Tokenized Community Building

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1. 0:08

   hi everyone it's doran kutcher with blogheads here we're doing another blogheads community interview and today we have james young with us um say hi james hey everyone yeah we're gonna be going over we're going to collab land his background how he got started into blockchain um we're gonna have a lot for this interview guys so i'm super pumped and super excited so step right in james if you want to introduce

2. 0:32

   yourself and that gives us a brief overview of who you are sure thanks for having me super excited about being here i am ceo of a company called abridged and we make a consumer-based product called collab land and collab land is a bot that's on discord and on telegram that allows token holders to have private channels so that you need a certain token and a certain amount of that token which you can configure using the bot to be able to be in a private chat so the idea there is to help reduce the

3. 1:12

   coordination costs for token holders um we're talking about like crypto based tokens all right so you might i'm like so what kind of inspired this like project like this like um what inspire like collab land like how'd you get started yeah the this the beginning of collab land actually uh was an experiment in dao or decentralized autonomous organizations and the initial thesis was instead of creating websites and um driving traffic

4. 1:46

   to these sites where people could do this decentralized governance why don't we bring the technology to users so if you want to have a community and instead of having that community from a dow perspective i'll go to a website and then fill things out in terms of voting and proposals why don't you bring the dow to them and so this was to reduce the distribution and um the kind of coordination

5. 2:18

   so uh instead of having let's say you know 50 000 users go to a site if you have this huge community what you can do is just have one community admin install the bot and now it's available to those 50 000 users and this is where they're naturally already at right chatting and communicating and so initially the club land bot was some it was a is a tool so you can launch a dao vote on proposals and submit proposals and we had it where on discord

6. 2:56

   the bot would you know put out a proposal and you can emoji reply thumbs up or thumbs down if you wanted to vote yes or no and the whole concept was um voting is the new like and so part of the idea as well with the collab land bot was you know decentralized autonomous organizations dao's they're conceptually something new but from a user experience interaction with this decade deck and a half of social media we're used to voting already whether

7. 3:27

   it's liking or retweeting and so it was trying to figure out how to put these new concepts uh to users but in a very familiar way so that was the spark of uh collab land and the bot um and then what we saw was uh people didn't quite understand or couldn't grok this idea of a doubt it was like a big conceptual leap for them uh so uh we pared it down to just you're all in a group together you have the same token you can talk to token holders uh and that um

8. 4:09

   seems to just take off uh and so we went with it and so we're waiting for the market to mature we're seeing the rise of like these social tokens uh where people are you know congregating together online the backdrop of the pandemic people are online more as well and so uh you know we're trying to just be you know a step or maybe a half a quarter step ahead of the market and and see how this evolves but i do think there is a path to bringing back all the dow

9. 4:46

   functionality that we have uh in collab land but just don't know when or yeah when it will happen so yeah just trying to be engaged with the market see where the market is and how it evolves and then bring these features back off the shelf uh when the time is appropriate makes sense so essentially overall it's like it's like a dao mixed in with like with like discord and like telegram and like just kind of like these nfl works with telegram too um yeah it does

10. 5:18

    and like so it like it uses those like the voting features inside of the um of those like platforms already to vote on proposals and use like this like token that exists within this ecosystem um which is it like a complex erc20 token um is it like like what sort of tokens are supported yeah um we support erc20 uh we also so this is on ethereum so on ethereum we support erc20s uh erc 721s nfts

11. 5:50

    and erc 1155 which are these like batch standard for nfts and for fungible tokens we also uh support um tokens on on the near blockchain um so the the nft versions um i think it's nap 141s as well on near um and what we're becoming from a collab land perspective is multi-blockchain and multi-platform so we support uh evm based chains so the main net and side chains and test nuts and then on near the near main net on discord and telegram those are the

12. 6:34

    platforms we support we also support twitch and you know we had this one event where we have a twitch bot that you that allows you to create these sub clips as nfts that then get promoted through the discord bot so you can claim uh the nfts that you mint via the live twitch stream so we had this one um uh this this one twitch streamer her her name is blondish she has abracadabra

