Syndicate was co-founded by Ian Lee & Will Papper with the vision of building the next generation of investing infrastructure. They believe in the next decade, investing will be decentralized, democratized and community-driven, so they are building the protocols, tools and infrastructure for this future across the Internet at scale.

Traditionally, forming a venture capital fund takes 1–2 years and costs at least $100–200k from setting up the legal structure, fund license, bank account, auditing report, 3rd-party custodian to fundraising and more. Syndicate’s Investment Clubs tool has democratized this process by making it 1 minute and 0.01 ETH (less than $20). On Polygon, it costs less than 0.02 MATIC (less than $0.02). Six months since the launch of the investment clubs tool, there are 25,000+ investing DAOs deployed and $20M+ invested using Syndicate.

Syndicate just launched its new social primitive “Collectives”. Compared to Syndicate’s first product Investment Clubs which are powered by the financial protocol, Collectives are powered by the social protocol that enables anyone to create on-chain social networks with ERC-721M NFTs. Collectives can evolve with communities and are composable across Web3 and can be used to build LP, scout, founder, and expert networks around investment funds and clubs on-chain. In addition, they can be used to connect people with shared interests and expertise, find opportunities as a network, share investment ideas, win deals together, and support projects as a community.

Collectives are built on ERC-721M, a new standard developed by Syndicate that transforms ERC-721 into a powerful platform for communities and developers. Its modular architecture enables Collectives to evolve with communities through custom mint, burn, and transfer plug-ins that can be swapped in/out of the contracts, customizable metadata renderers (to create on-chain identity, roles, reputation, badges, levels, etc.), and has built-in admin tools for community managers (e.g. member management, royalties, fees, ownership, etc.). It also has gas-efficient bulk minting and distribution capabilities inspired by ERC-721A to onboard large communities into Collectives.

As an investor, partner and strategic customer of Syndicate, Outliers Fund has taken a lead on forming one of the world’s first Collectives on Syndicate called Outliers Research Fellow. In this article, we will walk you through a step-by-step example of how to create your own Collective and issue your ERC-721M membership NFTs.

Step 1: Design your collective’s NFT

You are given the free rein to create your own Collective name, token symbol, and description, and upload your own artwork as the brand image for your Collective’s NFT.

Here’s our first Collective’s NFT “Outliers Research Fellow” with the token symbol of “ORF” for people who can contribute to the research aspect of Outliers to own a stake of all future research publications. You can immediately see the preview of your Collective’s NFT on the right side of the screen as you are typing it in. All fields (except the token name and symbol) are modifiable later via on-chain transactions with gas.

Step 2: Customize your Collective

Next, you can customize your Collective in terms of the invitations permission, price per NFT, maximum number of NFT each wallet can mint, opening period of this collective and whether members can transfer the NFTs. These invitation and mint mechanisms can be customized for a community’s unique characteristics and needs via ERC-721M’s modular architecture.

If you select “A max number of collective NFTs are claimed” you are required to input the maximum supply of your Collective’s NFTs.

For example, we listed the price of each of our NFTs as 1 ETH and the maximum supply of our NFTs as 10,000.

Step 3: Review & Launch

After clicking the “Continue” button, you will be led to the Review page for your Collective customized setting.

After you confirm all the information, you can click the green “Launch” button and confirm your transaction in your MetaMask wallet to complete your Collective creation.

Outliers Research Fellow Collective’s NFT is successfully created! You may simply copy the link to invite members.

Another great thing about Collectives is that Syndicate is opening access and documentation to developers and Collective admins to configure everything on the protocol level (decentralized smart contracts on Ethereum). Developers and Collective admins can sign up for the developer platform here.

Outliers Fund has been one of the most active and pioneering VC funds on Syndicate that took a lead on deploying Outliers Fund III as a Investment Club and Outliers Research Fellowship as a Collective on Syndicate.

We believe that Collectives will open up a whole new spectrum of opportunities for Outliers by empowering and incentivizing Collective Intelligence from our extended community members i.e. portfolio founders, limited partners, venture partners and ecosystem partners.

Take Outliers for example. When we run the Outliers Fund III, we realize that our community members can contribute much more than just financial capital i.e. shared knowledge, expertise, reputation, connections, social credibility, etc. We summarize all of these as “social capital”.

Social capital is difficult to quantify, track and reward. However, with the launch of Collectives on Syndicate, we can finally launch the Outliers Research Fellowship program to incentivize and work with world-class scientists from everywhere in the world. Honestly, this is an initiative that we have been planning/discussing internally for two years.

For more info about Outliers Fund, please visit https://outliers.fund

For more info about Syndicate, please visit https://syndicate.io