Owning Your Future: From Community to Identity

Transcript

good afternoon everyone so happy to see all of you about two minutes ago this room was completely empty so thank you for showing up um my name is anjali young i am the co-founder and ceo for abridged inc we're the makers of collab land um we are a verification bot on right now telegram and discord have any of you used collab land before yeah a couple of you awesome that's good to know oh i see some friends coming in so amazing today i'm going to talk about where we started with collab land how we started where we are now and where we're going and it fits nicely with community to

identity because that's going to be like the the final resting place of where we are at least for now so collab land started well a bridge started in 2018 we started with an abridged sdk so the main purpose of once we when we decided to start a bridge was getting people to come user onboarding having people join us in this magical space of crypto we had felt like this is a real unlock for people but they need to get here in order to experience it so the original idea was an sdk which was a a wallet that had social recovery so you could identify two or three of your

friends and they would also share your private not share but they would have access to your private key so that way if you lost your private key you weren't just in a mess you could actually get it from maybe trusted individuals maybe your parents maybe your best friend whoever business partner so we started there and it was to bring the users how can we bring people to come and start using crypto sorry about that and that didn't work so people weren't coming we couldn't get users that was about two years of trying to get people to start using this wallet start using social recovery but the

concept of even coming in using it why would they there just wasn't anything enticing enough other than maybe the speculators to come in and start using it and so we pivoted in january of 2020 to no code tooling so if you can't get people to join maybe you can get or users to join maybe you can get developers to join so we started no code tooling in january of 2020 to build a platform so that way developers could come didn't have to really know how to do much but they could start building apps and maybe if we build the apps the users will come well what happened then was kovit so in spring of 2020 we had kovit and so we thought okay what can we do here to

be helpful to the greater community of people that are suffering right now so we started the collab 19 dow the collab 19 dao was a way to collect funds and to grant funds to people who were suffering or were in need or had some negative impact either financially or medically from the effects of covid and at this time if you remember spring of 2020 this is when lockdown had begun this is when people were still dying from covet and it felt like maybe crypto could be a really great way to do something for people where they could see how lots of different people from all over the world can get together and do something

good so we started the collab 19 dow and the first issue that we had at that point is that new people were coming in and we didn't know them prior to spring of 2020 most people who were in dallas you knew who they were you knew them from personal relationships maybe you had met them at conferences maybe you had online relationships with them and so there wasn't really a need to identify people by their wallet address because you knew whose wallet addresses belong to who like i knew that robert had a certain wallet and so he and i could be in a group together and i could identify him but this was the first case of i didn't know who these people were and what are we going to do now and people were advocating for grants to be given to different people that they knew

and so we needed to be able to identify people and so collab land was the first version of that um collaboland was a way where you joined a community and we started off as a telegram bot where we verified that you owned a certain wallet we would check your wallet to make sure you had shares of our dao which was the molok dao at that point and if you had those shares you gained access into the community and if you sold those shares then you were removed from the community so that was kind of the first um if you think of the word token gating now and i don't know how many of you are involved with that but it seems ubiquitous now everyone's using it but at that time it's it very much felt like

a fresh idea um and we we solved our problem of wanting to know who people were so the first use case or the first adoption of collab land our token verification tool were dows and that was because at this time spring of 2020 there was a lot of cross-pollination across daos people that were interested in taos were kind of in the same dows and so people who were in ardaos took our idea of the collaboland token gating and they used the collab land bot in their dows shortly after dao's investment group started using collab land um as you know from like 2016 2017 that was

the ico boom there were still holders of these tokens even in 2020 and now you could project owners communities could say okay if you own a certain number of these tokens you can join our investment group and you can get it by having like maybe a thousand maybe a hundred thousand the communities that they would decide themselves on who would have access and in these investment groups there would be deal share deal flow um sharing new projects that were coming out um and they were able to build an identity through that and so it's interesting because the communities themselves with the deal flow going on in the investment groups the tokens themselves the prices would go up because now you had to have a

