---
title: "Collab.Land"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/membership/collab-land"
updated: 2026-09-08
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Collab.Land

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Tool** | [Collab.Land](https://www.collab.land/) (collab.land) — token-gated community-management bot |
| **Category** | Access control / membership verification — the chat-native token-gating bot that assigns and re-checks roles from on-chain holdings |
| **Platforms** | Discord and Telegram |
| **Core primitive** | **TGRs** (Token Gating Rules) → platform **roles** |
| **Rule types** | Balance-based (ERC-20 amounts) and Attributes-based (NFT traits); the Role Composition miniapp AND-combines multiple tokens |
| **Verification** | Wallet signs a message to attest ownership → the bot reads the public chain → grants the role; balances are re-verified on a schedule, so a role is _revoked_ when the holding is sold |
| **Coverage** | 40+ chains, 30+ wallets per the [homepage](https://www.collab.land/); “50+ blockchains and 35+ wallets” per the [subscriptions doc](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/bot-subscription) — the vendor does not agree with itself. Admin via the [Command Center](https://cc.collab.land/) (cc.collab.land) |
| **Token** | **$COLLAB** — 1,000,000,000 fixed supply _on Ethereum_; bridged representations of 901,964,917.15 on Optimism and 15,552,353.30 on Arbitrum (`totalSupply()`, 8 September 2026). The Optimism contract is the one that carries votes |
| **Origin** | Built by Abridged, Inc.; live since Spring 2020, used by tens of thousands of communities |
| **Status** | 🟠 **Product live and subscription-priced; DAO governance silent.** No post on [gov.collab.land](https://gov.collab.land/) since **17 January 2024**; per-seat pricing since **12 November 2025** |

**Collab.Land** ([collab.land](https://www.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](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/token-gate-communities/) in that community's Discord server or Telegram group. Live since [Spring 2020](https://www.collab.land/), 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](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/voting/snapshot).

## Token Gating Rules

A community's access policy is expressed as one or more [Token Gating Rules](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/token-gate-communities/) (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](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/command-center/) 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](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/token-gate-communities/) 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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/sybil-resistance-in-daos), 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](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/membership/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](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/membership/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](/wiki/dao-governance/tooling/dao-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](https://tokeninsight.com/en/coins/collabland/tokenomics) 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](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/02/23/collabland-to-airdrop-token-to-over-2m-wallets-on-optimism), 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](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/token) says $COLLAB is “minted on Ethereum and bridged to both Optimism and Arbitrum” and names the addresses. Calling `totalSupply()` on each:

|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Chain** | **Contract** | **`totalSupply()`** |
| Ethereum | [0x8B21e9…fe902A](https://eth.blockscout.com/address/0x8B21e9b7dAF2c4325bf3D18c1BeB79A347fE902A) | 1,000,000,000.00 |
| Optimism | [0x8B21e9…fe902A](https://optimism.blockscout.com/address/0x8B21e9b7dAF2c4325bf3D18c1BeB79A347fE902A) (same address) | 901,964,917.15 |
| Arbitrum | [0xf18C26…f10613](https://arbiscan.io/address/0xf18C263EC50CC211EF3F172228549B6618F10613) | 15,552,353.30 |

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](https://gov.collab.land/), answers HTTP 200 and renders a complete Discourse.

Discourse also publishes its own vital signs, and [about.json](https://gov.collab.land/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](https://gov.collab.land/t/season-0-dao-governance-delegates/25) 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](https://optimism.blockscout.com/token/0x8B21e9b7dAF2c4325bf3D18c1BeB79A347fE902A).

### 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](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/bot-subscription) 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](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/miniapps) describes them as “developed by both Collab.Land and third-party teams” and does not mention DAO curation. The [homepage](https://www.collab.land/), © 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](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-wind-downs), 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](/wiki/foundations/what-is-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](/wiki/governance/proposals): 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](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/token-gate-communities/) (balance- vs attributes-based rules, verification flow)
- Collab.Land, [Command Center](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/command-center/) (admin portal, miniapps)
- Collab.Land, [$COLLAB Token](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/token) (the DAO description in the present tense; the Optimism and Arbitrum addresses)
- Collab.Land, [Subscriptions](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/bot-subscription) (Verified Member pricing from 12 November 2025; Premium tier; Pending members)
- Collab.Land, [Miniapps](https://docs.collab.land/help-docs/key-features/miniapps) (current description, no DAO curation)
- Collab.Land, [homepage](https://www.collab.land/) (Spring 2020 launch, 40+ chains, tens of thousands of communities, © 2026)
- Collab.Land Co-op, [gov.collab.land forum statistics](https://gov.collab.land/about.json) and [post stream](https://gov.collab.land/posts.json) — 49 topics, 399 posts, newest 17 January 2024; read 8 September 2026
- CoinDesk, [Collab.Land to Airdrop Token to Over 2M Wallets on Optimism](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/02/23/collabland-to-airdrop-token-to-over-2m-wallets-on-optimism) (2023)
- TokenInsight, [$COLLAB tokenomics](https://tokeninsight.com/en/coins/collabland/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`