13. 7:07

    and so she was doing an earth day festival and there were different clips called magic moments that she meant it as nfts and um once the nft was minted on near um the discord bot would say hey the magic moment has been minted go claim it and then you would just have to emoji reply to be able to be sent this nft so we're seeing this like integration across platforms and across uh different blockchains and it's this emergent

14. 7:39

    design um and uh yeah just experimenting with the this new use case to try to make like crypto much more approachable so uh just to make it kind of fun so you know there are these tenets of like decentralization and um you know disintermediation and permissionlessness and these are very big concepts uh similar to kind of data and data privacy which are these concepts that are more

15. 8:11

    difficult to grasp especially if you haven't experienced that or if you know you don't have a reason to like understand decentralization or permissionlessness or censorship resistance and so what we want to do is provide these different use cases uh that make um interacting uh more fun and uh really provide also another use case for crypto and we're seeing that you know with the mainstreaming of nfts where creators can have

16. 8:44

    a direct connection with their fan base here we see collaboland and the bot allowing um that type of uh interaction happen by holding tokens by minting and by gifting out nfts uh and also separately these community use cases uh when it comes to you know dows as well that's so cool it's like you were able to like um actually so yeah so like you kind of like approached like interesting subject of like making uh crypto more approachable in different ways like the non like crypto community like especially um

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    do you think like um like i think the gaming like thing is really cool it's like we're able to actually like take like really cool like game moments like i don't know like some awesome wobble combo and super smash brothers and like mint that moment as an nft like that's that's actually pretty brilliant to me do you think um what have you seen like what's been like your approach in like bringing in people who aren't at

18. 9:46

    all familiar with like the blockchain like you know the crypto community like um and like all these like crazy like you know crypto terms like nft dow like tokens like what's been your approach to like bring them on board what have you seen has been like successful so far um and what's been like the feedback and reaction to like your platform yeah um you know there's some context

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    here when it comes to history which has evolved our thesis uh when it comes to um like approaching mainstream so with uh collab land uh initially we started with this token gated chat and uh there was no minting of tokens within collab land so you already have had a like a need for your community from a token perspective come together and so we were able to uh capture like a subset of the ethereum ecosystem

20. 10:41

    so they already had metamask they already had acquired tokens and so you know configuring a bot in in discord was a very easy lift for them um and so you know we we know that that's the core of our audience and there are values um you know that kind of derived from you know uh the cypherpunks uh where you know you have um you know pseudoanonymity or full anonymity uh and uh you know uh

21. 11:12

    you have this these value systems that we don't want to um ignore that we want to respect in terms of privacy so we don't give out um you know association or the mapping of their discord or telegram username with a wallet address so we want to be very super careful about that but then you have that juxtaposed to people that are new to crypto that are doing it for the laws that are fun

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    they want to like you know have this magic moment and have this nft that they want to show off and so they want everyone to know their wallet address and what they have right so you have these like competing value or cultural um values that that could be kind of you know kind of contradictory or in opposition with one another so there's this like fine balance uh between the two that

23. 12:03

    uh you know we're seeing emerge so uh we want to make sure that we can serve both because it's those that are you know the ogs that are in crypto that are going to help pay it forward for the new people that are coming in so when it comes to um onboarding users there's this kind of persona of the user that you know is is well-versed in crypto um so we want to make sure that you know uh

24. 12:35

    we have this tenants of this non-custodial management so we don't manage private keys or anything like that and how do you then have that type of value system but still allow new users to come on board easily so how do you how do you get new users to come on and they want to just grab an nft but then they're like hit with like key management and they're like wait what is this so you know we have to like balance the two and this is where um our experiments on near have been quite fascinating because

25. 13:16

    uh what we have is this like overall thesis of progressive decentralization and so you know onboarding and users are not a one-time thing but it's an evolution and so we started on ethereum with like expert or advanced users that are already there when it comes to decentralization and in order to like keep the tenants of decentralization intact but also serve new users that you know are just in and are just kind of dipping their toes in near is great because of the account

26. 13:49

    management system where there could be shared key access where on ethereum it's you know externally owned accounts where you have keys where the ownership of your wallet is like having root access to a computer it's all or nothing there isn't any gradient in between where as in here you can have almost like a multi-user account so you can have multiple keys that have limited access so at the beginning when a user is first

