The First SocialFi Bot From Collab.Land: The Inventor of Token Gating | James Young - Collab.Land

[Music] down here um we'll start in about eight seconds or so all right welcome Denver my name is James Young I am a CEO of a bridg uh we make a product called collab land and uh today I'm here to talk about tele friends uh the first social trading bot and um want to get into it so for those in the audience and on the stream watching this whether live or on recording what we've seen kind of tldr based off of our data from collab land and where we see things going is that we are noticing a new type of dgen that is appearing and I'm going to walk through our findings and what we've experienced hopefully will be Illuminating and uh educational for all of you so some context so before I talk about tele friends want to give you some information about collab land so we've been around for about four years uh we service and help manage about 54,000 communities on Telegram and Discord we are a token gating bot and what that means is if you have an asset like an nft you can use that and use the collab land bot to verify that you hold that asset and if you do you get into special channels within telegram chat channels in Telegram in and our Discord uh currently we have about 13 million connected wallets uh we manage over 30 different chains so all of the major evm chains um but also nonm chains Bitcoin is recently popped up um if all of you or any of you know about like ordinals or inscriptions we Service uh salana near and Flo and bunch of other chains like uh polka dot uh for example and uh a lot of the communities that we manage are the Blue Chip nft communities a lot of prominent defi communities uh gaming communities like axi infinti and what we're seeing as crypto and nfts mainstream is a lot of consumer Brands so there is Adidas McLaren Barbie um and we're seeing a lot of um of these communities grow uh so much so that this last month in January uh was our largest growth month ever so um you know we believe that momentum is now coming back into the cycle into the market it's a little bit different this time around because um it's not happening all on one chain and so uh we're seeing a lot of growth uh across a bunch of different chains especially uh different l2s now again that on eth Main net gas is um becoming more expensive we as a community also uh launched a token last year uh around this time so uh we had our first oneyear lockup period expire we have about 110,000 token holders um and over the course of this last year we've held over 50 Community spaces on X we've had 34 town halls in Discord uh that we've streamed and recorded you can check out our YouTube we had over 24 or about 24 Dev deep dies uh explaining our technology and what we're doing there's a lot that we do under the hood I'll explain a little bit about that when I I talk about tele friends we have done a lot of live devrell sessions that we have Integrations uh we have a whole platform of mini apps that thirdparty developers can utilize and build to um Leverage The collab land and um distribution base uh we've had 15 Spotlight on security security is uh one of those values that we hold up along with privacy and so uh especially in crypto and with a lot of new people coming in especially from like nfts uh security is Paramount and utmost importance for us uh so we have uh these security sessions and uh we've been running uh these AI research team meetups and again I'll explain a little bit more in terms of what we and how we see AI playing out uh when it comes to communities and tokenized communities so that's a little bit about collab land what we've seen happening um and what we uh you know are coming from now as we get into this next cycle and our arguably uh I think people would say that we're already in a new cycle right now um we've not only taken a look at our data not only listened to our community getting feedback but what has also informed us is the technical advances the technical innovations that now have become unlocked so these four texts are kind of initiatives have really set the groundwork for us and we really try to figure out you know how do we utilize these Innovations so one is smart accounts um I don't know who's heard about account abstraction here in the audience all right so smart accounts um what we've done is we made it easy for people to onboard into crypto um so you can in in a telegram or a Discord if it's managed by a collab land bot uh we have the capability where you as the end user can do transactions Within These third-party platforms without having to leave the platform so it's that convenience factor we use multi-party compute compute networks NPC networks who sort of MPC networks so we partnered with a project called lit protocol and with lit they have the ability to Shard your private key so we as collab land do not have custody of your account you do um and I happy if people are interested in understanding more of the technical detail and how you maintain sovereignty without having to manage your own private key happy to talk to you about that and with this along with the the smart accounts users can have full custody of their account and there are other things that we can provide along the way with these smart accounts under this EIP this ethereum Improvement proposal 4337 where you as a user onboarding into crypto don't even need eth or anything to pay for gas so uh all of this Tech is production ready in 2023 we've been working on this in terms of integration for about a year at collab land and everyone understands and if you're you know coming to eth Denver I think it's hard pressed to not hear about crypto and Ai and so we've been working on um fine-tuning a language model for a group Community setting where people can express a natural ual language because Community chat is not only a great interface for people to talk together online but it's a great interface for AI so that's why I think you see a lot of um AI interfaces being chat-based and so um and I'll talk about that a little bit more when uh we get to tell a friends and then these like yield-based business models so uh I think it's today there is an L2 um that's launching with a yield-based system and so with all of this with our our data and what we're seeing in terms of growth and the type of communities that we see are um engaged online that have a token and with all this Tech that is being ready and production available um we we thought to ourselves okay how do we apply this uh and you know with that though we also took a step back and we also looked at what's happening culturally and all of this like this next slide that I'm going to present is just kind of you know my subjective opinion and so um and I'll go through this real quick and then we we'll get to tell a friends so you see after covid and I