Anjali Young, Co-Founder and CCO of Collab.Land, on Token Gating, Building Out Digital Communities, and Launching a Token | Ep. 216
In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Anjali Young, Co-Founder and CCO of Abridged Inc, discussed Collab.Land’s recent token launch, their seven-part documentary series, and their recent marketplace launch for creators and developers.
About Anjali Young
Anjali Young is the Co-Founder and CCO of Abridged Inc, the maker of Collab.Land. Anjali has been active in online communities since 1993 as a member and in leadership positions. She has also worked as a lawyer, adjunct professor, and early tech startup employee. In addition to her interest in online communities and web3 onboarding, she is passionate about NFTs and the artists who create them. While developing her business skills and working on several passion projects, Anjali also homeschooled her two children. Her role at Collab.Land focuses on onboarding all tokenized projects and partners onto the platform, ensuring Collab.Land’s “community of communities” is a safe and welcoming space, educating others about web3 ethos and values. Anjali enjoys creating art from found objects and improvisational theater when she’s not working.
Anjali Young gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- Collab.Land’s seven-part documentary series
- Behind the scenes of launching a token
- How NFT creators and DAO members can use web3 tooling to form relationships
- Providing safe spaces for token holders and the greater crypto community
- Launching their marketplace for developers and community administrators
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always and I absolutely love when a guest comes back on for round two the Cryptonews Pod and that is exactly what we have today. Anjali Young is back. The Co-Founder and CCO of Abridged Inc, the maker of Collab.Land, we’ve all been using Collab.Land. If you’ve ever dabbled in NFT space or Web3 you’re well aware of what Collab.Land is. We’ve already given her an intro no need to do the same. However, some things have changed, and that is more specifically with Collab.Land. I can’t wait to get into it. Anjali, welcome back to the show.
Anjali Young
Thank you so much Matt, for having us or for having me. Last time it was James and myself, which was a lot of fun, and now I’m excited to be here with you. Oh, so it’d be great.
Matt Zahab
Crazy how quick that four months went literally seems like you and myself and James are on three weeks ago, four months later, boom we’re back for round two.
Anjali Young
I don’t understand it. Honestly, I don’t, and when I was like, Oh I’m gonna get to talk to Matt again this is exciting. It feels like I literally just talked to him, and how is it that it’s been 10 years and five minutes at the same time? That just goes to show how crazy Crypto is.
Matt Zahab
Crypto land, there’s nothing like it. Let’s talk about some sort of pop culture and TradFi stuff before we get into Collab.Land, and obviously you guys have the new Collab token. Congrats, that is absolutely huge. I think you and James actually perhaps may have hinted a couple times throughout last pod. But obviously, I couldn’t be the one breaking the news there, and here we are. Can’t wait to get into this. But how crazy is all this bank run stuff going on right now? It is absolute bananas.
Anjali Young
It’s absolutely bananas and the whole thing it’s just like, what is happening right now, and like you mentioned, you know we’re kind of in the middle of our token and our marketplace, and we have a lot of stuff going on. So I haven’t been able to be as like engaged with what’s happening. You know, we don’t have any exposure to SPV or Signature, and so you know we’re first republic or whatever it is like, so we’re a little bit removed from that. But as far as like the greater Crypto industry, and also like in startup land, like so many people are affected, and so it’s a bit crazy. But you know, never a dull moment. Like really, can we point to a time in the last few years where we’re like, oh yeah nothing’s going on and it’s quiet. Like that doesn’t exist. So yes, this is crazy. But also it’s crazy in a timeline. That is crazy.
Matt Zahab
It’s truly bananas. One of the things that I find absolutely, just crazy is I felt like a month ago things were perhaps looking a little better. I feel like the outlook on a sort of a macro side wasn’t as bleak. I felt like you know, I didn’t think there was going to be a crazy lot of light at the end of the tunnel, but I wasn’t expecting some catastrophic event to happen, and then we have SVB and now we have the other three four banks in the you just rung off we have Balaji you know, putting up 2 million of his own dollars for Bitcoin bets. It’s crazy how it’s all going on within the last little bit. You and the team though, have done some crazy stuff, and I’d love to start with the seven part documentary series. Let’s form group which spotlighted the most important Web3 artists, entrepreneurs, thinkers, content creators, and each sort of episode is a day in the life of these masterminds like Frock from Rock Radio, PizzaDAO, MNTGE spank chain, AOk1verse, Aslan Ruby, and ThankYouX. I think this is absolutely incredible. I also love how you partnered with sort of the biggest dogs in the space. It’s great for exposure on both ends, and just like what you talked about last time, you guys are all about inclusion, giving a safe space promoting good people, good thinkers, and here you are and you’ve done that walk me through the whole process. When did this whole idea come to fruition? And what was it like getting everyone on board and making the seven part docu series?