27. 14:21

    dabbling you know in crypto they're not going to put their whole life savings into it so it's okay if they're if it's a shared account essentially like a multi-sig where the bot can help you along the way and you know if their keys get lost or you know what not the the bach could have a recovery system to generate new keys to have to get the users their access back and then from there you have this ability to remove the bot

28. 14:52

    and then just have social recovery and this is where i think we can have this viral aspect so you can actually make security a viral component where you trust people you know offline like your mom your dad whoever your friends and you get them an account and then along with the account you can you know help with social recovery with each other so you can yeah you can map your online relationships or your account management with your offline account management

29. 15:23

    so that's kind of like intermediate mode right and then expert mode was you were like okay i put my whole life i put everything in there like i'm fully focused on crypto i'm going to take everyone out of my account i'm no i know how to manage my keys so you know what we're seeing is the ability to kind of have parity with the user at first five dollars whatever that amount that small amount is to that user they don't want to go through the burdens of like key management

30. 15:55

    once they are become more intermediate they're like okay i don't know what these different services are but i know my friends and family and i trust them so i'm gonna take these other services out and put in you know people that i trust and then ultimately they're like okay i want to be fully self-sovereign so it's these type of user experiences and having this user empathy uh that um you know we're working through and i think over the next few years you know as more

31. 16:27

    of crypto gets mainstream these patterns will become uh solidified and so part of our job at collab land is a lot of user research and a lot of like the slow small iterations so that we can have this uh pathway uh to to decentralization wow man yeah well okay that's like that's that's incredible i mean i honestly love the idea of like um kind of like different levels of like accessibility yeah and like um like this like this whole social recovery idea it's actually

32. 17:04

    really interesting like that can be uh so like you kind of see that in a way of like almost um enabling kind of like a trust system for like for like families or like for um like close ones like building up some sort of like financial wealth or security for someone that you can like rely on um maybe like a graduating student or something getting them like prepared with this like cool crypto backup like on the way like it's i could see like i don't know a whole like

33. 17:28

    divergence like possibilities with that um i'm like uh something i'm like really curious about is like um it's like just you honestly like how did you get started in crypto and also if chad if you had like any questions on what he said like um uh no not yet okay yeah yeah but yeah tell us about you how did you get started crypto yeah um you know i have a background uh in video streaming um and so

34. 17:58

    uh back in the day this is before like phones this was um you know youtube would was not bought by google yet and if you wanted to upload a video uh you had to plug in your camcorder into a usb port and upload your video and at the time there was no native video technology like html5 video there was flash so you had to use flash and so from that experience um you know i got into gaming because uh you know around the time that i got out of video streaming social

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    games were becoming popular and uh i launched a game called farmville when i was at zynga it really opened my eyes to a lot of uh things when it comes to monetization on the internet and it that got me into like online advertising and um it was a time uh when uh i was in online advertising that ethereum had just uh launched so i was i was following it and what was really fascinating for me was the dao that original down 2016

36. 19:17

    major hack that call caused the hard fork with eth and ethereum classic and that was just super intriguing for me and it got me down this like rabbit hole that i feel like i'm still going down it never ends it never ends it never ends and um yeah that that's that's uh how i got started um helped co-write a white paper uh for token created registries or tcr's which is a simple mechanism design of

37. 19:52

    like voting essentially because of the interest when it came to uh to dowse and then um on the side uh working with a couple of um other people uh amin arjun rahul and lane they are all co-founders of connex helped come up in austin griffith as well with malik which was a dow framework uh and you know we were um just doing that on the side um and just learning solidity and just talking about game mechanism

38. 20:32

    the game design mechanism design and then what happened it was like at the end of 2018 uh vitalik uh you know was yoloing um eth to eat two researchers uh because uh there were um you know there was a lot of like questions about each 2.0 at the time uh and so we said there has to be a better way we're like okay the next uh eath global event uh we're going to just launch this dow i had just moved from los angeles to colorado so i was like okay let me help with all of this

39. 21:11

    and we launched the molok dao in uh february uh 2019 so like my interest has always been with you know coordination and uh with like emerging patterns when it comes to um you know voting and and coming together and with my gaming background to me it's just like we're just creating a game in the real world now and that's really what crypto is right it's not just this virtual currency that's only available in this game universe but it's like kind of inside out now the the crypt the

