Ben Rubin, who founded Meerkat and Houseparty, announces Towns, a protocol and a web-based chat app, and raised a $25.5M Series A led by a16z Crypto
After launching a pair of well-loved but ultimately star-crossed social apps, Ben Rubin is going all-in on decentralization.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ben Rubin has been here before, twice. Meerkat's live-video run ended when Twitter cut off its access to the social graph, and the pivot became Houseparty, which raised about $50M from Sequoia, Aleph, Comcast and Greylock in 2016 (that round was reported across two days that December).
Towns is the third act, and the structural lesson is baked into the architecture: instead of an app renting its graph from a platform, Towns ships a protocol alongside a web-based chat client, built on the River Protocol, with a $25.5M Series A led by a16z Crypto rather than a traditional consumer fund. Rubin's later Q&A coverage flags moderation as a core design question, not an afterthought.
First-order effects
- Rubin now runs a protocol-first company with crypto-native backing: a16z Crypto's lead means Towns answers to token-economics expectations, not the consumer-app growth metrics Sequoia tracked at Houseparty.
- Moderation becomes Rubin's day-one product problem — on an open protocol anyone can spin up a room, so the Q&A framing suggests he is treating governance as part of the protocol rather than a policy layer bolted on later.
Second-order effects
- The a16z Crypto lead signals that decentralized consumer social is now a funded category for crypto VCs specifically, pulling capital that previously went only to infrastructure into end-user chat products competing with centralized incumbents.
- Any success for Towns pressures other messaging apps to articulate why their closed graph benefits users — the same dependency that killed Meerkat becomes the attack surface in marketing against rivals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across Rubin's career — platform-gated app, pivot, then protocol — it points toward group chat migrating toward user-owned rooms where no single company controls the social graph, with moderation standards becoming the competitive moat instead of network lock-in.
The trend: Serial social founders are rebuilding their products as protocols after being burned by platform gatekeepers, trading network-lock-in economics for ownership of the graph itself.