Decentralizing Collab.Land - James Young

i have to actually start off with an apology here because uh i was supposed to speak earlier today and i got my schedule all mixed up and actually this kind of dovetails into the reason why uh we're decentralizing collab land because we've been working so hard i feel like i don't have enough hours in the day so i want to start out with that so these slides may be a bit abridged and shortened and so i left some time for q a but i'm gonna go through this and uh i'm james young ceo of a bridge we make collab land and i want to give some context into why we are deciding to decentralize uh collab land and for some perspective you know the way that we tend to look at web 2 right now is like this internet kind of dark ages right where the internet is a fundamentally or architecturally peer-to-peer but now we have these like huge platform providers and the response to collab land initially didn't have this insight and so i want to talk about how and what we've learned and how we've kind of thought about our role as collab land as as we've have contact with with the market you know in a lot of ways land is a little different than you know the typical web 3 uh project or initiative because you know 2017 it was all about icos and a white paper and a great team and i was there at that time i was actually one of the lead developers of malik based out actually this is the third year anniversary of the framework and uh you know there's there's a lot to to learn there and what we did in terms of going to market with collab land is try to be as kind of anti-shilly as possible and just really show the utility and the value and that kind of has informed kind of our perspective and how we look at uh web 2. so you know you work on a platform whether it's twitter facebook clubhouse or whatever vr ar platform these platform providers are going to take your data and take your information and sell it and so you actually don't own anything on the platform we think of web 3 as this kind of new age we're getting out of the dawn of this like dark ages into this kind of age of ownership and so um it's really chaotic and it's really wild right now and this is kind of kind of the state of web 3. right where it's like this angry mob we don't know what to do here we're all on discord trying to like all figure it out together and one of the key lessons that you know we've seen at collab land is that there is this kind of fork in the road you either go like web 2 screw you and we're going to rebuild everything from scratch and i and i've seen that what we have done at collab land though is try to see what we can embrace what parts of web 2 could we can use and kind of as this cheat code as we're trying to assemble communities in web3 so one of the the key insights for collab land early on and this was not our intention the the key thing that we initially wanted to do was create a minimum viable dow so i helped with the malloc doubt the biggest thing that or the challenge with malloc the first couple years was just getting everyone in the same room but how do you know if people are still members or not and this is where we kind of invented this category of token granting or token gating a role so we started on telegram and we were thinking wow this is going to be a thing because we saw the data and we said okay well can we move to other platforms and it's really this kind of um serendipity where we actually got onto discord as the d5 summer was slowing down and this whole nft craze was coming up and so with that and looking at the market um we thought wait a second this is not just about building a minimum viable dial this is not just about like dow tooling but it's more about a hybrid solution and so i'll talk about this what what i now kind of imagine when it comes to the transition from web 2 to web 3 it's not creating at least in my perspective the twitter of web3 or the facebook of web3 what i did was i took a look back at kind of the history of the internet like web 1.0 was really uh this producer to consumer model what you know people ascribe to web 2.0 is this like user-generated content or you know people actually participating on a platform but the way i think about web 2.

0 is this is the kind of start or the era of apis and this is a key difference or the key kind of dimension that we look at things so in web 2.0 if you and this is a very very high level example salesforce invented the category of software as a service in 2000 it was embraced by facebook because facebook was the first like social platform that allowed third-party developers to build on that platform um i was there i was at zynga help launch farmville and saw kind of the the fire hose from a consumer perspective of what happens uh when you open up a platform and then you know if you take a look at the extreme you have companies like zapier that connect apis together and you can un you can see and this is kind of coincidental that there's these like six-year kind of kind of high-level cycles here right where the category gets invented in six years it gets adopted to consumer and then another six years people actually build api tooling just to stitch apis together in kind of a like loose way we i see this happening in web 3 right but it's actually happening at a faster clip because you don't have these centralized services uh mandating and having to grow and create the distribution so the way i look at kind of the api evolution i think of ethereum as really the first blockchain that opened up its api right when you create a smart contract the output of a smart contract is two things binary code and an abi right and this abi really is just an interface definition into a smart contract so you know the way i look at ethereum from this perspective from an api it was just now you can actually have these communities or token holding or these own group ownership now based off of blockchain and it's huge kind of a shift when it comes to ownership that you know you saw kind of at its heyday in the first spike right the in in november 2017 crypto kitties um pretty much clogged the ethereum network and so you see now we've moved from these like six-year kind of cycles and what i kind of maybe this is some confirmation bias here but think of it more like in these two year cycles now we launched uh you know the the bot on telegram uh in in 2019 and then said okay well if we can actually connect a blockchain with an api service can we then extend that to other services or other platforms so at the beginning of last year we launched on discord and it was pretty much like lightning in a bottle kind of thing at collab land right now just to give some high level vanity metrics we just crossed over 20 000 tokenized communities just on discord alone we service multiple chains so you know on uh on ethereum on the ronin chain uh we help manage the axe infinity community that they have about 850 000 users just in their discord and then on the flowchain uh we help manage nba top shot which is about half a million users and that's just two discord servers out of the 20 000 that we help manage so uh what we've done is then extended this idea and this is what kind of we've been hard at work and it's hard to see at the consumer level but now we not only have uh two different platforms telegram and discord that we help service but uh we have 13 chains that we've