Anjali Young
Yeah, I mean it’s crazy to be at this side of it you know, like at the end of it, because time and space is so weird in Crypto, it’s like when did we start thinking about this? I mean as you know, and we talked a little bit about last time, Collab.Land growth has been organic, you know we haven’t spent money on marketing, and really how do you even do that in Crypto and why do you do that, and how do you attract the right people? I mean, all of these are big questions that a lot of different marketing slash PR companies are trying to figure out right now. But for us we’re like, Okay we’ve created this item, this type of work, token gating. It’s working slowly, you know all we’re going to do is continue to serve the communities. That’s it, like as long as we continue to grow with the communities allow our development to be created based on community feedback, and just be in this position of service like that is going to lead us to the right place, which is we want to create a product that people can use and they can use to build on and create something special for themselves, and So we didn’t spend that kind of money on marketing or PR or publicity, and so in the back of our heads were like, what can we do that can be significant for Crypto and for our culture, the Crypto community culture, what could be something we could do to create that would have some long term historical value, and so we kind of set out with this idea and initially approached Toby from LoRa machine, who we’ve been friends with for a couple of years in Crypto doing different types of things. He was working on some other projects before, and we had met him in a couple of other DAOs and so kind of just started brainstorming with him. Like he comes from Vice. He comes from Motherboard. He knows about content creation. So we wanted to brainstorm with him like, what can we do? What value can we add here that is going to help with like the larger narrative, like our narrative is about community. Our narrative isn’t hyper financialized. It’s about people coming together, coordinating together, collaborating together, innovating together, we’re building new relationships together, and so we really wanted to focus on that part of it the part of it that Collab.Land sees, and so with him together with Toby, we’re like what would be a good use of our funds? What would be something that we could create that would be beautiful, that could be a historical artifact for futures, people in the future that are interested in knowing what these early Crypto communities were about? Now, you know part of it is this is my second go at this, right? Like my first job out of college was at an internet startup, and I was teaching people how to search. I mean, at that time I didn’t think that this. Crazy to think about that like now it’s such a primitive search, of course everyone searches in the same way token gating. It’s become a primitive everyone token gates. Now, you would think that it has existed from the beginning of time, just like you would have assumed this search on the internet has existed from the beginning of time, neither has not somebody came up with that idea, and so this time around, it’s okay we had this second chance right, with token gating, and we get to be at the precipice of this new type of relationship. What can we do to kind of bring that what we see out into the mainstream, and so then the concept came up of maybe making these short documentaries, like we have a lot of really interesting characters in Crypto, people that have come from all different walks of life into this space, and now are creating a new world for themselves world building their own communities now, and so we’re like okay, the idea would be not to focus Collab.Land, but to focus on what Collab.Land has enabled, and so in this situation, like you mentioned we have Frock we have AOK1verse, we have Aslan Ruby, we have ThankYouX, we have PizzaDAO, we have all different types of communities that have now used Collab.Land and created something special of their own, and so why not give these communities an opportunity to share their culture, share their language, share their traditions, and talk about what does token gating actually do? Like, what is it exactly? And really what it is, is the creation of a brand new type of community, a Crypto community, the concept of Crypto community didn’t even exist before. So yeah, the idea was to like find seven very different types of communities that use Collab.Land and let them share their stories. Let them talk about it, and so the first one that we debuted was PizzaDAO, and so PizzaDAO you know, they talk a little bit about how Collab.Land is used within the PizzaDAO discord, where you have to have this rare pizza NFT, and then you get access into a special channel, and in that special channel voting happens, like that’s an example. ThankYouX was our second one that came out, and it was about how Discord is used within the community and the art itself. So what he did is he took four large murals paintings that he did, he chopped them up into 400 pieces each, and then you were able to buy one of those pieces digitally, and then you were able to combine pieces to make a larger artwork, and so a lot of that coordination happened within the Discord. It’s like, how do I incorporate my community into my art and into NFT? So lots of different projects, you know like I said there’s seven different ones. They’re coming out over time today. Well, today is we’re gonna put out a little teaser, but March 21st is going to be mintage, which is MNTGE. They’re an NFT fashion company. So it’s like, we have fine artists. We have media companies, we have DAOs we have musicians, and we have fashion companies, and so it’s like, they’re all so different, but what do they have in common Crypto community and these specifically, what do they have in common? You know, they use Collab.Land to come together.
