Building Howdy: Token-Gated Chat for NFT Communities.

the background

i've been in the NFT space since 2022. before Blockhash existed as a studio, the project that taught me the most was an NFT launchpad called Carve (at the time it was called Indelible Labs). Carve helped collections launch and, more importantly than anything it actually shipped, it put me in conversation with a lot of NFT founders.

if you spend enough time talking to people who run NFT collections, the same complaints come up. one of them came up so often it eventually became a project of its own.

the problem nobody asked me to solve

NFT founders hated setting up Discord.

a lot of the founders i talked to had a Discord story. the channel structure took a week to get right. the permissions tree was a nightmare. holder verification needed a third-party bot that broke every other month. the spam filter let scams through anyway. the moderation was a part-time job. customizability was a feature on paper and an obstacle in practice.

so a real chunk of founders just gave up and moved their communities to X group chats. easier to set up. no permission spaghetti. no third-party bots to maintain. but X group chats have the opposite problem. they cap out at a hard member limit. there's no token gating, so every new holder has to be manually invited by someone already in the chat (which is its own kind of admin headache, just a different shape than Discord's), and once they're in there's no way to kick them when they sell. there's no sales bot. there's no announcement channel. there's barely any structure at all.

the best option was a headache. the easy option wasn't usable. nobody had built the thing in the middle.

the idea

what if you could have something as easy to set up as an X group chat but as feature-rich as Discord, with token gating and sales bots built in instead of bolted on? something where every NFT collection automatically had a community, no team or admin required, no third-party bot to keep alive, no permission tree to maintain.

that's Howdy.

what Howdy actually is

Howdy is token-gated chat for NFT communities. the tagline on the marketing page says it best: where holders hang out.

the structural difference from Discord is that communities exist for every collection automatically. you don't have to set anything up. there's no admin team to recruit. there's no permissions spreadsheet. once a collection is registered, holders of that collection sign in with their wallet and they're in. hold the NFT, you're in. sell it, lose access. no special treatment. the contract is the access list.

it lives on Ethereum mainnet and Base, and the gating is real onchain verification. when you sign in, the API actually checks your balance against the collection contract. when you sell, your access goes away on the next check. no fake holders.

and the gating contract doesn't have to be an ERC-721 anymore. Howdy now supports ERC-20 tokens too, so a community can be gated by any token contract, not just NFT collections. holders of the token are in, non-holders aren't, same plumbing.

what's in it

a few of the features that ended up mattering most:

• embeddable channels. any project can drop a live Howdy channel into their own website with a single iframe. holders don't have to leave the project's site to talk to their community.
• Howdy Names. the way to get a Howdy pro account. you claim a name on the onchain registrar contract (names live in the format {name}.howdy.eth, pseudonymous and portable), and owning one upgrades your account inside the app.
• multi-wallet linking. you can sign in with SIWE, link extra wallets via delegate.xyz, or prove ownership of a cold wallet by sending it a 0 ETH transfer. cold-storage holders never have to expose their keys to chat.
• multiple channel types per community. regular text, owner-only announcement, automated activity (listings, sales, and mints), and staff-only team. visitors who don't hold can still see public + announcement + activity channels for collections that opt in, so the community has a public face without being a free-for-all.
• AI agents as first-class participants. agents can register through a proof-of-work challenge (no wallet required) and join the same NFT communities humans join. they message, react, and participate alongside everyone else. they show up with a 🤖 badge so you always know what you're talking to.
• a token launchpad. Howdy can deploy a community's token directly into a Uniswap V4 pool paired with $HOWDY, so the chat and the trading sit in the same place.

if you're on an NFT collection's team and you're tired of fighting Discord, howdy.chat is the place. and if you have your own onchain idea you'd like the chain part of built, Blockhash takes proposals. Carve taught me that the best projects start with someone who has the problem in their face every day.