Collab.Land (collab.land) is the original token-gating bot for chat communities: it verifies that a wallet holds the tokens a community requires, then grants and periodically re-checks the corresponding role in that community's Discord server or Telegram group. Live since Spring 2020, it turned "hold this token to get in" into infrastructure that tens of thousands of communities now run, and it sits at the entrance of a large share of the DAOs catalogued elsewhere in this directory — the gate a new member passes through before they ever reach a vote.

Token Gating Rules

A community's access policy is expressed as one or more Token Gating Rules (TGRs): each rule names a token contract, a threshold, and the platform role to grant when a wallet meets it. TGRs come in two shapes. Balance-based rules check a fungible amount — hold at least N of an ERC-20 to earn a role — and are the common case for token communities. Attributes-based rules check NFT metadata, granting a role for holding a token whose traits match a set the admin specifies, so a single collection can drive many tiers. The Role Composition miniapp lets a rule require a combination — both an ERC-20 balance and a specific NFT — for finer-grained membership than a single holding can express.

How verification works

Collab.Land never takes custody and never asks for a transaction. A member connects a wallet and signs a message to attest they control that address; the bot then reads the public blockchain to confirm the wallet satisfies the community's TGRs and assigns the matching role. The design point that distinguishes a gating bot from a one-time allowlist is re-verification: Collab.Land re-checks balances on a schedule, so a role is removed when the holding that earned it is sold or transferred away. Membership tracks the wallet's current state rather than a snapshot taken at the door — a property that matters for the failure modes discussed under Sybil resistance, since a borrowed or briefly-held balance loses its role once returned.

Where it sits in the stack

Collab.Land is one of three complementary answers to "who is a member, and what may they do." It is the chat-native gate: deeply integrated with Discord and Telegram, it is where most communities' membership is actually enforced day to day. Guild.xyz sits beside it as a platform-agnostic requirement engine — composing the same on-chain facts into roles across many surfaces (Discord, Telegram, GitHub, gated forms) from one definition. Hats Protocol works one layer deeper, encoding on-chain roles and permissions as transferable authority a contract can check, rather than a chat role a bot assigns. Collab.Land answers are you in the room; Hats answers may this address execute. Most DAOs run more than one, and the tooling overview maps how the access, execution, and voting layers fit together.

The $COLLAB token and the Collab.Land DAO

In 2023 Collab.Land distributed a governance token, $COLLAB. The published allocation reserves 50% to the DAO treasury, 25% to the team and its investors, and 25% to a retroactive airdrop — itself split 60% to the top-100 Discord communities, 16% each to Patron and Membership NFT holders, and 8% to members verified as of 14 February 2023. The airdrop reached over two million wallets, one of the larger eligibility sets a community tool has distributed to.

Everything from here was read first-hand on 8 September 2026 off keyless surfaces: eth_call against public RPCs on Ethereum, Optimism and Arbitrum, the Discourse JSON API at gov.collab.land, Snapshot’s GraphQL hub, and Collab.Land’s own live docs and homepage.

One billion, but only on one chain

The fixed supply is real and it is an Ethereum number. Collab.Land’s own token doc says $COLLAB is “minted on Ethereum and bridged to both Optimism and Arbitrum” and names the addresses. Calling totalSupply() on each:

Only the first is the supply. The other two are bridge mints against escrow, and the escrow says so: the Optimism L1StandardBridge holds 902,947,616.15 COLLAB of the mainnet supply and the Arbitrum L1 ERC-20 gateway holds 15,552,363.30 — together 91.8% of every token that exists, leaving about 81.5 million free on Ethereum. Each escrow sits a little above the rollup supply it backs, by 982,699 COLLAB on Optimism and 10 on Arbitrum, which is what withdrawals burned on the rollup and not yet finalised on L1 look like. Nothing has been burned: the zero and 0x…dEaD addresses hold none.

Summing the three readings gives 1.92 billion, nearly double the cap, and is the wrong sum to take. This is a hazard for any DAO directory, this one included: a supply figure is chain-scoped, and a bridged token has one per chain. Quoting the right number against the wrong contract reads as verifiable and falsifies on the first eth_call a reader runs.

The chain matters for governance too, not just for accounting. The Optimism contract implements ERC20Votes — delegates(address) answers there — and the Ethereum contract does not; on L1 the same call reverts. The token that carries a vote is the bridged one.