40. 21:49

    the virtual economy of currencies coming out to the real world so now we're playing kind of real world games which is super fascinating uh for me um and so that's that's kind of like my kind of stumbling down or falling down the rabbit hole when it comes to uh crypto and so the kind of natural progression here with collab land is you know getting people together and seeing how they coordinate uh and this whole beginnings that we're seeing when it comes to like social tokens

41. 22:20

    is super fascinating um to me as well and i think of social tokens as its own uh kind of niche that's different than like defy uh for example um because you know with defy you have a lot of the mechanism design like written in solidity whereas like in social tokens it's just a token and everyone's like okay you know what are our values as a community it's very uh very soft or it's very like kind of value driven from like a human perspective rather than it being completely like

42. 22:59

    autonomous from like a code execution perspective and so what i'm fascinated with is this like human coordination aspect and um can we reduce coordination costs and that's really from like if i were to take it up a a level when it comes to crypto that's what i see crypto is you know you have a scarce digital asset that allows you to reduce coordination costs so scarcity asset reducing coordination costs money is a great killer app and i think voting is another killer app but now what if it's like money and

43. 23:36

    voting are kind of the same thing that's really interesting and i think that uh we're just kind of at the beginning or scratching the surface of what that really means um one i think it's like really cool like you're part of like the farmville game like i didn't even even know like like yeah um wait so you did you helped make farmville james or what how what what's a scoop yeah farmville yeah so um uh i

44. 24:05

    was cool um so i wasn't video streaming and we had the flash video player and you had to like you know uh upload video and transcode it transcoding video into flv or the flash video format with very uh cpu intensive and so we had a startup and you know we had limited resources and i just just stumbled upon like aws it had just come out i was like very very first like users uh a user of um ec2 and we were transcoding video in the cloud and all our competitors were like okay

45. 24:43

    well uh we have to buy computers and we have to rack and stack them in the data center and then you know you have to pay all that upfront cost for it and then you know for us we're just like on a command line just light up a server and we can take it down so you only you know pay for what you use it was like just mind mind-blowing in terms of capital efficiency uh and so you know startup was purchased

46. 25:10

    actually you know the startup was purchased because uh you know google had bought youtube and we're like oh my gosh like what are we gonna do okay let's like ban down the hatches and see if we can you know get sold so we got sold sold to cisco i went from a startup of like five people to an organization of 50 000 people and i was like oh like you know this was kind of a drawing

47. 25:34

    for me and so i was like you know what i like the startup culture i'm more of a startup person so i did my requisite like golden handcuffs at cisco uh it was a great place everyone was playing farmville because everyone el everyone thought everyone else was playing it because it was a game that was always up so it was kind of like this definition of the shelling point of like popularity and so as it was growing it was still staying up it wasn't falling down and so it just kind of kept on growing

48. 26:05

    and then from there we're able to iterate and get better data analytics and be able to fine-tune the game and you know be able to do all that great stuff um and so what i learned and the big lesson there for me was you know you just have to be there and stay up and you'll figure it out as you go um and this is where i think uh when it comes to this uh mass adoption and crypto uh i think that

49. 26:35

    there's a lesson to be learned there the the blockchain with built-in virality will win because it's going to be easy to to to get people on board and the nature of the blockchain and you know just massive peer-to-peer network it doesn't go down that was really like to be honest the the the kind of catch phrase uh for me when i was understanding and learning ethereum was the meme of the you know the the world computer and to me coming from aws i was like

50. 27:12

    why do i even have to manage virtual servers why can't i just upload code and like that's all i want to do as a developer and make it super easy uh and you know i worked on and off with the people at aws over the course of a decade and they finally came out with lambda which is you just put your code up but that's basically what you know doing things on a blockchain is right that's what a smart contract is you don't have to figure out any of the infrastructure and so that is really like the the compelling thing

51. 27:43

    to me is that okay you know you can just upload your code and people can use it um and so that was kind of the initial hook for me and so this is this is kind of what i see in terms of like the future you have a viral blockchain that makes onboarding super easy uh then we'll figure out uh you know from a mechanism game design especially with social tokens what patterns will emerge and with collaboration we're beginning to see that like these patterns of like fan based

