Social communication protocol Towns: a16z bets $22.5 million on track upstart

With the development of web3, NFT communities, game communities, and DAO organizations are becoming more and more active. Although they can use discord, discord is not for web3 Designed for the community, various plug-ins and bots are required to implement various governance behaviors during use. Towns was born with the hope of solving this problem. What is Towns, a $22.5 million round led by a16z? What problem does it solve? How does it work? BlockBeats made a brief summary of this.

Benchmarking Farcaster, a16z’s new horse race in the social field

Towns is a group chat protocol and application designed for online communities. consists of parts. In fact, the market positioning of Town is very similar to that of Farcaster, a social communication protocol invested by Multicoin. We can even regard the two as two top encryption VCs betting against each other in the same field.

The biggest feature of Towns is that it adopts the idea of a town square, combining community, NFT, and games Combined, users can be provided with an Ethereum-based smart contract system and end-to-end encrypted chat. Towns allows community members to truly own their town squares - and communicate freely with people in a fully decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol.

Towns provides users with the fundamental building blocks to create their ideal community. The ownership of each Town exists on the chain, so it can be transferred, sold, or held by another smart contract (such as DAO or multi-signature). Build new clients or APIs and maintain full control and customization, allowing any group to use the Towns organization and chat freely and design rules to suit their needs. In addition, community owners can create some unique community, NFT, game experiences, such as selling access keys to specific channels, rewarding members for their contributions, or allowing users to trade NFTs directly in chat, etc.

The Towns team believes that in the past ten years, Internet users have been like a group of "tenants", and the gathered digital town squares have been walled gardens owned by "landlords" trapped. In addition, the biggest problem facing most communities at present is how to coordinate and cooperate to release the collective thoughts of each user to achieve sharing. Towns hopes to create a digital town square through decentralization and web3, where members can define boundaries, make rules and build the world they want. Users will become the masters of the digital town square and have a real sense of the online community they are in. sense of belonging.

At present, more and more project lists have joined Towns, hoping to transfer Web3 projects from platforms such as Discord and Telegram , including Den, Matrix, Console and Nansen Connect from analytics platform Nansen's Dragonchain.

Introduction to Towns Mechanism

Node & Decentralized Chat Server

The node of Towns is actually a node package, Includes a server, a database, and a node resolver. Node packages will be packaged as Docker files for easy deployment. A node operator guide will be available in a future Towns release. The Towns backend will initially run on the relatively centralized POW proof-of-work algorithm, and then the construction protocol will be transferred to the Ethereum 2.0 POS proof-of-stake algorithm in time. Developers can use Towns smart contracts to develop social applications, Towns nodes run on a decentralized proof-of-stake network, and messages are encrypted and stored as events in a replicated DAG for verification.

Towns’ smart contracts are scalable, composable and upgradeable, each community can draft and establish its own rules, Use this to define who can participate, what to participate and how to participate. In the future, the sample-app directory in the GitHub repository will contain the application code. Developers will be able to step through the readme to explore the Towns protocol and deploy native components and tools, and will be able to adapt the example applications to meet the needs of your community, make their own use cases, and help the protocol evolve.

Each Towns node has a decentralized chat server. Chat message communication is distributed in a peer-to-peer network, where each node is connected to several other nodes. One of the advantages of a decentralized chat server is that it offers better privacy and security as messages are encrypted and distributed across the network. It also ensures that there is no central point of control or censorship. Our philosophy is that all Towns users are free from surveillance or repression.

Towns Protocol & appTowns

Towns is an Ethereum-based composable smart contract that puts you in control of your own online space. Contracts are extensible, composable, and upgradeable, enabling the community to write their own rules for censorship, access, and monetization. The Towns Network is an end-to-end encrypted near real-time communication system governed by the Towns smart contract and driven by nodes of a decentralized, distributed proof-of-stake network.

The Towns app provides all the technical aspects of the protocol implementation in an open-source, end-to-end encrypted, enjoyable chat experience. The experience links user identity and Town ownership through smart contracts to represent access, censorship, privacy, and reputation. Tight integration of applications with the Web3 ecosystem allows users to interact with communities in ways that were not possible before. From participating in DAO governance to on-chain game interaction to trading NFTs, all of these can be done directly in the Town of the ongoing communication community. While this will be the first Towns application, it will be one of many, as anyone can build a Towns protocol client for their specific needs.

daoTowns

Towns It will be governed and maintained by the Towns DAO, a group dedicated to supporting the development and evolution of the protocol. DAOs make important decisions such as voting on core development roadmaps, technology upgrades, and managing finances. The DAO will represent key stakeholder groups in the Towns ecosystem such as users, node operators, space owners and core contributors.

Team, Funding & Development Stage

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The founding team of Towns is Here Not There Labs, founded in 2020 by Rubin (former CEO and co-founder of Houseparty and Meerkat) and Brian Meek (former CTO of STRIVR Labs and former GM of Engineering at Skype) ) co-founded. On February 23, 2023, Towns completed a US$25.5 million Series A financing, led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Benchmark and Framework Ventures, and also acquired the Towns.com domain name at a low price of several hundred thousand US dollars.

Currently Towns has released the Alpha version, users can find the application entry on the Towns official website, fill in the name, email, and receive the alpha The wallet address of the NFT. After receiving the alpha NFT, you can enter the official website to register and experience Towns Alpha, cast your own town, and visit Pioneer Town, the early adopter community of Towns.

Towns plans to launch a wider beta in 6 months, allowing anyone to use the protocol to create their own community, and in the next few months thereafter A mobile web application will be launched during the month, as well as a native application. Towns also plans to add support for Apple's next-generation login password key technology.

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Although Here Not There Labs is responsible for managing Towns at the beginning of the project, as the project continues to develop towards decentralization, the governance and control of Towns will gradually transition to Towns DAO. Once control is handed over to the DAO, members can vote on the protocol's roadmap, technology upgrades, and how the DAO's funds will be managed.

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