Guild (guild.xyz) is the authorization layer for token-gated communities: it decides who may enter a space and what role they hold there, based on what a wallet holds or has done on-chain. Where a governance contract like OpenZeppelin Governor answers "whose vote counts," Guild answers the prior question — "who gets into the room at all." It is the plumbing behind most of the token-gated Discords, Telegram groups, and members-only spaces in Web3, including social DAOs such as Friends With Benefits.

Requirements, Roles, and Rewards

Guild organises a community around three building blocks, documented in its How Guild works guide. Requirements are the conditions a person must meet: on-chain activity (own a $TOKEN or NFT, hold a POAP, make N transactions, interact with a given contract), social proof (follow an X account, hold an existing Discord role, verify an email), other-guild activity (a points threshold or another guild's role), or time-based conditions (had a role before a date, transacted in the last seven days). Requirements span 20+ blockchains and 30+ apps, and a "should not satisfy" rule can exclude wallets rather than admit them.

Roles bundle a set of requirements together with what meeting them grants; a single guild can layer many roles for tiered access. Rewards are what a satisfied role unlocks — the platform automatically grants Discord server roles, Telegram access, GitHub repository permissions, Google Workspace file sharing, POAPs, and token rewards, per the rewards documentation. Access is re-evaluated against live wallet state, so a role is revoked automatically when its holder no longer meets the requirement.

What it gates, and where

Guild's value is that it turns an on-chain fact into an off-chain permission without any custom code. A community defines "hold 1 of this NFT" once, and Guild keeps a Discord role, a Telegram invite, and a private GitHub repo in sync with that condition across every member. Its homepage claims 100+ integrations and communities scaling from a hundred to hundreds of thousands of members, with reference deployments in the 160,000–483,000-member range. Because the gate is a requirement check rather than a smart-contract lock, the same guild can mix on-chain holdings with off-chain proofs — a token and an X follow and an allowlist entry — which is why it became the default access layer for social DAOs and creator communities that gate a human space rather than a treasury.

Sybil resistance and proof-of-personhood

A token gate has an obvious weakness: one person with enough capital can meet a holdings requirement from many wallets, or borrow tokens just long enough to pass the check. Guild addresses this at the access layer with native wallet-activity requirements and, since a 2023 partnership, an integration with Gitcoin Passport — a guild can require a minimum Unique Humanity Score so that roles are gated on a proof-of-personhood signal rather than on holdings alone. This makes Guild one of the practical building blocks discussed on sybil resistance in DAOs: it can filter who gets a voice in a forum or an allowlist, even though it does not itself weight anyone's on-chain vote.

Origin and adoption

Guild is built by the Agora Space team — formerly ZGEN, founded in 2020 and based in Szeged, Hungary — positioning itself early as "the authorization layer for Web3." The project is freemium, free to start with paid tiers for scale, and grew into the widely-used token-gating standard for Discord and Telegram, trusted (per its own site) by 1,000+ teams. It sits in the access-and-identity slot of the broader DAO tooling stack, alongside contribution tools like Coordinape and voting layers like Snapshot: Guild decides who is in the community, and the governance tools decide what the community does.

How Caper approaches this

Guild is the best answer to one specific question — gate this space by what a wallet holds right now. But a token gate is a snapshot: hold the token today and you are in; sell it, or return the tokens you borrowed for the check, and the role is revoked. It governs access, and access is exactly the thing a well-funded buyer can rent. A caper does not gate access at all — anyone can buy the token and become a member — but it makes the part of governance that actually matters something a wallet cannot buy or rent. Voting weight is (t·v)/(V·T), combining tokens held with v, an earned, soulbound proof-of-vote record that is minted one-per-vote and cannot be transferred, and the same weighting sets a member's pro-rata share on exit. Stake still counts — t is a multiplier, not something the earned record replaces — but the decisive, earned factor has no spot price. The two are complementary rather than competing: a caper could happily use Guild to gate a token-holders' Discord. Guild decides who is in the room; a caper decides who has earned the standing to move the treasury, and makes that standing un-buyable.

References

• Guild, How Guild works (Requirements, Roles, Rewards)
• Guild, How to set up rewards
• Guild Knowledge Base, Wallets & social accounts
• Gitcoin, Guild.xyz and Gitcoin Passport partner to stop bots and sybil attackers
• Agora Space (the team behind Guild); company profile via CB Insights