Matt Zahab
One I love that. Two my favorite part about what you guys are doing and sort of the whole vision is the fact that there’s so many polarizing figures and artists and communities in Web3, but like no one really knows what they do in the day of their life like does Anjali do? You know, well I know what you do because I you know we had a we’ve had some great chats together but it’s like, what do these influencers if you will or famous Web3 creators what the heck do they do? What are they eat for brekkie? What do they do for dinner? Do they go to the gym? What gets them going? Like do they ever touch grass? You know, like do they game there’s so many of these questions that we have, and when you see someone on Twitter, and when you’re in their Discord, it’s like, I feel like we all think about this. I’m not the only one where I’m like, what this person X or community Y do when they’re not on Discord with me? You know what I mean? Like it’s something cool to give back.
Anjali Young
Right? Like, why are they even here? Why do they even care? What motivates them? Like, there’s so many unique stories in this space, and the popular narrative is just gloom and doom like we started with, I mean that’s the story that gets the buzz, right. That’s what the story that it’s positive stories don’t get the clicks. It’s just stories that get the clicks. So when it comes to Crypto, like it’s the negative stories that survive and are shared all over the place. So what we are setting out to do with the series, let’s form group is making it too good to ignore. Like, we have these people here that are so compelling characters that are so interesting that really, if you watch what they do, you’re going to be inspired to try something for yourself, and really that’s what we wanted to do which is like inspire others, and how do you inspire others to show them these stories of people from all walks of life that have come together. You know one of the stories is about Aslan Ruby, and Sarana who runs Aslan Ruby with her husband, they’re from outback of Australia, and so it’s like someone from the outback of Australia, that is homeschooling their kids out of a camper van, now have two successful NFT projects, and now is in New York City and flying to Miami and like having a whole other type of life. Like how is that possible, and it’s possible because of the blockchain, and it’s possible because of this global coordination effort that we’re right at the heart of, and so being able to share those stories and inspire others to show like, look this is really made up of people, we’re all made up of people, that people that are in this space, are dreamers are thinkers are visionaries, and they’re using Blockchain as a way to fulfill their dreams, and so let’s hear about those stories, and let’s just make it really beautiful and too hard to ignore, and I don’t know if you’ve got to see any of them. But during ETHDenver, we previewed three of them, you know in front of a live audience, and that was so much fun to see people’s faces as they’re watching these videos. But truly, we think of these videos as just little five to eight minute pieces of art, where you’re going to be able to see colors and music and interesting characters, and really get to see what makes this space so magical and again, it’s really fighting the narratives that we have out there, which is like, oh it’s all about greedy individual, single players, where it’s not about single players at all, at least from Collab.Land perspective, it is the community it is a multiplayer game. So let’s share that story of that multiplayer game.
Matt Zahab
Very well said, the two other massive things you guys did since our last Convo four months ago was launching the marketplace for developers and community administrators, which is really a one stop shop to browse Dapps, and again all of these are curated by DAO members. The other thing is the token, and I’d love to get into the token. I know everyone is so intrigued about the token, it’s been all over Twitter. It’s been everywhere really, Collab, I could do a job and try to tell it but you’re a master at this. I’d love if you can jump right into it. Walk me through the whole process, why create the token, the pains and you know, shitshow of launching a token obviously, your token launch was incredibly smooth, but like still the hours and blood baths that go on behind the scene walking through the whole process Anjali and to where we are today.
Anjali Young
Oh my gosh. All right, where to start? There’s so much I want to talk about, but I’ll try to take it all the way back. So Collab.Land, you know is a product of Abridged We started in 2018 2019 for Abridged. May of 2020 is when Collab.Land launched, and it’s been a community project from day one, right? Like you know when I alluded to that a little bit earlier, but it’s like, what was Collab.Land? Collab.Land was an experiment of Abridged, and it was the community itself that said, we need this and we want this and helped us guide what Collab.Land became, you know it started off as DAO tooling, and then we have investment groups using them, and then we have social tokens using it and you know, in the spring of 2021 then we have NFTs coming. So two years of collaboration on NFTs it’s incredible. But it’s always been a community project, and so the idea of taking it back to the community, having Collab.Land then be governed by the community and having an exit to community has always been a part of the plan. You know, people have been asking for a token for years now. But we were like, No, you don’t have a token, just for the sake of having a token, if you’re going to have a token, there needs to be a reason for that token, and so it wasn’t until late summer and early fall of 2022, where we’re like, Okay, this is the time, you know we started thinking seriously about a token, and it was what will this token do? And what will be the purpose of it, you know at this point and now we’re at over 46,000 communities on Discord and another 2500 to 3000 on telegram. But at this point, we were at about 43,000. I know, it’s incredible.
Matt Zahab
That’s insane.