52. 28:16

    communities versus like dao based communities and the similar patterns of using the tool uh which is pretty exciting uh to see and then you know how to integrate that into like fungible tokens and nfts together what are you seeing more of are you seeing more dows or are you seeing more of the other yeah and so it's interesting at first and i think it was this like confirmation bias thing because i'd come from the world of dao's and that was

53. 28:47

    kind of my ecosystem i saw daos first but then uh once so we launched initially on telegram and that was more crypto native so that was you know um interesting and that was uh more dow like and then once we launched on discord um things started taking off and the and the profile of like the com the general user base was not dao specific but just token holders um and so it was just people holding tokens and then it's now more what we're seeing

54. 29:20

    is uh the rise of like more of these like fan based communities yeah and you know the the whole nft mass adoption thing uh it was really interesting because it gives the creator that direct relationship with the you know the their fan oh so i think we're seeing an extension of that with collab land right so you can have an nft and uh have a whole series of them and then you can be in a discord and i think that's going to lead into

55. 29:52

    like fungible tokens in terms of like social tokens but for whatever reason it's easier to i think you know as someone that's not in crypto that's just understanding what crypto is it's easier to understand like an nft because it's it's from a mental model it's like a like a collectible rather than like oh we're printing our own dollar bills and people are like what what is that yeah you know it's it's a little more

56. 30:17

    heady very um okay i got i got another weird one for you james so do you see in the future with say music festivals um nfts do you think maybe in the future people could go to say a music festival and they could do like an nft scavenger hunt yeah we're seeing a lot of so i'm working on a project uh to have a specific implementation of collab land that's location based and it's exactly

57. 30:50

    for that use case right and so uh there's this company they uh you know we're about to launch all these nfts for events and like you know there's a whole rich history when it comes to music and like scavenger hunts and uh there's a couple of wired articles uh i'll i'll send uh your way i can't remember off the top of my head uh i and i think um nine inch nails did one like a decade decade and a half ago no yeah yeah and uh you had to solve puzzles and then you get sent to like random

58. 31:21

    locations and you got like things and then so i think it's going to be a thing but uh they were going to launch i think last year but then kobit and so now uh things are starting to kind of like warm up a little bit more it gave us some time to flesh out the tech and so uh we'll probably see something uh like that um where you'll have this combination of you know the physical location

59. 31:49

    and a digital asset and it's this kind of natural kind of expansion i think uh i don't know if it's because of covid or just the evolution of being online where before it was you're online or you're offline it's a good point no it now it's like blended right so now now you have your your digital assets and with crypto right like crypto is a fully just you know digital asset but it can have

60. 32:20

    impact in your offline world right and so that in itself is this like connection between online and offline real quick i have a quick story i was like four years ago i had i signed up for this like bitcoin credit card and so i can buy things with my credit card uh they would draw out of my bitcoin account interesting and uh you know there was this run-up in bitcoin and you know i was just dabbling in and this is kind of like you know where i was like oh my gosh this stuff is real because i would go to starbucks and i would use that credit

61. 32:52

    card and it would be deduct from you know my bitcoin and i was like this is great because bitcoin was running up and so it was like i was getting essentially like free coffee yeah you know but then now that i look back on it after a few years that's the most expensive coffee i've ever bought in my life you know so it's like it's a time scale thing but this is where i think it's like okay the online and offline

62. 33:21

    world kind of like merge and so you will see this with assets but then you're also seeing it with like people talking about the metaverse right and then like you know buying things and items so that they can kind of be in this you know virtual world uh and so you'll see a lot of experimentation uh happen uh between the two and i think it's this like seamless blurring and being able to fluidly go back and forth that uh you know might take a generation

63. 33:52

    so it takes the old people that have done things one way to like go away for the new people to kind of like the younger people to say hey this is more natural and so i don't know if it's going to take a full generation or not but i think it's inevitable and that the trick is is like okay well you know how and where is it going to pop its head out first and i do think uh one of kind of

64. 34:16

    the the places i'm kind of looking at uh is like for whatever reason i think it's going to happen with music yeah and music events do you think it'll be as simple as like scanning a qr code somewhere or is it going to be more like nuanced uh i think that you know there's a well established pattern with qr codes and cameras and and i think it will probably uh start somewhere there first

