Collab.land, Colorado & Tokenized Communities - James Young

[Applause] welcome east denver um my name is james young i am ceo of a bridge we make a product called collab land have people heard of collab land okay awesome excellent so if you use collab land great uh what i'm gonna be talking about today is how do we exit to community for collab land and so i want to first thank everyone here that has helped contribute to east denver this is an amazing event i remember eat denver one of my first eve conferences and was motivated by just kind of the spirit of uh the community here moved to boulder in 2019 and so if you're into crypto into daos uh i would highly recommend checking out what this state has my home state colorado has and it was about three years ago actually this week when we launched i helped launch uh molok dao we've been toying around with the concept of dao's for a few years and what really got me interested in in ethereum specifically was the dow in uh 2016 and how we can reduce coordination costs and that was just this rabbit hole that fascinated me and when we were launching malloc we were like we need to create a whole new economic system because web 2 is equivalent to living in the dark ages right you're the product you're the surf tilling the land using your attention and all of your actions for these platform providers to make money off of advertisers and the concept here and it still is true you know with web3 and when we were launching molecules thinking wait you know we need to be able to own it's about working together and shared ownership and in this age of enlightenment and uh practically speaking uh having been part of malik and helped start meta cartel dao um with there was this difference in terms of practicality and so it was really hard to to let alone like converse with someone on a dow proposal because i don't know who 0x123 is right and so when we launched collab land in 2020 it was really just a practical kind of cheat code where because with collaborant this is my fourth startup i know how hard it is to be able to get people to go to a website so what we did was we said hey you know what i want to solve a problem i need to be able to hol uh talk to token holders so why don't we just have a bot and go to where people already are and that was a kind of the the beginning and the inspiration of collab land and um we're still very early and when i was looking at uh the the traction that we had with collab land and thinking about web 2 yes you are still the product you're still tilling the land but i think with web 3 what i've come to realize is that we're turning things kind of upside down right so whether you're an nft a d5 a dow or a play to earn community you get to set up shop now you get free commercial real estate on these platforms it's still very early and i think this is why uh the this experiment with collabolin is so interesting so we're just at the very beginning things are very chaotic right so this is what i would kind of understand if you know your endows or in these nft communities these discord servers can be kind of frenetic but i think this is where the opportunity is so as we take a step back we have at collab land 13 different chains the majority of them are evm based side chains or evm compatible and we have discord and telegram we're working on reddit i'll talk about that in a minute and we have a github inter integration and we have looked at other a bunch of different platforms and we know that these platforms are ripe anything that has an api if everyone anyone knows what an api is can be integrated or can be used to provide token granting roles for whatever that platform is and when we started with collab land and we thought of it as just being able to bring people together that have this shared ownership we didn't understand actually what this would mean with 13 different chains many different wallets just two platforms we have just on discord over 20 000 tokenized communities we have over three or almost two three and a half million registered wallets what's interesting though is we're just scratching the surface and when we go back to just what is it that we're trying to do now with collab land because we have this opportunity in a way to kind of take back these platforms that we've worked so hard on and now we can have a sustainable economic shared model my ideas of like what web 3 is have evolved so instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water we can actually take back the internet we can take back uh these platforms that are supposed to serve us and this is where i think collab land is going part of that and with all this data that we hold uh there are a couple things that we want to make sure that we push forward right so as we exit to community and there have been other projects that have exited to community we don't think of it as like flipping a switch what we're doing now is getting the stamina the working out the the collaboration so we have a small team uh we're six full-time employees but we have many many partners and for us as we exit to community what's super important for us is that we have a token whatever that there isn't it's not like turning on a light switch it's not throwing something over the fence and like yolo good luck we want to make sure that it's a smooth experience so when i talk about the focuses that we have for collab land one is focusing on these api integrations two is what i'm gonna briefly describe in terms of self-sovereign identity dids decentralized ids and verifiable credentials it's all about ownership right i don't think anyone of us here is interested in creating the old system just on new rails so what we're focused on in terms of ownership is is very important and the data and the sovereignty the responsibility ultimately will end on the individual and we need to make room for that what does that look like this is part of this experiment as we decentralize and third and what's important is that there's this interoperability that we make sure that like we're building this together so for the first point uh when i talk about how we're decentralizing talk about our integrations i want to highlight the different groups that we're working with again we're working with a bunch of different initiatives teams and projects i'm only going to call out a few because of the nature of this presentation but we are working with a bunch and i'm just going to highlight just a small percentage or a small group of them so the first one i want to give a shout out to raid guild raid guild if you don't know what raid guild is go check out redguild.org and it's born from metta cartel and we're here to just help people understand web3 and one of the first integrations outside of our core team is this reddit integration so don't mind the the slide it's just there to tell you that we have everything