About Guild
Guild.xyz is the infrastructure for platformless access management. Create portable memberships, social structures around on- & off-chain requirements and build unique user journeys across apps!
We started out as a simple bot for connecting Ethereum with Discord, inspired by our own needs for better token-gating and general access management of internet native groups.
Over time, Guild evolved to be integrated with multiple platforms like Discord, Telegram, Twitter, Google Workspace, GitHub in addition to 25+ chains and several web3 protocols such as POAP, Mirror, Lens and Snapshot. Supporting a diverse set of projects like ZetaChain, Arbitrum, Scroll or Base.
What is our mission?
Since our launch working with hundreds of online communities, we've witnessed how painful transition costs from and between web2 walled gardens is and how kept them from reaching their true, full potential.
Communities should be able to move fluidly as a collective. Guild is the direct opposite of all-in-one platforms. Our goal is to build full interoperability for communities between all their platforms for sharing, interactions, and collaboration. So community members can automatically access gated areas in any of the connected applications holding a single role. Before, if you set up roles in a platform like Discord you could not use the same membership structure in any other app, with the same requirements, and without members losing access in the converting process.
Being a core part of web3 communities today, it is very important that our infrastructure is less and less reliant on centralized service providers and uses a lot more of openly available blockchain data.
Core Principles
Guild's membership structure is best described using three primitives: Requirements, Roles, and Rewards. Essentially, you can "lock up” anything with Guild if you have the keys, which are the requirements.
Requirements can be onchain like tokens, NFTs, allowlists, POAPs, or off-chain like verifiable credentials, already existing roles, social activities and many more.
Roles are the unit, making up your Guild's membership structure, which is fully custom to every community. You can port these over for access into any other application.
Rewards are a form of access to something or ability to do something. In the form of access: to exclusive groups, content, tools, or means of communication such as Discord roles, Telegram groups, Github or Google Workspace. In the form of abilities: to be able to claim an NFT, purchase merchandise or vote on a decision.
They are fully custom and free to mix and match across chains and solutions, creating unlimited combinations that make sense for your needs.
And to clarify a Guild means the entirety of your community. All the roles, sub-Guilds, working groups, pods are within your own Guild, because your Guild is not restricted to one platform but it's relevant across applications. Members can authenticate once, then get automatically updated access to everything they are eligible for!
How Guild works
Browse our Guildhall to explore all non-hidden Guilds, and get inspiration on different setups and community layers.
We have multi-address support so you don't have to worry about which address your NFT or tokens are held on. You can manage your Guild account on the top-right and see which wallet addresses and social accounts you can (dis)connect.
Go to a Guild page to see details of any Guild. At the top of a Guild you can see all rewards you are eligible for, access to specific roles on a Discord server, exclusive knowledge base in Google Workspace, and a private Github repository.
In the background Guild is running on a powerful real-time query engine, Balancy we built to be able to interact with the blockchain. We can use this feature to check, which wallet addresses hold what. This is useful for:
Exporting allowlists about holding any single or combination of assets
Doing market research about community cross-sections based on holdings
Making sure members in your community didn't sell and still satisfy your requirements, all of this in real-time
Creating a Guild starts with selecting the first reward type, then setting up roles with specific requirements. After members joined your Guild, you can also export connected addresses by roles, for rewarding, allowlists, creating further roles. Essentially an allowlist maker at your service.
Start using your Guild's role system in different applications. Transfer already existing roles to your Guild, or add different rewards to your group. Since Guild is a very horizontal tool, the use cases are endless between having a very small group of your friends with a single role, and big DAO-y structures with many different roles and complex social systems.
There is another major use of Guild that is highly important in a community setting: You can set requirements for adjacent community supporters, and owners of specific assets of another project. This allows you to curate groups in a way that you recognize common interests and form deeper connections within the community becomes easy-peasy. As a community builder, you can get more context of individuals and their internet journeys within the group to better communicate with them or find ways to better provide value for each other.