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, an ERC-20 on Optimism with a fixed supply of one billion. 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. Token holders form the Collab.Land DAO, which votes on feature requests, funds bounties, and curates the miniapp Marketplace — making the gatekeeper for thousands of communities itself a token-governed organisation, and a fitting entry in a directory of DAOs.

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/logic/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, homepage (Spring 2020 launch, 40+ chains, tens of thousands of communities)
• CoinDesk, Collab.Land to Airdrop Token to Over 2M Wallets on Optimism (2023)
• TokenInsight, $COLLAB tokenomics (1B supply, allocation, DAO governance)