The firm plans to expand to Reddit as easing the movement of large groups of people becomes more important

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Collaboration is central to everything about web3. Whether you’re governing a decentralized autonomous organization, managing a treasury, leading an NFT project or running a Discord server, the ability to coordinate large groups of people has become easier than ever before. But it takes serious tools to pull it off, and Collab.Land has emerged as one of the earliest and most vital.

Since its inception in 2020, Collab.Land has been integrated into about 40,000 communities on Telegram and Discord, they’re connected to 6 million wallets and are about to add Reddit to the platforms that their software can access. The Discord bot is maybe the best known use of Collab.Land, which checks a user’s wallet to confirm it holds the necessary NFT or number of tokens to be part of a token-gated community like Friends With Benefits.

While that’s all well and good, maybe the best thing about Collab.Land is that it helps create troll-free zones online.

“We are able to be this infrastructure plumbing play,” James Young, the founder of Collab.Land, told me recently. With the scale the company has reached, “we’re the water pipes and then other people use our system to create the water park,” he said.

Vote with your wallet

The economic incentive does seem to influence people’s behavior. Compare the level of discourse on crypto Twitter with an average token-gated Discord server and the difference is obvious. Of course, not all Discord servers are a futuristic utopia but then again, they’re not the atomic garbage fire that is CT.

People can vote with their wallet, in effect, Young said, because when they have a sunk cost into a community, spam and trolls are largely avoidable.

“Every day you don’t sell your assets you’re deciding that being a part of this community has a dollar value and is worth it,” he said. Collab.Land came out of a company Young started in 2018 called Abridged that provides digital wallets. The NFT craze was just about to reach liftoff and Collab.Land was suddenly in huge demand.

“We didn’t anticipate the mainstreaming of crypto through NFTs,” Young said. “But we were at the right place at the right time.”

What Young wants to enable is for large groups of people to be able to shift from one platform to another with as little fuss as possible. While individuals can easily move between platforms today, it’s harder for groups to do the same.

Reducing coordination costs

“What we see is this kind of power because everyone’s anchored in this shared financial asset to move across platforms,” he said. “The heart of what we do at Collab.Land is reduce coordination costs.”

The next platform to integrate Collab.Land, Reddit, said recently that 2.5 million users had created digital wallets since it opened an NFT marketplace in July. Reddit was how Young learned about crypto, and he says the social and news platform has a deep understanding of digital assets. About two years ago Reddit gave some users Ethereum wallets that connected to the Rinkeby test network.

“What Reddit is doing with NFTs, and not calling them NFTs, actually comes from a rich history that a lot of people may not know,” Young said. “Reddit’s been looking at crypto for many, many years.”

In another sign of more mainstream adoption, Apple recently released its App Store rules related to cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Some found the new guidelines onerous and restrictive, such as only allowing apps to access licensed exchanges in parts of the world that allow trading, but Young had a more nuanced take.

Read more: The Web3 Rewind Newsletter: Crypto v Tech Giants

“I know that Apple is really interested in crypto,” he said. “They are trying to create, from my outside perspective, a constraint or guardrail so things don’t get out of control,” he said. “It may look kind of onerous from the outside especially to crypto-natives, like, ‘oh my gosh, they’re the bad guys now.’”

But that’s not the vibe he hears from startups that are getting funded by vehicles related to Apple.  

“It may seem weird, but I do think Apple is trying to evolve here. But they have to tighten things up a bit so that they can experiment in a closed system before things get out of hand,” Young said. “They have so much to lose.”

True to its collaborative roots, Young plans to convert Collab.Land next year into a Colorado-registered co-op.

“We’re going to be turning into a distribution platform,” he said. “We’re going to do what’s called ‘an exit to community.’ We’re not a defi protocol, we’re not just running on smart contracts. We have AWS bills to pay, we have a bot on Discord” that has to be maintained. As a co-op “we’ll have a centralized service but a decentralized governance.”

It’s part of an effort by the state to get DAOs to set up in Colorado, Young said. “That’s the new era of DAOs, if you will, that aren’t just governed at the blockchain lower-level protocol but are going to have formal corporations” associated with their operation.  

“As the maintainers of Collab.Land, we’ll work for the DAO and then progressively go and decentralize,” Young said.