With Towns, our compass is set toward one horizon: building better online hometowns for communities. In a world where the digital realm encompasses more and more of our daily lives, this is more important than ever. To make this real, moving away from centralized platforms to a decentralized approach is the path forward. For each community and its members to be owners, there can’t be a reliance on a single centralized actor to set the rules.

We need a system where owners control their digital hometowns. We believe the right way to do this is by 1) Bringing the community primitive onchain 2) Building a permissionless protocol anyone can use based on said onchain primitives 3) Introducing both of these to the world through a best-in-class user interface where delightful user interactions highlight what’s possible 4) Stewarding a DAO to govern and oversee long term sustainability of the ecosystem.

Towns Smart Contracts

Towns and Ownership

The heart of Towns is the ability for communities to form decentralized ‘towns’ enabled through onchain ownership on Base chain. These Towns can set their own rules, offer exclusive content, and access the River communication protocol, all completely controlled by an Owner token that can be held by an individual, a multi-signature wallet, a DAO, or even another smart contract.

Membership Tokens and Entitlements

Membership tokens serve as your passport to each Town. They can be priced variably and restrict ownership to holders of certain assets or those with a particular onchain reputation. Entitlements act as the rulebook for Towns, defining varying levels of access and privileges. These unique features allow for flexibility in how communities engage and raise funds.

River Protocol

The River Protocol is a decentralized communication protocol responsible for routing and storing encrypted messages within a given town. River chain is built on OP Stack and is used for consensus and validation on subsets of off-chain nodes responsible for storing and routing message event payloads. This hybrid system will strike a balance between decentralization and liveliness to meet the goals of a modern communication platform. The goal is to gradually decentralize the network so that anyone can come in and operate a node permissionlessly without harming the integrity of the network.

Towns Application

The Towns application is where most users will spend their time. While we see a future with many clients and applications built on the protocol, HNT Labs is building the first client application for desktop and mobile use (available as a Progressive Web App).

Wallet integration in Towns enables composability with onchain data and allows for wallet-based activities like voting and token swaps. The application is designed to be extensible through integrations with third-party clients and APIs making the ecosystem more versatile.

The Towns DAO

The Towns governance model is neutral by design, acting as a guardian to ensure fairness and sustainability of the ecosystem. Through the Towns DAO, we aim to explore new ways of participatory decision-making to diversify governance and include more community stakeholders. The DAO will be run by the nodes operating and the users using the platform and ultimately be responsible for all decisions affecting the protocol and smart contracts.

The Compounding Effect of Towns

Through the cohesion of the Towns smart contracts, client application, and the River protocol, we’re setting out to marry excellent design and UI with robust decentralized infrastructure. We believe the inherent power of this technology must be amplified by a well-crafted and delightful user experience and see this as the best path to scaled adoption of decentralized technologies.

If you’re excited about the future of the Towns ecosystem, we’re now accepting applications to onboard communities for our upcoming private beta. You can apply to join here.