65. 34:48

    yeah and so again this goes back you have to have a great easy to use mobile wallet experience oh yeah yeah once you have that i think like game on experimentation on uh and you know we're seeing it right like a year ago like we've known about nfts for a few years cryptokitties and ethereum was blew up at like end of 2017 right uh but and i i you know back then i would think that they would go mainstream but i would have no idea

66. 35:22

    that you know 20 21 or 20 20ish depending on you know where you want to see your first sides it's kind of where it really blew up mainstream um so i think it's just those catalyst events that will that you got to keep your eye out for see who's experimenting and so that's part of like you know what we're trying to do uh with collab land is like kind of force the future to happen if we make things easy to use uh then we're there uh you know in terms of like a balcony

67. 35:54

    view in terms of uh where what things are happening when i was like back in video streaming i thought okay i want to be clever and i want to like build for this specific use case because i believe in it and i did not see youtube coming like back then it was crazy to imagine because bandwidth was expensive that you know you would give out free bandwidth and you wouldn't direct people

68. 36:24

    to your website you could actually embed the video in other sites i was like what are you doing this makes no no sense at all to me and i didn't understand advertising economics you know i didn't understand the trend toward like bandwidth and you know all of that like google knew about back then so this time around i'm like okay i don't want to necessarily be or try to be the cleverest smartest person in the room i just want to be able to position myself in a place

69. 36:56

    where i can see what's happening and see what is bubbling up and then be able to go there when it hits and that's really kind of the vehicle of collab land amazing is it that was a vehicle flatland like was that um dude could you like break that part for me more like when you make me so like position yourself to see what's happening as a vehicle cleveland is like through social tokens through like what's it look like yeah so um the the

70. 37:23

    thesis there is like you know you offer a great great core service and then you see what people are asking for and you if enough people ask for it enough times then you implement that this the smallest lift feature and see what people do with it so instead of like trying to because i'm an engineer like and a developer i'm like okay i want to get to the solution but i'm i'm now not trying to say okay this is the exact solution you know here's a dow this is how the future of work is going to be

71. 37:55

    here get on board it's more of like hanging out in the problem space and providing just enough solution for people to tell you what the answer is if you want to answer on the internet you don't ask the right question you like tell the wrong answer and then people will tell you what the right answer is and so in that way this is like the product version of that right where we just give the minimum

72. 38:19

    like viable like value and then let and this is why we need to be really engaged and do things that don't scale when it comes to talking with communities talking with people and being as interactive as possible and try to understand like these first principles so one of the examples of that you know because you're like okay with collab land won't you just like mint tokens have social tokens and then

73. 38:43

    just like do that service for for people uh for creators uh and you know that was you know when you look at it from like that seems like an obvious answer but when you talk to creators and you see what you know at least the ones that are not like at the top one percent of one percent but those that are struggling there are a lot of like issues you know before you know they have to play to the algorithm

74. 39:08

    and you know they have to like turn out content all the time and there's like a lot of stress and a lot of you know kind of mental health issues that come come come along with that and then you know if you were to tell that person hey launch a social token and then they have to like have to deal with all these token holders that are saying make my token go up how much more pressure would that be from like a monetary perspective right and so we want to make sure that like when we

75. 39:39

    launch a feature or we launch different products that you know it it remains true to like this idea and core tenant of progressive decentralization but that we have you know good guard rails because like right now um to the average user i would people are curious about crypto but think a lot of it is like scammy or ponzi scheme or whatnot oh yeah and so you know we want to be really

76. 40:10

    like careful and responsible uh with that and we don't want to perpetuate that or give the tooling to allow you know that to go on rampant so there's a sense of responsibility and a sense of context uh and so this is what i mean by like having like a a balcony view of like okay what's happening what's working what's not working and you can only do that by engaging with the market engaging with you know and interacting with people and trying to figure out like pattern

77. 40:41

    matching what are the common threads across uh different types of communities uh and whatnot can we um go into more like what the user sees when they're like just like the the function of collab line the bot itself like um it's like i'm a user i'm going on to um my favorite artist is like discord page and then like um like what what goes on from there like in terms of the voting process and like engaging with this like token based system yeah so um there's an