Anjali Young
It really is. But at this point we’re like, okay we’re over 40,000, you know like let’s put ourselves back into late summer, early fall of 2022, and it was like Okay, we’re over 40,000 communities now what? Like, what can we do now? And it’s concept of having this social network that we’ve created, be owned by the members or be governed and have participation from the people who use it. Like, you know when you look back at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, like other social networks, from Web2 it’s like, there’s such a big division between the people who are using the project and the people who are running the project, and so for us with Collab.Land we’re like, look this has been a community project from the beginning. This isn’t just Raymond James that is sitting in an ivory tower saying this is what’s going to be successful. It has been something that has been the community has adopted it, and grown with us, you know it’s what Collab.Land first was to what it is that right now is. It’s such a more robust product, but even then, it wouldn’t have been without the community itself, and so it’s like, how do we now make sure that the community members are the ones that get to determine how Collab.Land grows, how Collab.Land changes, what new features come to Collab.Land, and so it was kind of a two prong approach, which is like having a DAO, where Collab.Land member, we want everyone who’s ever participated with Collab.Land and have an opportunity to join the DAO, and that was the thinking behind giving out a Collab.Land token to 2 million wallets is that we’re not giving you this is not dropping you free money. What we’re dropping you is responsibility. Now you are going to be able to participate in the Collab.Land DAO and have a voice in what happens with the social network. Are you willing to take it? Are we ready for that? Are we willing to be more proactive about where we are, and what we do and how our data is used? Or do we want to just be passive and say, you know I’ll click away all my rights, and you’re all selling my data any which way you want, and now I am your product. Well with Collab.Land, we didn’t want our members to be our product, you know that’s always been an option of what to do member data, and part of our belief from the beginning, which is member data belongs to the member, you know Matt, whatever Matt does belongs to Matt, it does not belong to Collab.Land to be able to monetize, but we want to give this ownership back to individuals, and so number one, it’s the token is an opportunity to join the DAO, which means you can participate in what happens next with Collab.Land. How are our features monetize? How is the data going back to the member and shared? What new platforms do you want to go to? Like, where do you want to see this social network go, here’s your chance to not only be a passive consumer, but for you to be having a voice in this new Web3 social network that we’re trying to create here. So that was one, and then the second was the marketplace, which is we created this industry token gating which is incredible, and I’m humbled and grateful that we are in this position to bring more developers into this space. I mean, that’s really been the plan from the beginning is how do we get more people into Crypto, whether it be users or whether it be developers, and so with the marketplace, we’re saying look, we’ve built this up with the community, you know we’re at now 48 49,000 communities. Now you if you’re creating for the Crypto social Crypto space, then instead of you having to like find your own distribution, platform network, how are you going to do that? We are opening up our network to say now you can have a one click install into the Collab.Land bot, and now the Collab.Land admin whoever that is, is going to be able to customize their community. So now we’re not in charge of pushing all the features us deciding which features are getting pushed, but developers are going to be able to come in, they’re going to be like you, if you’ve created a product that is for Crypto communities, you can treat a mini app, a lightweight version of that app, put it in the Collab.Land marketplace, any Collab.Land, any of our admins are going to be able to one click Install Matt’s app, and now they know who you are, they know the name of your product, you get to have some iteration with them in terms of like, now you have users for your product, you can grow your product, you can grow your relationship, and our community admins are no longer beholden to just Collab.Land to say, build this and this, no, you don’t have to do that anymore. Like either you can create your own mini app to put in the marketplace. Or you could put out a bounty into the DAO where you’re saying my community needs this is are there any developers out there that are going to take up this bounty for my community, and so really allowing customization of communities and to take us out of that feature race, because that’s not what we wanted to do from the beginning. You know we want to obviously give the network back to the members who are using the network, and we also want to fulfill the dream of Blockchain really, which is interoperability, which is create this public database and allow people to build on top of it, right? Ethereum, Money Legos, in the same way, Collab.Land is following in those footsteps by saying community Legos, you know we’re not just going to take our big bag and run, we’re gonna say, Okay we’ve created this network together with the community, and now developers come and join, grow on top of our distribution layer, and so the people that are going to be wanting your product, you’re going to be able to get right in front of them. So you know, being able to grow together build together, let’s see, this is the dream, the dream is inviting as many developers that are out there building in social Crypto, giving them an opportunity to build in front of the people that are actually going to use their product, and for our members and our admin saying like, look you get to participate in what happens here. You know this isn’t a situation where we’re just going to take the data and take your behavior and monetize it for our own needs. But it’s an opportunity for you to actually determine the future of what a Web3 social network is going to be like. Then we’re hopeful.
