No.312
Towns TOWNS
the community-owned Discord
🎭 a town-crier sprite: it rings the bell, hands out the deeds, and lets the square govern itself
💬 “Your chatroom should belong to the people in it, not to whoever owns the server. So I hand each Space its own deed, lock the door with a token, and let the crowd decide the rules. Hear ye, hear ye. 🔔”
- What: a Web3 take on Discord, where group chats called Spaces are owned on-chain, not by a company.
- How: smart contracts on Base hold the memberships and rules; the actual messages stay encrypted and off-chain.
- Token: TOWNS is for staking, voting and governance, not a fixed-cap coin like Bitcoin.
- Who & when: built from 2023 by ex-Houseparty founder Ben Rubin; token launched August 2025.
📖 The Story
In 2023, Ben Rubin had already learned how fragile a chat app can be. He co-founded Houseparty, the video-hangout app that boomed and then vanished inside someone else's company. With Patrick Fives he started Towns to ask a stubborn question: what if a community owned its own room instead of renting it from a corporation?
The answer they built looks a lot like Discord at first glance. You make a server, you invite people, you talk. Towns calls each one a Space. The twist is underneath. Every Space comes with a deed written into smart contracts on Base, Coinbase's Layer 2 network. The contracts decide who is a member, what each role can do, and what entry costs. Hold the right token and the door opens for you. No company sits in the middle holding the keys.
The chatting itself stays fast and private. Messages are encrypted and streamed by a separate crowd of operators called Stream Nodes, so your conversation does not get carved permanently into a public ledger. Only the ownership and the rules live on-chain.
In August 2025 the project shipped the TOWNS token with an airdrop and exchange listings. From that point the town square had a vote and a treasury of its own, and the town-crier could finally hand over the bell.
📊 Stats
These bands are our editorial read of Towns' character, not market data or a price call.
🧩 How it works
Towns splits the work in two. The slow, important things, who owns a Space and what members may do, are kept on-chain in contracts on Base. The fast, chatty thing, the actual messages, is kept off-chain and encrypted so it stays quick and private. The TOWNS token glues the network together: people stake it to run nodes and use it to vote in the DAO.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- Communities actually own their Space. The rules and memberships live in contracts, so no single company can quietly change them or pull the plug
- It feels familiar. The flow is close enough to Discord that newcomers are not starting from zero
- Real backers and a real team (founders from Houseparty; funding from a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Benchmark and others)
- It is very young. The token only went live in August 2025, so the network still has to prove people will stay (many social tokens fade after the airdrop)
- The supply is inflationary. New TOWNS keeps being minted toward a soft cap near 15.33 billion, which can dilute holders over time
- It is fighting Discord, a free app with hundreds of millions of users. Convincing communities to move is a steep hill, and some of the cited figures are project-reported
🧬 Evolution lineage
Towns is not a fork or a sibling of another coin. It is an app built on top of Base, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2, so its family tree is the Ethereum stack underneath it, not a Bitcoin-style split. Its rivals (Discord, and Web3 chat like Farcaster or Lens) are peers, not parents.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Towns?
- Towns is a messaging protocol for ‘Spaces’, group chats that work like Discord servers but are owned on-chain instead of by a company. A Space can be token-gated, so only members who hold the right token can walk in. It runs on Base, an Ethereum Layer 2.
- How is Towns different from Discord?
- On Discord the company owns your server and can change the rules or shut it down. On Towns the membership, permissions and pricing of a Space live in smart contracts, so the owner and members hold the deed. The messages themselves stay encrypted and private.
- Does TOWNS have a fixed supply like Bitcoin?
- No. TOWNS is inflationary. It started near 10.13 billion tokens at genesis and is set to grow toward a soft cap around 15.33 billion, with new issuance near 8% in the first year easing toward about 2% over roughly twenty years. There is no hard cap that freezes the count.
- What is the TOWNS token used for?
- TOWNS secures the proof-of-stake node network through staking and delegation, and it gives holders a vote in the Towns DAO over proposals, funding and partnerships. It is a working part of the network, not just a price ticker. (Information only, not investment advice.)
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only