A Town is a programmable, self-governed space that exists on the Towns protocol and allows a community's members to communicate freely and truly own their community.
The Towns protocol and app are the work of the members of HNT Labs. HNT is a small group of world-class engineers and product people that believe in framework-driven value creation through open and direct communication. HNT is backed by the world's leading investors including a16z crypto, Benchmark and Framework.
While HNT Labs will be stewarding Towns initially, governance and control of Towns will be transitioned to the Towns DAO progressively as we move towards decentralization of the network.
Towns will be governed and stewarded by the Towns DAO, a group dedicated to supporting the growth and development of the protocol. The DAO makes important decisions for the platform, such as voting on the core development roadmap, technical upgrades, and managing the treasury. The DAO will represent key stakeholder groups in the Towns ecosystem like users, node operators, space owners, and core contributors.
Towns is not quite ready yet to onboard your entire community with our Alpha product. We&pos;re working hard to get there and will be sharing updates on our progress.
To ensure that Towns remains sustainable, the Towns Protocol will take a small slice of the economic activity happening between communities on the platform.
The Towns Alpha will launch on Goerli (Ethereum testnet), and Beta is intended to launch on Ethereum (and derivative L2s). This means Towns will support identity and gating based on Ethereum wallets and their assets. Towns will likely use side chains for other backend transactions in the app to keep costs low for users.
Towns will progressively decentralize over time. To start, HNT and our partners will run the backend in a Proof of Authority network; however, we are developing the decentralized backend to allow anyone to run a node and plan to decentralize the protocol as soon as possible.
The Towns client is a React app, currently existing only as a web app, but our roadmap includes desktop and mobile clients. Third parties are encouraged to build other clients as their communities want as well.
The reference implementation of Town Nodes is built using Golang and Postgres, and Town Node operators are actively welcome to build other node implementations that improve the operation performance aspects of the network as they desire.
The smart contracts are written in solidity and compiled, tested, and deployed using Forge.