would argue that a lot of this like previous cycle was spawned from covid and being people being locked down but people wanting to connect so they go online um people not being able to really uh make money if you will so I think there was an intention and a mainstream interest when it came to crypto um and so with that you see uh the proliferation of nfts for example uh but postco after covid uh you've seen these different social platform Dynamics you see Twitter changing its name to X new owners you see threads applying and reaching um you know a new demographic or audience you see decentralized social networks like Macedon popup you also have seen like this multi-polar shift where you see cultural dominance um you know from I guess other areas of the world specifically Asia um rising in dominance so that has this like internet um kind of resonance as well and I think you see that a lot too in crypto uh you see Brands adopting nfts so you see the mainstreaming and um you know that's what we see a lot at collab land we we get approached by Brands all the time you know asking because collab land is a free product the these Brands actually wanting to like just give us money because they can't you know they can't just be having a free product manage their communities they need someone to be held responsible for things if they go wrong because they're more in a this defensive position so you see this mainstreaming of nft communities you see this kind of if you're familiar with like Street Wear and um hype Beast you see this I guess postco post hype Beast what's happening Next Movement they go from being kind of Quasi online to now being full Deens I would argue that this type of street wear cultural drop culture actually has fueled nfts and is very much a parallel to what you see um regardless whether you like it or not like airdrop and airdrop farming and then what we're seeing now too which I don't know if a lot of people especially in the ethereum ecosystem really understand is this Bitcoin kind of cultural energy that is coming down the pipeline and again this is my opinion but the way I see it is that the havening is going to happen probably in april-ish time frame minor fees are going to get reduced and what you're seeing and what I'm hearing I would love to talk to anyone that is part of the Bitcoin ecosystem or Community is seeing the miners being okay with these new type of experiments like layer twos and with their version of nfts so you know ordinals or inscriptions and I think you're seeing this huge like ecosystem buy off there uh from uh these communities and I I think with that you see this Renaissance uh happening on in Bitcoin right now that is this overall Revival they may be in my opinion a cycle late but like Bitcoin and the community and the ecosystem there feels kind of like 2019 2020 so they're kind of like a cycle behind um but all of this together so our data the tech that's happening in the ethereum OR evm ecosystem the kind of dynamics that are happening worldwide and culturally we I think are coming into this like next cycle of like you know you want to if you want to call them shitcoins if you want to call them meme coins I think I'm just labeling them like status coins right now because it's really about status and for me I've been um an ethereum developer since 2016 you know personally I had this kind of um I don't know distaste or this kind of hands off approach when you see the 2017 like Ico cycle um and you know you saw that most recently even though a bunch of our communities are nft communities uh you know I'm not coming from a trading background I'm more coming it from the Dow space uh and coordination space but I think that and this is where telr comes in and this is why we are experimenting with it is that you're seeing just this new mode of a Trader coming on and I think it's really going to be spurred on by these AI agents you know you can imagine so for for collab we managed the largest Discord server in the world which was axi Infinity that has now been dethroned by mid Journey so mid journey is now the largest Discord server in the world and you have all these channels of people typing slash imagine and then doing these prompts and the AI returning visually these AI generated images and what we've seen whole and getting traction is people wanting to understand how to make trading prompts because if you're a and you're probably in a couple of these like telegram Alpha groups these private groups and you can probably you're in a few of them trying to get the latest Alpha but what we're seeing is people learning and using AI to get that edge now for us at collab land working on Smart accounts and making mainstream adoption easier for us what we were thinking is like you know if we allow mainstream adoption to happen you know retail is just is going to get fleeced by these algo Traders and so for us with tele friends trying to kind of nurture this new type of Trader SL reseller slash you know collector if you will of these status coins what we're seeing is that they come together in a group and they're creating these trading prompts to be able to gain status whether you know they're early or in a group or know about a coin first or through the fragmentation of all these different l2s being able to Arbitrage because it's really hard and I think as we get into this cycle you know the whole thing is like people are going to be in front of their laptops or their desktops 247 we we see this new kind of gameplay happening with AI and it's emergent and we see this as an extension of nft community so these kind of new form of dgen Traders if you will are more on the collectible side they're not reading charts they're not doing ta uh they're not creating Algos scripts uh and they're not sharing them they're just basically you know collecting these coins and selling them and they are not nfts they are fungible because their fungible tokens are just a lot more liquid and more quickly to be traded um and you're seeing the rise of this group trading and people are doing this for status um so that's tele friends that's our experiment I hope it was insightful to everyone in terms of how we've distilled four years of analysis um trying to understand the technology that is coming our way this next cycle and in the context of these broader uh you know macro Dynamics basically culture as we see it because I think that we have this mainstreaming moment with crypto it's not something that I would have imagined uh eight years ago but here we are now um so eight years ago I thought it would happen in a year or two uh but now I I see that it's happening now uh and we're embracing it and so um beyond the look out for tele friends um I'm James Young I should have put my Twitter there but I'm James Young on Twitter if you want to reach out um and thank you very much