kind of figured out and planned out uh for the reddit integration and it's coming soon so as we decentralize we're taking on more platforms and reddit is going to be um is on the roadmap not only do we have these uh different platforms from like an api level i'm going to get a little bit technical we have these like i don't know what you want to categorize them i call them like dao ops so there is like coordinate source cred and a couple others that i'll i'll mention here and one of the first ones that we're integrating with that's not quite a platform but more of this like dow tooling is sumadai so sumadai is a project that is wanting to become an ops platform where you can track your tasks in a dao see the task details and see how uh who's in the dao as well so you can think of it as a linkedin so that you can actually see members in a doubt a glass door you get to see uh what the dao is doing in a trello for task management and what we've collaborated with sumadia on is retroactive reward so if you're familiar with collab land right now you know that there's a bot interface what we're previewing right here is a web app that we're coming out with it's coming out of beta now as we speak that allows these community admins to be able to set their token granting roles in a website because the bot interface is great and easy to use but it can become cumbersome and so with sumadai and retroactive rewards we are using source cred so that communities don't have to be based solely on asset ownership so you can contribute to a dow and earn these rewards that are weighted via source cred and this is what vitalik has mentioned and written about in terms of retroactive rewards so now we're moving from just token granting roles based off of asset ownership to being able to extend that so that you can get new roles based off of uh retroactive reward so let's say you do something in a dow you can get rewarded for it and we're going to come out with this source credit integration soon two in terms of uh what we're doing in terms of ownership is we're working with veromo veromo agent is what we use to be able to deploy or be able to create verifiable credentials so again here is a quick demo we're going to come out with this user portal where users will be able to claim their verifiable credential and what do i mean by that well what right now with collab land you get access to let's say a discord channel because you own an asset what we think will become valuable is not only owning that asset but also the actions that those assets unlock so with a verifiable credential that's based off of your asset ownership collab land could attest that you are early in on a nft community right so for example you may not own that asset you may not own that board ape or that world of women anymore but through these verifiable credentials collabolin a test that you were early on and you had access to these channels and so you can take those verifiable credentials and then you can move on to a new dow so you're not like starting at level one you have now what's the beginning of your resume or your reputation and so what we're going to do is not only token grant roles based off of asset ownership but by the actions that you've done and the things that those assets have unlocked so that's kind of our our step two and we want to make sure that you as a user are owning that you have selective disclosure for that and so we're going to try to figure it out there is this interesting ui ux scenario where people are going to have to learn and be responsible for that data just like people in web 3 have to be responsible for for their keys and so this is kind of this next level of ownership and data ownership and part of our experiment as we exit to community is to find and figure out this together and then three is uh interoperability like this doesn't make sense the the whole money legos metaphor or the composable community metaphor breaks down if there is an interoperability so we want to make sure that uh we start off and we are interoperable this is why for all these points in terms of focuses for decentralization we make sure that we are working with other partners so we are creating the stamina we are creating like we're working out organizationally on how to decentralize and so for interoperability we're working with sobel and sobol is this uh ui that shows you the a map of your dao and it gives you details on uh a visualization in terms of details of uh who's in the dao what the dao is doing who is making up members of that dao and kind of their contribution and i will turn the audio off on this but what we're doing with our uh oops what we're doing with our integration for interoperability this video is not playing but i'll explain it is that with sobol we're able to take sobel verifiable credentials into collab land we're creating a standard an interoperability standard for verifiable credentials we are taking it very slow we're starting and we're using and thinking about the openc metadata standard for interoperability so we will try to stay unopinionated about whether these vc's should be on chain as like nfts transferable or non-transferable or if these are just purely off-chain ass test stations and with sobel they'll be able to and this is what the video shows that they can ingest collab land vcs so we're beginning on this road of interoperability um and so i think we all can agree decentralization is uh the future uh and uh thank you for listening to this presentation i would highly encourage everyone again um to take a look at colorado and what every and what is happening here on a statewide level um it's been an honor to share the same stage with all these incredible thought leaders i think that you know when we had set out to start malloc we are thinking about a decentralized future i think that there is this ability for us to not throw the baby out with the bath water my hypothesis my purview and what i see seems to be working right now is this ability to work with the platform providers work with governments um and to be able to carve out this future of work in terms of decentralization i think it's inevitable and so you know i encourage everyone uh to to get on board to be able to check out what we're doing at collab land we don't have all the answers uh this is an experiment and me actually being here on stage and talking about decentralizing collab land you know it may seem like a chilly kind of thing but for me it's this i know i need to do this and i need to put and hold my feet to the fire and so i need to publicly state this so this is what we're starting now and uh again i don't have all the answers could use a help so if you know you're interested in this at all i'm going to summarize all of this in a blog post and please reach out and always are looking for feedback for collab land thank you [Applause]