Coinbase Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) have co-led a $10 million funding round for Towns Protocol.
As a decentralized communication platform aiming to reshape how online communities interact and govern themselves in the Web3 era, the protocol announced its funding on Thursday.
The round also saw participation from Union Square Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Seed Club Ventures, and others. This signals a strong institutional interest in building the next generation of online communities beyond traditional platforms like Discord and Telegram.
Notably, the investment marks a major vote of confidence in on-chain messaging infrastructure and the broader decentralized social stack.
Here’s Why
What Is Towns Protocol
Towns Protocol is a Web3-native communication protocol designed to bring group chats, online communities, and social interactions fully on-chain.
Built with decentralization and composability at its core, Towns aims to give users total control over their community’s structure, data, and rules.
Each “town” represents a group or community space that lives entirely on-chain. Unlike centralized messaging platforms, these towns are governed by smart contracts, allowing for programmable rules around membership, moderation, and even revenue sharing.
The project wants to make group communication a first-class citizen in Web3, alongside identity, finance, and governance.
Excited to share our latest funding round, led by @a16zcrypto, with the addition of new investor @cbventures and continued support from @benchmark.
The future of communication is onchain. pic.twitter.com/qGQUa9cvaE
— Towns Protocol (@TownsProtocol) April 10, 2025
Why Coinbase and a16z Are Interested
The decision by Coinbase and a16z to back Towns reflects a growing conviction among investors that decentralized communication is the next major layer of the crypto stack.
After years of innovation in DeFi, infrastructure, and gaming, attention is now turning to how communities interact, organize, and scale in trustless environments.
Coinbase Ventures, which has also invested in Web3 identity projects and DAOs, views Towns as part of the essential toolkit for making crypto communities more resilient, secure, and autonomous.
The investment further aligns with Coinbase’s broader goal of supporting user-controlled, censorship-resistant ecosystems.
Interestingly, Coinbase, the VC Ventures parent exchange firm, recently provided blueprint for US SEC on digital assets regulation.
Can Towns Provide the Decentralized Communication in web3
While existing platforms like Discord have been widely adopted by crypto communities, they come with significant downsides — including centralized control, data vulnerability, spam attacks, and lack of native crypto integration.
Towns aims to solve this by:
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Allowing communities to vote on membership, permissions, and rule changes.
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It has enabled wallet-native access with which entry to chats can be gated via tokens, NFTs, or verified identities.
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It allows developers to build apps and bots that plug directly into towns.
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Users and communities own their messages, content, and interactions.
This approach appeals especially to DAOs, NFT projects, and Layer 2 ecosystems looking for customizable, secure communication tools that can evolve with their needs.
What’s Next for Towns?
The Towns Protocol team plans to use the $10 million to expand engineering and developer support, improve protocol scalability, and launch a public beta later this year.
It is also working to open-source key components of the stack and enable easy integration with other Web3 apps and wallets.
Long-term, the project hopes to become a core social layer for decentralized applications, functioning much like Ethereum did for programmable money — but for programmable community interaction.
The post Coinbase, A16Z Lead $10M Round for Towns Protocol – Here’s Why They’re Backing It appeared first on CoinGape.
