Towns, an on-chain messaging platform co-founded by the creator of video streaming apps Houseparty and Meerkat, launched on Tuesday after raising $25.5 million in their Series A funding round with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark and Framework.
The new platform resembles other popular messaging apps like Discord and Slack but puts a unique twist on these well-known competitors. Towns is hosted on a blockchain—on-chain in crypto parlance—and uses the technology to let users create, own and manage their communities.
CEO and co-founder, Ben Rubin, touts the messaging platform's decentralized ownership and end-to-end encryption as what differentiates Towns from the rest.
“When I built Meerkat and Houseparty, it was clear that online communities are the backbone of the internet and a key part of our culture,” Rubin said. Those apps are no longer around but gained considerable traction when they launched and are regarded as key pioneers in the early years of social video streaming.
In the case of Towns, users can join groups based on common experiences as verified through the underlying blockchain—like having gone to see Taylor Swift’s movie or betting $100 on a Polymarket poll. Rubin says this feature will prevent bots and unwanted users from infiltrating group chats dedicated to a specific issue or topic.
Towns relies on a blockchain protocol called River, and permits entry only to those who satisfy certain qualifications set by the user who creates the group.
“It's no longer about my phone number and your phone number. It's actually about our shared experiences,” he said. “Where'd you travel to last year? What kind of books you're reading, what shows you're watching on Netflix. Are you really listening to this song over and over again?”
The platform achieves this by allowing the creators of each Town to “token-gate” their community, giving them the option to require other users to connect their crypto wallet and verify their on-chain transactions. While Taylor Swift tickets are not usually purchased on-chain, last year AMC Theatres allowed Swifties to buy tickets to her movie through BitPay, a bitcoin payment service.
On the other hand, users without a crypto wallet have the option to join communities that are not token-gated. “Currently we have “and” “or” logic to token-gating at Towns, meaning you can decide if a member must hold a specific token, multiple tokens, or one out of several tokens you allow,” the Towns website says.
Rubin believes his platform and others like it will pressure companies to offer their products on-chain. Additionally, he said he wouldn’t have launched the platform if users were required to connect a crypto wallet. Those unfamiliar with crypto wallets can join by simply providing a phone number. “We're using the technology,” he said. “We're not making the technology the point.”
Arianna Simpson, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, believes that Towns will succeed because it “uses the best of web3 but doesn't hinder its ability to be used by folks who are less native,” she said. “That, I think, is what will really enable them to kind of reach a massive scale.”
Each “town” acts as a smart contract, allowing the communities to be permissionless and programmable. Membership and ownership are minted on-chain and users can customize each town with specific pricing, gating and rewards.
The Towns team is using the Series A funding to scale their team and continue building out the Towns platform and its underlying River Protocol.
Towns launched today and is available on the App Store after two years of development. “It feels like it's a destination, but in all the important ways, it's just day one,” Rubin said.
