Detailed Explanation of Social Communication Protocols Towns: Benchmarking Farcaster, the New Rising Star Led by a16z
What is Towns, which raised $22.5 million led by a16z? What problem does it solve? How does it work?Author: Jaleel, BlockBeats
With the development of web3, NFT communities, gaming communities, and DAO organizations are becoming increasingly active. Although they can use Discord, it is not designed for web3 communities, and various plugins and bots are needed to achieve various governance actions. The birth of Towns aims to solve this problem. What is Towns, which raised $22.5 million led by a16z? What problems does it solve? How does it work? BlockBeats provides a brief overview.
Benchmarking Farcaster, a16z's new racehorse in the social domain
Towns is a group chat protocol and application specifically designed for online communities, built on Ethereum, consisting of three parts: smart contracts, a decentralized node network, and applications built on the Towns protocol. In fact, Town's market positioning is very similar to the social communication protocol Farcaster, invested by Multicoin, and we can even view the two as a race between two leading crypto VCs in the same field.
The biggest feature of Towns is the adoption of the town square concept, combining communities, NFTs, and games, providing users with an Ethereum-based smart contract system and end-to-end encrypted chat. Towns allows community members to truly own their town square—communicating freely with others through a completely decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol.
Towns provides users with the foundational building blocks to create their ideal community. The ownership of each Town exists on-chain, allowing it to be transferred, sold, or held by another smart contract (such as a DAO or multi-signature). At the same time, Towns empowers communities to create programmable, autonomous gathering spaces for communication, enabling the construction of new clients or APIs while maintaining complete control and customization, allowing any group to organize and chat freely using Towns and design rules that meet their needs. Additionally, community owners can create unique experiences for communities, NFTs, and games, such as selling access keys to specific channels, rewarding members for their contributions, or allowing users to trade NFTs directly in chat, among other things.
The Towns team believes that over the past decade, internet users have been like a group of "tenants," trapped in a digital town square owned by "landlords" with walled gardens. Furthermore, the biggest problem most communities currently face is how to coordinate cooperation to unleash the collective thoughts of each user for sharing. Towns hopes to create a digital town square through decentralization and web3, where members can define boundaries, set rules, and build the world they desire, allowing users to become the owners of the digital town square and have a true sense of belonging to their online community.
An increasing number of projects are joining Towns, hoping to move Web3 projects away from platforms like Discord and Telegram, including Dragonchain's Den, Matrix, Console, and Nansen Connect from the analytics platform Nansen.
Overview of Towns Mechanism
Nodes & Decentralized Chat Servers
Towns' nodes are essentially a node package, which includes a server, a database, and a node resolver. The node package will be packaged as a Docker file for easy deployment. A node operator guide will be provided in future Towns versions. The Towns backend will initially run on a relatively centralized POW proof-of-work algorithm, and later the protocol will be built to transition to Ethereum 2.0's POS proof-of-stake algorithm. Developers can use Towns smart contracts to develop social applications, with Towns nodes operating on a decentralized proof-of-stake network, where messages are encrypted and stored as events in a replicated DAG for validation.
Towns' smart contracts are scalable, composable, and upgradeable, allowing each community to draft its own rules to specify who can participate, what they can participate in, and how they can participate. In the future, the sample-app directory in the GitHub repository will contain application code. Developers will be able to follow the README file step by step to explore the Towns protocol and deploy local components and tools, and they will be able to adjust sample applications to meet their community's needs, create their own use cases, and help the protocol grow.
Each Towns node has a decentralized chat server. Chat message communication is distributed across a peer-to-peer network, where each node connects to several other nodes. One of the advantages of a decentralized chat server is that it provides better privacy and security, as messages are encrypted and distributed across the network. It also ensures that there is no central control point or censorship. Our philosophy is that all Towns users are free from surveillance or suppression.
Towns Protocol & appTowns
Towns is a composable smart contract based on Ethereum that gives you control over your online space. The contracts are scalable, composable, and upgradeable, enabling communities to write their own rules for censorship, access, and monetization. The Towns network is an end-to-end encrypted near real-time communication system managed by Towns smart contracts and powered by nodes from a decentralized, distributed proof-of-stake network.
The Towns application provides all the technical content for implementing the protocol in an open-source, end-to-end encrypted, delightful chat experience. This experience links user identities and Town ownership through smart contracts to represent access rights, censorship, privacy, and reputation. The close integration of the application with the Web3 ecosystem allows users to interact with the community in ways that were previously impossible. From participating in DAO governance to on-chain game interactions to trading NFTs, all of this 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 applications, as anyone can build a client of the Towns protocol based on their specific needs.
daoTowns
Towns will be managed and maintained by the Towns DAO, a group dedicated to supporting the development and growth of the protocol. The DAO makes important decisions, such as voting on the core development roadmap, technical 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
The founding team of Towns is Here Not There Labs, co-founded in 2020 by Rubin (former CEO and co-founder of Houseparty and Meerkat) and Brian Meek (former CTO of STRIVR Labs and former Engineering General Manager at Skype). On February 23, 2023, Towns completed a $25.5 million Series A funding round led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Benchmark, Framework Ventures, and others, and acquired the Towns.com domain name at a low price of several hundred thousand dollars.
Currently, Towns has released an Alpha version, and users can find the application entry on the Towns official website, filling in their name, email, and wallet address to receive the alpha NFT. After receiving the alpha NFT, they can register on the official website and experience Towns Alpha, mint their own town, and access the early adopter community Pioneer Town.
Towns plans to launch a broader beta version in six months, allowing anyone to use the protocol to create their own communities, followed by the release of a mobile web application and a native application in the coming months. Towns also plans to add support for Apple's next-generation password key technology.
While Here Not There Labs is responsible for managing Towns in the early stages of the project, as the project continues to evolve towards decentralization, the governance and control of Towns will gradually transition to the Towns DAO. After transferring control to the DAO, Towns plans for members to vote on the protocol's roadmap, technical upgrades, and the management of DAO funds.
