The most recent wave of crypto hype has centered around various denominations of crypto “communities” in which tokens—be they NFTs or something else—represent a stake in or ownership of a collective enterprise. 

Take the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which entitles holders of the wildly popular Bored Apes NFTs to various (often lucrative) perks and memberships in decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. Today it seems there’s a DAO for every new, heavily marketed token launch in existence: There are DAOs for artists, fundraisers, even social media influencers. And almost all of them make use of two major communications channels to communicate: Telegram and Discord. 

The problem is that managing these large groups and coordinating the tokenomics, which can often involve astronomical sums of money and a sensitive repository of personal data, can be hugely difficult.

What is Collab.Land? 

That’s where Collab.Land comes in. 

Created under the auspices of Abridged, Inc—a company founded by Anjali Young, a Web3 entrepreneur and collaborator with major DAOs MolochDAO and MetaCartel— the software was designed to make the experience of setting up a DAO and governing the tokenomics easy and safe for users and moderators alike. 

In its simplest form, Collab.Land is a bot that a would-be moderator of a Discord of Telegram-based crypto community can download as an add-on. It offers a range of commands around group dynamics, public addresses, and token mints. But its longer-term goal is far loftier, and its mission statement is to “reignite an era of shareware that is community-owned and operated” and to “iterate towards a sustainable open source business model.” 

vulnerable to scammy imitators who simply drain the users’ wallets.

How does Collab.Land work?

At the outset, Collab.Land works rather like any typical software add-on. You download the app and activate it via Discord or Telegram, which allows you to chat to the bot via the pre-existing user interface. 

Commands govern things like the amount of tokens that will be minted, what kinds of tokens will be minted, whether the chat will be open only to friends or to the wider public, and more complex variables pertaining to the given organizational structure of a DAO: How many votes a token confers, for instance, or how many tokens entitle a holder to a given role within the DAO, or even which blockchain the DAO (or general crypto chat) will run on. 

After these instructions are fed into the bot, it will proceed to take care of everything, automating the running of the DAO. 

What's so special about Collab.Land? 

Part of the great promise of Web3 is that it allows great swaths of the web to be owned by users, thereby acting as true “public goods.” Collab.Land claims to operate within this tradition—though it is centrally developed, free to use, and funded via private donations rather than venture capital (you can buy an NFT to support the project for 6.9 ETH). 

It follows in the exalted footsteps of other DAO-enhancing chatbots, including DAO search-bot Wayfare, all in furtherance of the dream of a powerful, AI-enhanced crypto ecosystem.

Collab.Land also combines the Web2 simplicity of the messaging apps it supports with under-the-hood crypto complexity, making use of hybrid platforms such as Stripe to make the user experience easier. 

All of this has made Collab.land widely used by DAOs as well as more run-of-the-mill crypto communities. On its donation page (to finance the upgrade to Collab.Land 2.0), Collab.Land’s developers boast that the app’s users include such venerable NFT projects as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Lazy Lions, as well as more mainstream-aligned projects like NBA Top Shot and Fox reality show "The Masked Singer," which has launched its own NFT collection.

Other projects working with Collab.Land 

• 💱 Axie Infinity - An NFT-based roleplaying game using a Pokemon-like collectible mechanic that allows users to trade and “battle” NFT monsters, called Axies. 
• 🃏 MetaMask - The go-to Ethereum wallet, which was previously the only one supported by Collab.Land. (Collab.Land now features it alongside others, such as Phantom and Flow.)