At its core, Towns is collaborative chat built on crypto rails. Towns’s UI is familiar and intuitive. If you’ve used a messaging app (think Slack, Discord) in the past decade, you’ll know how to use Towns immediately.

Because it’s built on crypto rails, you control permissions on who gets access, how to charge for that access, and you completely own your community’s data. Plus, you get a community NFT token when you join. Beyond cultural ephemera, a token’s a real stake in the community you’re part of. It’s a sign of inclusivity (or exclusivity- depends on your Town) and ownership. As your Town (and its treasury) grows, you’ll have a material stake in the success of your community.

Why Decentralization Matters for Communities on Towns:

Ownership and Control: Decentralization on Towns puts the power back in your hands, allowing community leaders and stakeholders to have a direct say in the governance and evolution of their Town. Want to charge for access? Want to gatekeep who comes in? Cool. Do it. Better yet, your community gets a direct stake in your Town and can share in the upside of growth over time. We think this will be particularly meaningful to moderators. Current messaging platforms put a ton of pressure on moderators and it’s largely a thankless job. Towns flips that script from a burden to be tolerated into an opportunity to be rewarded. 

Resilience: Because Towns is built on the River messaging protocol, it’s less prone to single points of failure, making it more resilient against attacks, censorship, or any form of top-down control that could disrupt service or erode trust. By design, everyone you invite or speak to in Towns is verified, which cuts down on the amount of spam, bots, and outside noise communities come up against on current communication platforms. 

Encryption and Trust: Every transaction, interaction, and message in Towns is encrypted end-to-end on-chain, simultaneously enhancing transparency and building trust with users who prize authenticity and privacy. 

At the end of the day, we believe in the radical freedom afforded to us by the internet and Towns is a reflection of that commitment to put control and ownership back in the hands of communities and the ppl leading them. We’re launching soon. And we can’t wait for you to be part of it.