integrated some are considered side chains some of them are evm based but some of them are not so we think of ourselves as being able to connect this uh we're part of this connective tissue that connects different block chains with different services and so we've been hard at work with scaling and scalability and so we have telegram and discord we also are in beta of reddit and uh we're looking into github so where we're at right now in this updated hypothesis in terms of api integration if we have all these different chains and we have these different apis we can imagine a full-fledged service so you can imagine i'm coming in and i can get token gated like discord and that's what collaboland is known for but you can imagine on the other side of the spectrum like let's say there was a github bot right the github bot could be an admin of the organization and so in order to merge code you have to own certain amount of nfts or tokens for example and so we are seeing ourselves as this acl access control list or verification layer across different chains four different web 2 platforms so not only can you now communicate with token holders now you can if you're a developer or you're managing your dao in github you can token gate your github service and you can then have specific api integrations for example if code gets merged uh maybe that sets off some bounty reward so this is the the a the automa automation part of daos but we've been doing this for about two years we've figured out a lot of the scaling infrastructure on the blockchain side i think it's pretty trivial for us to add new chains whether they're evm based or not but the real issue is creating api integrations that are specific for a platform and so the number one reason why we are wanting to decentralize is that we want to be able to uh get help from those that you know are looking for other api integrations in a permissionless way so not only can you imagine a github integration but you can imagine integration with like notion for example or or air table and so we've listed out a bunch of integrations that we like to see happen but we just don't want to build just to build we want to build based off of use case and with our 20 000 tokenized communities i think we have a good foothold now in terms of being able to take it to the next level so we have prototypes of some of these platform integrations but we want to be able to cultivate a you know a system where once we're decentralized we can get other developers on board integrating uh with collab land so you know right now in the process of decentralization creating the developer experience to make it easy for those to kind of on board developers to be able to onboard and integrate with our api essentially and not only on the platform level but we have these different data providers and this uh dovetails into the second point of why we want to decentralize but when i you know have this big bucket what i'm calling data providers that includes you know three box coordinate source cred and these others like uh kind of and verifiable credentials through uh brahmo or uh you know certo uh is not only is it important for uh we think for a user to be able to be verified for the assets that they have so you can imagine if i'm in like board 8 yacht club right and i sell my ape i get kicked out of that discord server but i've done a lot of great work there maybe i was early on and so what we can do is provide data or more specifically verifiable credentials and i'm going we're going to have a demo of this later on so watch on twitter but let me go back with data ownership in this example if i have these certain roles within a discord the collab land bot can create what they call verifiable credentials it's just a signed message saying that the collab land bot has seen and has proven that i have asset ownership because i've signed a message authenticating that i have custody of the of a wallet and in that wallet is my board aid but then i sell it right and so what good is you know uh my hard work in the board a bia club or in their discord server where is that well the collab land but since it gates access to discord servers and different channels the bot can actually sign a verifiable credential saying james was in x y and z channel at these dates i can take those signed messages you can think of it as like snapshot for ownership it's off chain no gas i can take those and i can i can prove that the club bot said you know i was part of these channels now i can go into world of women and and they can know that like i was in board ape around this time doing x y and z things and so we believe that another crucial aspect for collab land and us decentralizing is to empower users so that they have self sovereignty of their data and data ownership is i think what is really critical here and this is why we've been working so hard because we're not interested in creating this next facebook for crypto we believe that the way that we have an opportunity now and this is why i'm speaking because i implore everyone you know we know where we're at in web 2. we kind of see how we got here we have this window of opportunity i don't know how long it is maybe a year or two while the ecosystem and as we are mainstreaming the clay is still wet and now we have this opportunity to be able to say you know what platforms they can own the certain slivers of our data but we as users we can own you know and we can use these platforms because we're using discord right now to coordinate because it's easy to set up chat and they have a great ui ux kind of from a chat perspective but they don't see any of that value when it comes to the nfts that i own it's us as a collective in this nft community that is also able to now leverage discord so what we what i thought of is starting as minimal viable dow tooling actually when you pull back and you look at apis and being able to connect to any platform is this ability to have this equanimity now in on the internet it's not about finding these platforms for whatever incentives based on advertising that they're following it's about living together and how do we provide this power back to owners and i think this is what web 3 unlocks and this is what i think we have this window this time where we can actually set this trajectory of ownership and this ability to work together with uh platforms and so for us we don't see discord as the end-all be-all we see discord as kind of a pit stop so that you as a user own the actions that are signed by this decentralized verification service across all your platforms so twitter may see your twitter profile and know your actions on twitter but you as a user get to own those actions through verifiable credentials whatever that twitter integration looks like so you can own it on twitter on github on discord on telegram whatever platform comes up in the future and really that is uh what we see as the the power kind of back to the the end users and really really that was what the internet was made for these peer-to-peer relationships uh and you know for us at collab land it's really at first the centralized service so that we can then begin to progressively decentralize um and so that's my presentation my shortened version uh i hope it was informative please follow us at collab land to find the link to the demo with verifiable credentials that uh we'll be showcasing uh this week