Matt Zahab
Wow, that I mean, you were absolutely buzzing there. So many ways, I want to take this first, we got to have a huge shout out to sponsor of the show that is PrimeXBT, we’ve been using PrimeXBT for a hot minute at Cryptonews, we love them as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast after making your first deposit, you get 50% that is five zero percent of that first deposit that will be credited to your trading account, where users can use that as additional collateral to open positions. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50, that’s CRYPTONEWS50, all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Anjali. So many different points you touched on I want to go back to the marketplace because that was the latter of what you spoke about and obviously, the token was the former. So to my knowledge, the marketplace sounds like a mix between like the best features of LinkedIn, Fiverr, and like coding databases, where developers and DAO members can literally sort of network showcase what they’ve built, send requests for new features and things that they want all built into one happy community marketplace.
Anjali Young
Yeah, and that’s exactly right, when you think about it which is community admins and members are going to be able to say what they’re looking for, and developers are going to be able to like show off their skills and show off what they’re interested in Crypto communities, like you know right now we’ve launched the marketplace already and has about nine apps already. But one of them is a Snapshot integration. One of them is a pull up integration. One of them is an integration called composable roles where you can take different assets from different chains to come together to make a new role, or the guests paths feature where if you have a community and you want to invite somebody in for a week or two into your token gated access channels love that you’ll be able to do that you know different reasons. One, you might want to invite a special guest, but also maybe you have tourists, right? So it’s like people want to check it out. Like what is it like to be in a doodles community? What is that interaction like? Let me give it a try. Give me a week, give me two weeks and then I can determine whether I want to purchase the asset. So it’s like, you know we have lots of different little mini apps that are coming up and that are like our ETHDenver hackathon winner was a AI winner, and so now they’re going to be it’s called QuestGPT and so that’s going to be a miniapp, where you’re going to be able to download that AI miniapp you feed it your information, and now it becomes an Ask bot within Collab.Land. So now you can do like a slash ask command, and you can ask anything from the document that the AI has consumed, and now it’ll just be answering. So think about like support, you know your mods, like you can feed it anything you want, and now you don’t have to look for this AI bot. Now, you can just download it one click instant from the Collab.Land marketplace, and so we think of this is so exciting. Number one, it’s like we believe in Crypto communities, we want to encourage people to build on Crypto communities like this is the way like when you think about mass adoption, it’s like really, who’s done a better job than NFTs in terms of capturing the imagination of people that were not interested in Crypto before, and so it’s like, community is the way whenever anyone you know and we I talk a lot about how it’s like similar to the immigrant experience, right? Like my parents were immigrants, and when they came to America, they’re looking for community and identity, like they don’t know anything about the culture. So they moved to an area where maybe immigrants from their same town are from or from their same country, where they can speak the same language, and they can eat the same foods. So in the same way it’s like when people are coming into Crypto, they’re going to need community, like there’s no way to separate that out, that’s what’s going to bring on the next billion people is community where you can buy an asset or sweat equity into a project, and then you are with the people that share that interests that have the same skin in the game, and that’s where you learn, you know it’s not just innovation, it’s education, and it’s these relationships that are going to bring more and more people into the space. So of course, we want to encourage as many developers as possible to build in social Crypto and in Web3, you know into this community space, and so it’s like how do we do that this is the way we’re doing it is through the marketplace, we’re giving you a distribution platform, we’re saying look, one click install into a Collab.Land community, we have these 48 49,000 plus communities, come on in, give it a try, you know build a mini app, build a small functionality and see how that goes, and then you can iterate with the communities themselves, now that you have their feedback and using your product to create something bigger and better. So that was a huge thrill, and you know being in this position where we can offer this is tremendous. Of course in the future, it can be you know, being able to charge for your miniapp within the Collab.Land marketplace, the DAO will decide how the funding gets turned on. So it’s like there is an opportunity to make money as well. Like, we’re not just saying, oh you know, add to the Collab.Land experience with no benefit. Of course there’s so much opportunity here, where admins can now use the Collab.Land token in order to download your app or pay in USCC to download your app. Like there’s opportunities here for making this sustainable, and you know a lot of our background is in open source seed, our CTO Raymond Fein comes from open source, and so it’s like having this sustainable model for open source, which is now we all have the same token, the Collab.Land token contributed to the token. It’s not just in waste. It’s like you contribute to the token, you make Collab.Land more robust. Now, we all win together, because now we all have the same token. When Collab.Land wins, then the participants win, the members win, the admins win, and the developers win, I mean that’s really the plan.
Matt Zahab
So token is called Collab, where can people get it? What’s the easiest way to participate in the Collab.Land ecosystem?