certain number of tokens or at this point fungible tokens with the investment groups to get in to the communities and so the value was brought to these investment tokens then after that we had social tokens i don't know if any of you remember um alex masmesh um he runs try showtime he started a social token around his own life where it was like buy an alex token so now he was able to get all the people who owned his alex token into a community together where they would decide like what he would do next um after that it was fwb that was another social token that started using collab land so the idea of token gating based on an asset that you could see online that could be verified

by the blockchain became more and more compelling what we didn't see or know at that point was nfts so nfts very exciting that's probably where i started like perking up and at i was firing on all cylinders with nfts it was so exciting um initially i was like oh this is these are also tokens now people are selling their 10 000 tokens to however many people they should get into a collab land community they should come in use our bot and have all the people who bought this nft in a group together so i went on the hunt um i run the twitter account and so i was dming over twitter if you can even imagine this is long before scammers

knew who we were and i was dming every single new nft project i could find and say hey why don't you try collab land it's this really cool tool where you can get everyone who bought your nft into a at this point we had moved to discord into a discord together and you can all talk to each other and build a little bit of a community together like is that something you'd want to do and so at the beginning it was definitely like a digital um pounding of the pavement i was knocking on all the doors and the exciting thing was and i was actually doing these like collab land community spotlights every single friday and that's because i was lucky to even get i was lucky to even get um one community

every week to use collab land so those were the very early days however about like four to six weeks after and i don't really remember exactly um but it was within a month or two um every single community that i reached out to said oh we're already using collab land um and that was like our our first real like real win um after all of that like slogging of just begging people to use it the interesting thing about nft communities is i like i mentioned that this was a time during um covet and so our irl life was um shrinking and our digital life was growing and nfts gave people an identity so you know we talk about pfps and and whether or

not you like pfps but pfps were a way for people to identify themselves digitally online and it was also attached to a financial asset and so what we saw with nfts is the concept of this community idea just was supercharged at this point because now you bought an nft because you maybe liked the art you joined the collab land community and then you got to know the people and you enjoyed that community so much that you were willing to to make it your profile picture and your online identity all right so let me quickly go through identity so now what are we doing with community communities so now we're at 40 000 communities we have 4 million connected wallets what can we do now

how are we going to unlock what happens now and we're moving into identity so we're taking a two-prong approach with identity one is through issuing verifiable credentials so collab land we've been there from the day one of crypto communities and so we will be able to attest to what you've done in those communities maybe you owned a world of women but you only owned it for six months and now you don't have it anymore it's okay collab land can issue you a verifiable credential for what you've done where you've been it's almost like a um a web3 resume that you can take with you now with verifiable credentials they're offline i mean they're off chain you have the opportunity to make them on chain you can mint them as nfts so you can think of them as off chain nfts so like if you

want to start your own nft project you may want all of it to be on chain and so that way anybody would be able to look at it however maybe you want to apply for a dao maybe you want to apply to be an admin in a different community maybe you don't want all of that to be on chain so everybody could look at it so with an off chain nft which is how i'm going to call it off chain nft you'll be able to share that with who you want and the second way we're going to be doing this is opening up our platform we'll be opening up our api so in two ways one is we're going to have a marketplace and so for all of our 40 000 admins right now there's a collab land dashboard we will have a marketplace so

if you have an app that you want to open up and share with our admins and it's something that they find valuable then you'll be able to present it to them so that's going to be through our marketplace also we'll be opening up our api so that way if you have a platform if you have a website if you have anything that you have that you want to start incorporating token gating into that um into that platform then you'll be able to use collab land you know collab land over the last two years it's been it's been hard but the benefits of it is we've fortified ourselves and we've grown grown stronger over the last two years we're up to 15 blockchains that we

support we have over 20 wallets that we support we started with just balance checking of a wallet address or a public wallet address and now we do metadata gating so you can even have sub-communities this has happened together in collaboration with our communities i also run the support team i've been having like my ear to the ground with what communities need and so everyone should benefit from that so i really hope all of you come and want to build on top of us like let us be the water pipes and you build your water park whatever excites you whatever interests you you can use our plumbing and we can do something special together so thank you so much um

for api endow updates we're also going to be becoming a dao um it's collab underscore land underscore um i'm dama de roca which is lady from boulder in spanish but don't send me any support questions so i got to put that up right there so thank you so much everyone [Applause] you