The forum has not taken a post since January 2024

Collab.Land’s docs still describe the DAO in the present tense: holders “participate in discussions, vote on proposals, and help shape the future of Collab.Land”, and the DAO “governs the ecosystem through voting on feature requests, offering bounties, curating the Marketplace”. Its governance forum, gov.collab.land, answers HTTP 200 and renders a complete Discourse.

Discourse also publishes its own vital signs, and about.json gives the whole forum’s life in one object: 49 topics, 399 posts, 68 registered users, and 0 topics, 0 posts and 0 active users in the last 30 days. Ordered by activity, the newest post anywhere on it is dated 17 January 2024 — two years and eight months of silence. Snapshot’s GraphQL hub returns no space at collabland.eth, collab-land.eth or collabdotland.eth, and a search of its space index for “collab” returns nothing belonging to the project. The Season 0 delegate thread opens with “The DAO lives! This is the MVD — Minimum Viable Delegation” and ends in 2023 with delegates asking for a better delegation interface. On Optimism the token still has 106,265 holders.

What the product does instead

The DAO went quiet; the product did not. Collab.Land now sells subscriptions. Since 12 November 2025 plans are priced per Verified Member rather than per Token Gating Rule; PRO miniapps, staking-contract support and the Solana event listener sit behind a Premium tier; and members above a plan’s limit are held as Pending and cannot complete verification until the admin upgrades. The current miniapps doc describes them as “developed by both Collab.Land and third-party teams” and does not mention DAO curation. The homepage, © 2026, does not mention $COLLAB, the DAO or the co-op anywhere.

None of this says the token was abandoned or that anyone did anything improper. The contracts are untouched, a seat-priced subscription is a reasonable way to fund a bot tens of thousands of communities depend on, and stale documentation is the most ordinary failure there is. It is worth recording because the two halves diverged without an announcement, and because the direction of the drift is the one a directory is least equipped to catch: a reader who checks the vendor’s docs learns Collab.Land is a token-governed co-op, and a reader who checks the forum and the pricing page learns it is a subscription business whose governance token has a hundred thousand holders and nowhere to vote. The pattern — product survives, governance layer quietly stops — is the common half of winding down a DAO, and it rarely comes with an announcement to cite.

How Caper approaches this

A gating bot answers a binary question — are you in? — and re-checks it periodically. That is the right tool for guarding a chat, but it is not how influence over a treasury should be measured: presence is not the same as stake in a decision. A caper does not gate the room at all — holding the token is membership — and it does not reduce standing to a yes/no role. Voting weight is computed continuously from what a member actually holds: in the contract (contracts/common/src/lib.rs) compute_vote_weight returns (held_amount × members_votes) / (vote_supply × tokens_in_circulation), so both a member's balance and their cast vote-tokens price their say — there is no role that is simply on or off. And where a gating bot's only lever against a member is to strip a role, a caper gives the outvoted member the exit right: the same weight that measures your vote also measures the treasury share you can withdraw when a decision goes against you. Collab.Land decides who may enter; a caper decides how much each member's holding counts and what they can take with them if they leave.

References

• Collab.Land, Token Gating and TGRs (balance- vs attributes-based rules, verification flow)
• Collab.Land, Command Center (admin portal, miniapps)
• Collab.Land, $COLLAB Token (the DAO description in the present tense; the Optimism and Arbitrum addresses)
• Collab.Land, Subscriptions (Verified Member pricing from 12 November 2025; Premium tier; Pending members)
• Collab.Land, Miniapps (current description, no DAO curation)
• Collab.Land, homepage (Spring 2020 launch, 40+ chains, tens of thousands of communities, © 2026)
• Collab.Land Co-op, gov.collab.land forum statistics and post stream — 49 topics, 399 posts, newest 17 January 2024; read 8 September 2026
• CoinDesk, Collab.Land to Airdrop Token to Over 2M Wallets on Optimism (2023)
• TokenInsight, $COLLAB tokenomics (allocation)
• Supply and escrow read 8 September 2026 with eth_call: totalSupply() on 0x8B21e9b7dAF2c4325bf3D18c1BeB79A347fE902A (Ethereum, Optimism) and 0xf18C263EC50CC211EF3F172228549B6618F10613 (Arbitrum); balanceOf() on the Ethereum contract for the Optimism L1StandardBridge 0x99C9fc46f92E8a1c0deC1b1747d010903E884bE1 and the Arbitrum L1 ERC-20 gateway 0xa3A7B6F88361F48403514059F1F16C8E78d60EeC