Anjali Young
Yeah, so right now the Collab.Land claim is still ongoing. You know we started on February 23, 2023 and it goes all the way until May 23, 2023. You know and I know you talked a little bit about the smoothness so we can talk a little bit about the actual claiming process itself, but it’s a three month claim process. So if you’ve ever connected with Collab.Land use Collab.Land before February 14, 2023 you’re eligible to claim so please do. That would be the best way to get the token is directly from us. It is a sponsored claim Collab.Land did not make any money off of the token. It is 100% retroactive distribution. You do not need to connect your wallet at all. You do not need to sign a message at all. You know the benefit of Collab.Land like I said, we’re a social network. We’re on Telegram and we’re on Discord so far and other platforms coming, but we are able to offer that type of auth to you that’s social network auth and so when you’re gonna go to wagmi.collab.land, you’re going to either often with Telegram or Discord, and we have that information and so therefore, yeah, it’s huge. Oh,
Matt Zahab
That’s so important.
Anjali Young
Yeah no gas, no wallet connection, no message signing, you know the reason we’re doing this and you think, why would we do this? And it’s not free, right? Collab.Land has to pay for that, and it’s like what are we trying to do with that, and really we’re trying to save people, like as much as we tell people like this is our website. This is how you connect the token, this is how you claim your token, people are still going to go to other websites where they’re going to end up connecting their wallet, it’s already happened, you know there’s promoted tweets, there’s Google ads, like you know, you really have to verify a million times over to make sure you’re doing the right thing. But what can we do as Collab.Land to try to help in our little way? I mean, that’s one way we did it which is where like let’s just say, no wallet connection. If we make that clear from the beginning, there’s no wallet connection, then maybe that message will go out and somebody who’s like about to claim a Collab.Land token, and they’re like, oh wait a minute, I have to connect my wallet here. This is not right. Like just giving one more moment for people to say like, Oh, I heard it there’s no wallet connection. That’s really the goal, which is to try to limit you know, it happens a lot, right? Like imposters happen all the time in Crypto, that’s one of our main problems in Crypto is imposters, and so we take that very seriously and if we provided this and you know, trying to set an example for others, if there’s any other way rather than wallet connection, then maybe you can try that as well. So just try to set an example. For other projects coming up like yeah, it’s not, it’s expensive you know a sponsored claim means you have to pay some money. But you know maybe we can all do our little part to try to keep the ecosystem safer, and so we try to lead by example there.
Matt Zahab
100%. And it’s such a good brand play to like, how the gen pop within Crypto thinks and feels about Collab.Land is. I mean, you know I don’t feel like there’s a brand score for any Crypto companies, but you guys must be hell up there. You know what I mean? And part of the reason why is because you do things like that. So we’d love to see that. Anjali this been a absolute treat, as always is there anything that’s getting you going at the moment, any Anjali hot takes, I know you and James had a couple last time, but anything at the moment that, you know it’s really letting a fire under your derriere or, you know maybe tying a couple of knots in your stomach?
Anjali Young
I think a lot about Crypto communities, obviously NFT communities, you know with the whole thing with a royalties being extinguished for the most part and everyone moving to zero with marketplaces and fees. Like I think a lot about Crypto communities, and what is it that’s going to keep them going, you know like we need it for mass adoption, we need commute like I mentioned earlier like, we need communities for massive mass adoption, we just do that any new technology, any new ecosystem, we’re gonna need community, like I said, safety and identity. Like, that’s key and you saw it over the weekend, were Bored Ape Yacht Club was like just tweeting the word Bored Ape Yacht Club, and you share your Ape, and I did that too even though it’s not my Ape, it’s James’s Ape but he’s not so much on Twitter. So I was like I’m just gonna do it for both of us, and communities have to come up with new ways to like engage their members, and so I think about that a lot and how AI is probably going to be one of the main ways because now you don’t need as many developers, you can have one developer that creates 15 apps that are for communities, and so it’s like, what can communities do now? And that’s what gets me most excited about the marketplace, because it’s like, communities themselves, you know I was talking to I did a Twitter spaces last week was Mintage, and telling them about the marketplace, and one of the things came up is like, Oh could Mintage make a mini app? And I was like yes, Mintage could make a mini app, and that mini app would be available to all Crypto communities. Like if there’s some NFT fashion kind of a connection where maybe they have an app where now they can dress the NFTs that are in that community. I’m just coming up with an idea right now, they didn’t have that idea. But it’s like maybe getting some vintage outfit or like creating some special outfit. Like maybe the members of your community can design a fashion line, and then that fashion line can be added to the NFTs as an outfit like, you know there’s so many different ideas now and so communities themselves through this marketplace are going to be able to create apps for themselves, but also get brand awareness like through communities, like you know we have these sometimes we see collaborations happening here and there between one project and another project. But I think moving forward, we’re really going to have to think about how we all grow stronger. Like how do all Crypto communities kind of have a new model have new ideas share new ideas, and this marketplace where you’re going to be able to like pick different parts of different social apps that are interesting for Crypto communities like, I feel like this is really going to be the next big thing, which is like, how to move forward, and there’s so much we can do now we’re here, we’re all interested, we’re all excited. We in some, you know have the same asset in a lot of ways, and so what do we want to do now? How do we want to activate these people and activating them by the Collab.Land token, you know and this is another this is kind of in the middle of what we’re doing right now. But 15% of the total Collab.Land token went to our top 100 communities, and we said to them, submit a proposal, you don’t just get to get the tokens or you don’t just get AirDrop the tokens, you just submit it.
