Towns Turns Group Chats Into Money-Making Hubs

Crypto's social x money crossroads continues to show plenty of potential.

We’ve seen content coins, creator tokens, mini-apps, and tipping experiments come to the forefront in this sector over the past couple of years.

A project in this vertical that recently caught my eye is Towns, a group chat app on Base that lets communities (free or paid) earn, trade, and run bots directly inside their conversations. If money-making group chats are up your alley, then this is a potential onramp worth exploring.

Let's catch you up on the basics. 👇

What Is Towns?

Towns is a messaging protocol and app designed around a straightforward but bold idea:

Your group chats should be able to move money. Your wallet should be native to the chat. And creators should be paid directly by their communities.

Under the hood, Towns runs on:

• A custom L2 chain for messaging.
• Offchain stream nodes for real-time, decentralized chats.
• Smart contracts on Base that handle payments, memberships, and bots.
• The $TOWNS token, which secures the Towns Network via staking.

It's a lot of crypto infrastructure, but, as a user, all that complexity is abstracted away. What you see from the ground up is Discord-like chats with built-in wallets, onchain paywall support, native tipping, and customizable bots.

Why does this approach matter?

Crypto activity is already socially driven. Towns embraces this reality by making chats themselves into economic engines. You don't leave a conversation to transact; rather, you transact inside conversations here.

Plus, it's yet another onchain business model for creators and communities to consider. Anyone can spin up a Towns chat, and deploy their own bots and kick off new revenue rails for their audience, etc.

How to Try Towns

Another pro with Towns is that it's simple to dive into. You can just follow these steps:

1. Head to app.towns.com — Then, log in via Privy by spinning up an embedded wallet linked to your Google, Twitter, Farcaster, Rabby wallet, etc. If you want funds for joining chats, tipping, or trading, click the wallet icon in the top right of the app. This will pull up "Deposit" and "Send" tabs for your embedded wallet, plus your TOWNS balance, your Base ETH holdings, your SOL, etc.
2. Explore Towns chats — The linked page is the app's main discovery hub; you can surf and join chats via recent activity, featured communities, top earning groups, trending projects, and more. Click into a specific chat to review its offerings and, if you'd like, officially join in. Some Towns are free; others require a fee to subscribe.
3. Create your own Town — In the app's left sidebar, you can press the "+" button to pull up the "New Town" deployer UI. Input your Town name, select from the "Free" or "Paid" options, and then deploy. It's basically as easy as spinning up a new Discord server – although you get in-built onchain rails this way.
4. Stake your TOWNS — If you decide to go deeper, you can head to the “Token” tab on the main Towns website and delegate your TOWNS to a node operator. This is what secures the Towns Network. Review operators' yield and commission stats, then make your pick and click “Stake.” Your rewards accrue automatically over time, and you can unstake whenever you want.

The Big Picture

As social platforms have spent the past couple of decades becoming more extractive and closed down, Towns is moving in the opposite direction: open, onchain, programmable, community-centric.

Whether it can become the “Telegram of crypto” remains to be seen, but it certainly has potential, and if you’re looking for a fresh corner of onchain social to explore, Towns is one experiment you can currently jump straight into. Explore a few chats and see what you think!