78. 41:14

    admin uh that will have the bot be a member of the the channel so we'll take discord for example and uh what that community admin will do the admin of the discord server will do is make the collab lan bot an admin of the server itself and then let's say that admin has five channels and what they can do is for each different discord channel they can set a token address and a minimum so you could almost think of it as like

79. 41:47

    being a game designer and setting up this like like leveling function and what you do is you you have let's say at the one channel is five tokens the next is 20 the third one is a hundred the fourth one is ten thousand and then the fifth one is like this max tier i don't know like 100 000 tokens or something like that and you can configure that all in discord through the bot the bot is this interactive uh experience all through chat and you set that up and

80. 42:17

    then uh users can join your general channel and discord and they just do exclamation point join the bot then sends dms that user a link the user clicks on that link and is able to attach their wallet address to their discord username and now what the bot will do is say oh this user has you know 500 tokens so it will based off of the config that the community admin that channel that server admin configured

81. 42:49

    the the bot will automatically give that user certain roles that will just open up different discord channels for that user and so it's just you know kind of automatic and we're just using your token holdings as a way to permission different channels so you can have combinations of like you know fungible and non-fungible tokens um and whatnot so like with with abra during the earth day event which was in discord

82. 43:17

    which was four days um they would have like the twitch bot send out uh nfts but uh the nfts that were minted were only notified in a special earth day channel and uh in order to get access to that earth day channel you had to like create a wallet and so you type in the command you know join it says oh you don't have a wallet and the bot would send you a link click here to you know create your

83. 43:49

    wallet and then they would go through the onboarding flow similar to like near names where you just are gifted a wallet uh and so uh we worked with the near foundation they paid for the transaction costs for this and gave a user an account and then once uh the user had an account uh we would just kind of drop in it's kind of like a goodie bag the wallet we kind of thought of it like the wallet as a goodie bag when you go to an event you like oh you have a goodie bag and inside

84. 44:21

    there's like an nft and so we dropped an nft in the goody bag in their wallet so they had something it's not just empty uh and then because they had that that nft in their wallet the earthy channel automatically got unlocked and so like oh okay what is this and then so they would um discuss about earth day discuss about near because um you know from a blockchain perspective uh carbon neutral

85. 44:51

    you know it promotes things that are green and it was consistent with the event uh and then um whenever magic moments from the twitch channel uh were were minted then they would claiming nft so it just gave them something a little more to do and and kind of like proof of attendance in a way in a fun way and that was kind of like a badge and so blonde is just planning to do something to reward those users potentially later on and so you can actually have proof of those

86. 45:24

    that are like you know uh kind of fans and because they've shown up to these different events and you can kind of build off of that these uh community primitives um and we have other communities uh that are using it uh like car coin so the uh west coast customs um is a shop that back in the day they did pimp my ride on mtv yeah yeah yeah and then so now they have a show on netflix called west coast customs and they have their own car coin and so they're doing things they're doing

87. 46:04

    things where you get the coin and then you get backstage access and then from the backstage access you have a chance to get flown out to florida to ride with will i am's custom car and so they're doing a lot of great things where you know it's not so that's not like a dow and it's kind of like a fan community but it's more like a brand a media extension the people that are in charge of media have like this direct connection with their fans so that's kind of another like you know

88. 46:37

    playbook or kind of you know foundational interaction that we're seeing because uh you know when i look at social tokens and you compare them to like d5 defy is like okay we're going against the banks right and you know we're better than a banks we give better interest and whatnot with social tokens it's a different thing you're not competing against banks you're competing against netflix you're competing against hbo

89. 47:07

    you're you're you're competing because that's where people are paying their attention and so that's kind of another aspect that we see kind of collaborate going where um you know uh i'm not it's not that like the tokens or the nfps that you hold become your identity but there are the things that you have skin in the game for those are things that you're paying attention to right so if i have uh you know a holding of 10 different

90. 47:37

    tokens and dorian has like seven or eight of the same tokens i'm gonna go oh okay let me check him out you know and then there's this kind of like social graph not on my interest of hiking and you know biking or whatever it may be but by holdings and then those tokens that he has that i don't have i might not know about i'm like okay let me check those out what are those communities about what's happening there and so that that's where i see we you know kind of collaborate kind of