Matt Zahab
Tell us why.
Anjali Young
Yeah, you need to tell us what you’re going to do with it. You need to engage your community. This is a community drop, we’re giving you these tokens. So that way, you can use these tokens to further engage your community. Talk to your community, you know we see on Twitter all the time, townhall, discussing our Collab.Land proposal, check out this channel, this is where we’re talking about a Collab.Land proposal. Already, we see communities engaging more with themselves with each other about what should we do with this Collab.Land proposal? You know and that’s really what we wanted to do is we want to excite these communities to kind of work together to activate them, and to get them thinking about how they should move in a direction together, and so it’s like they have the power of being the group. Now, what do they do with it? And I think all of us have to work together on unlocking what can communities do now, like in this future, that there may not be royalties, what can we do now? Because now we’re all here, we’ve all got skin in the game, we’ve all bought the same asset or sweat it into the same asset together, we don’t have royalties. Or maybe we that royalty future is unsure. How are we all going to work together now to create something special here, and really the marketplace allows anybody that’s in any communities to build any app that can be used throughout all the Crypto community. So that’s very exciting and also, like I said with the Collab.Land token, like where do we want to go with Collab.Land? Like, what do you want to do with it? What does the future look like? And how can we best serve on the future of Crypto communities? Let’s see.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Wow, you’ve been on a roll today. Always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Anjali, you always dropped the heat. Can’t wait for round three. Until next time, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Collab.Land online and on socials?
Anjali Young
Oh, boy, we didn’t get to my last. I mean, there was one more thing Matt I don’t know if it’s okay to mention this.
Matt Zahab
No, give me one more. We’re all good.
Anjali Young
Ok great. What you were talking about like, the craziness of dropping a token, and I haven’t talked about this anywhere yet. But I’m happy to talk about it now. Because this is kind of like the inside baseball stuff that you don’t get to hear outside, right. Like you won’t know until you’ve dropped a token, what you have coming at you, and it’s really you talk to anyone who has dropped a token, they’ll be able to tell you and it was over ETHDenver that actually got to talk to a lot of people who approached us, and we’re like, oh my gosh how was that for you? And we’re like, wait, what, you know how crazy this can be like? Okay, like, Thank you, like, I feel seen. But you know, it’s interesting because with Collab.Land, we’re very much a foundational layer, and you know I always compared us to like the electric company, or the water company, like not sexy but necessary. So it’s like, do you think about is anyone a fan of the water company? Is anyone a fan of electric company? No, you just know that you use them and you want it to work and you want to make sure that when you click let’s go, that it’s going to work and you want to make sure that all the roles in your community are working and that people who are kicked out or got kicked out and the people that are invited are invited, you want to make sure that your membership is staying, you know exactly where you need it to be. But as far as Collab.Land is concerned, we didn’t get much feedback in terms of how popular the token drop would be at all. So it’s like you know, previous to the token drop we had 500 people in our discord server after the token drop we have 77,000.
Matt Zahab
Yeah, a little bit of skin in the game, and everyone becomes a community member, easiest way out of it.
