.

On January 30 this year, Rollman announced his investment in Elastos, and the Elastos token also experienced a rapid rise from US$13 to US$21.

VC sheep’s head, selling marketing dog meat

In general, Rollman is more like a conservative version of GEM Digital. Most of the projects it cooperates with are pre-coin projects. Therefore, compared with GEM Digital’s model of relying on favorable news to pull the market, Rollman is essentially promoting tokens for the project party through investment behavior.

“Pump and Dump” was extremely common in the early days of cryptocurrency, especially during the ICO boom, when many projects attracted funds through false propaganda and exaggerated financing news, and then ran away or collapsed. The practices of institutions such as Rollman and GEM Digital can be seen as an “upgraded version” of this strategy, which uses “investment commitments” to put on a legal cloak and use the media and low-profile projects to achieve systematic operations.

The current crypto market is weak, and in the cold environment of the primary market, it is more difficult for projects to survive, especially those without background and reputation. So where there is demand, there is a market. In addition, the supervision is not perfect, especially the lack of definition and constraints on vague behaviors such as “investment commitment”. This provides room for operation for institutions such as Rollman.

ChainCatcher hereby reminds industry participants (including investors, project owners, media, and retail investors) to be wary of such investments and avoid becoming victims of capital games.