91. 48:10

    evolving too um across blockchains across platforms and it's just this like underlying kind of glue that holds these siloed platforms and users together so that today it's discord and telegram tomorrow we might add if clubhouse had an official api clubhouse and then five years from now who knows what it may be it might be you know some ar vr you know social media platform right yeah and so that you we can all be holding

92. 48:44

    tokens and evolve into these different distribution platforms over time but still have that bond where it's us holding the tokens that have that bond together rather than the platform uh being in charge of our relationships or being in charge of our linkings um and so that's kind of where i see this collab line going as we extend to multiple platforms extend to multiple blockchains and i really do think you know um this was crypto was a kind

93. 49:17

    of missing piece when it comes to um like the internet because the internet is like peer-to-peer right but how did we end up with like fang five companies kind of controlling the the internet and i think it's because we as humans you know uh don't know how to best organize in a decentralized fashion at scale because there was no precedent to do that yeah but now now we have that ability and so i think

94. 49:46

    now with crypto with that ability to coordinate like i do think it's it's the internet getting out of beta so now we can like understand we have bandwidth we have the devices we have all the mechanisms to be able to coordinate crypto is that last unlock for us to be able to do that in a peer-to-peer fashion um and so that that's why like i don't know where this is gonna to go necessarily i have some ideas but we have to test them out and like we have to have you know kind

95. 50:17

    of contact with reality to see kind of what emerges and how this evolves very well said yeah how would you love to see your project grow and how can we and the community help with that go to collab c-o-l-l-a-b dot land collab dot land we have all the links there you can sign up for the newsletter there's links to twitter and and you know all the other mediums and and whatnot um and yeah um i'm available um i'm on twitter

96. 50:48

    at james young and so uh feel free to reach out my dms are open um and yeah we'd love to just you know work this out together uh i think is kind of the overall kind of thesis here no one has the answer and we're all figuring it out as we go along i i really my another real quick another kind of uh thesis i have is uh a lot of crypto you know it's mean based right a lot of things that that goes going exactly that's right and so it's like in a way i think of crypto as

97. 51:25

    performance art and we're just it's just group art it's just group improv and we're like trying to figure it out see where we go um so yeah we need a community support as much as possible well thank you so much for your time and you know we really had a lot of fun like having you here um this is like really awesome and really cool and awesome yeah thank you yeah yeah thanks for having me yeah thanks for expanding our knowledge and everything james and uh i love i love a lot of your thesis man you guys are heading in the

98. 51:55

    right direction and uh people would be dumb to not look into collab dot land this is uh it's amazing and your whole backstory too it's kind of how you started with like flash media and you helped drop farmville and um uh maybe just one last thing to give context how much money do you think you guys were saving by doing the um cloud and instead of like racking and stacking you know the the server uh computers and stuff in the back like just maybe rough numbers just for the for the audience and

99. 52:27

    and stuff oh it it you save at you know millions because what's happening is that with aws it's not only that like it's instantaneous in terms of like you can light up a server it that on-demand aspect it it's that like as you grow you're only paying for what you're using so you don't have to buy a bunch up front and you don't have to like do all of that like okay well you know i have this dead inventory or what if my gain goes down

100. 53:00

     do i how do i sell my assets right it's just like auto provisioning up and down um and uh the analogy with cloud computing to crypto especially with social tokens that i'm kind of seeing is that with uh with social you have to like build up a large following right you spend years or whatnot getting a lot of subs to get the blue check mark that's right and and then you can light up monetization right so then then people like what's going on he sold out or

101. 53:39

     whatever with crypto you are growing and especially if the blockchain has virality baked into the chain itself you can grow your token economy as as you're growing your audience similar to this effect of cloud so i think that's really like what's going to be part of the game changer when it comes to like the influence or creator economy that it's going to have as big impact crypto as cloud did

102. 54:10

     to like computing and startups and whatnot well you here to hear folks james young thank you so much for your time we appreciate you we definitely would love to talk to you in the future so please don't get too busy i'm here great conversation thanks for having me really appreciate the time yes thank you james been a pleasure thanks i mean it got me down this like rabbit hole that i feel like i'm still going down

103. 54:52

     it never ends it never ends