Anjali Young
Fascinating to know that more. I mean, the people that were initially like talking about the token, didn’t know what Collab.Land was, and we’re like where did these people come from? Like, there is this like roving band of like AirDrop farmers and people who are just chasing AirDrops and tokens, and we as Collab.Land did not have any visibility into that group before. So we’re just like we’re a community project, we support communities, we know the admins of our communities, you know we have a through our support channels, because you know, I ran the support team for a year and a half, I don’t anymore but I did for a year and if like, we have a very close relationship with the people who use our product, and so we have a really good idea of who they are. But once you launch a token, it’s this whole other group of people that you have no idea who they are, and they have no idea who you are, and so managing that has been really interesting, and at first we’re like, wait they don’t know what Collab.Land is, but they are farming this token like, what’s going on? Who are these people? And what are they here for? And we don’t know who they are. But you know it’s interesting, because over the last few weeks, and now it’s been almost a month since we launched our token. They’re still in our Discord, and they’re interested in what we’re doing, and so it’s like, initially we’re just like afraid like, who are these people and what are they here for? But it’s been a really interesting situation, because like in terms of Collab.Land and what we’ve been about from the beginning, which is trying to be an ambassador of Crypto right to people who maybe have never heard of it before or brand new to Crypto. Now it’s like we’re educating these AirDrop farm communities and teaching them about social Crypto and teaching them about Crypto communities, and they’re joining in and they’re expecting something maybe they’ve been a part of DeFi projects before some other types of projects and so they’re expecting a certain kind of community, and then they joined the Collab.Land Discord, and they’re like what are you guys talking about vision and values? Like, wait you’re talking about governance, and you’re talking about this you know, like all the different things that we talked about within our Discord server it’s like a brand new culture within Crypto itself, and so it’s like we have people coming into our ecosystem which is Crypto in general, like big Crypto, capital C and then we have these, like DeFi games AirDrop farmer type people coming into Crypto communities which is like our world, and so initially, I would say was a bit frightening and overwhelming like, who are these people, and this is not a recreate the token. Like we created this token, so people can learn about governance and join the DAO and, you know bring utility to the token through the marketplace and so we can all win together of Collab.Land wins, everyone wins. But so it was very scary initially because they’re all so hyper financialized, and we’re like, what is happening, but I will say a month into it. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, which is these people yes, they didn’t know about Crypto communities before, they didn’t know about Collab.Land before, they didn’t know really about NFT projects before, and now they’re also staying, it’s not all of them. But the good amount is staying we have about 10,000 daily active users on our Discord. So 10,000 that’s still a huge amount of people. So it’s very exciting actually to try to like change some minds, and that gives me more confidence that this is the right way this is really going to be how we get people into Crypto. This is how we get people caring about their social networks, and trying to move away from the old Web2 models you know, like ownership is really foundational to Crypto, and owning something having ownership of a digital asset and in the same way, owning your identity, owning who you are outside of the computer, and on the computer, owning that person, owning what we do, and being able to have some influence in what a social network looks like. Let’s see if we can turn this around.
Matt Zahab
I’d love that. Anjali on fire as always, that was truly a treat. Thank you cannot wait for round three, our current rate, I guess we’re gonna have round three in July or August.
Anjali Young
I hope so that would be super fun. I’m sure we’re gonna have, you know one thing about the movies and gosh I talk so much Matt. But one thing I want to say about this, I really hope people also in the same way, you know like we’re inspiring people to come build in social Crypto, we’re inspiring people to come and create their own communities. We want to inspire people to tell their stories of Web3 please let’s form group, you know let’s form group dot XYZ, that’s where we’re showing them every single week. Let that inspire you to tell your own story. I want to see Matt’s documentary about where he came from and why he’s here, and why he does what he does, because there are 1000s of stories that can be told in Crypto and all the humans of Crypto, like let’s get people talking about those stories. Because if we’re going to try to change the narrative, and invite the rest of the world into this space, we need to inspire them and we have the tools to inspire them. So we just got to do it.
Matt Zahab
Very true. Maybe I’ll be on the next one who knows I’m joking. I need a couple more 100,000 followers before we get to that point, but we’ll see before you go you got to plug yourself and Collab.Land. Where can all of us find you in Collab.Land online and on socials?
Anjali Young
Awesome. So I’m damaderoca lady from Boulder @damaderoca on Twitter. Same on Instagram same on Discord. Yeah, so that’s pretty much me damaderoca. Collab.Land on Twitter is @Collab_Land_ so you can find us there. On YouTube where youtube.com/@collabland on Discord where discord.gg/collabland all one word, and then also our link tree is linktr.ee/collab_land_ so if you go to our Twitter, you’ll be able to see all of our links in our linktr.ee in our bio, always verify, you know Collab.Land of course gets impersonated a lot but all trusted projects do so of course be very careful with Collab.Land but also be very careful with MetaMask wallet connect you know everybody else as well so just you know be careful out there.
Matt Zahab
Love it. Anjali thanks again appreciate it as always incredible episode dropping knowledge bombs left right and center we’d love to see it and I’ll see you again in three four months.
Anjali Young
Thank you so much Matt always a joy to be with you
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Anjali Young from Collab.Land incredible epi as always two for two so far can’t wait to make it three for three if you guys enjoyed this one and I really hope you did. Please do subscribe it would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking to the team love you guys Justas my amazing sound editor appreciate everything you do. You are the GOAT until the listeners love you guys keep on growing with bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
