Best token gated chat apps: how each one verifies
Six token gating tools compared: Collab.Land, Guild.xyz, Matrica, Cherry, Towns and Push Chat, by how each verifies holders and what it costs.
Choosing the best token gated chat app comes down to one question: what reads the chain, and how often does it read it again. This roundup compares six ways to run a token gated or NFT gated community in September 2026. Three of them gate a chat that someone else runs: Collab.Land, Guild.xyz and Matrica add a verify link and a role to Discord or Telegram. Three of them are the chat: Towns on Base, Push Chat as a protocol, and Cherry (cherry.fun), a wallet-to-wallet messenger and community app where you sign in with a wallet, DM any wallet address, and join or create token-gated, NFT-gated and paid group chats.
How we picked
This list is for a community owner picking where a token gated or NFT gated community will live, or which tool will gate the Discord or Telegram server it already has. A tool qualified if it verifies holdings against a wallet the member controls, if a community owner can set it up without writing code, and if it was live and documented in September 2026. Push Chat is the one exception on the second rule, and the list says so. Six questions separate them: how a member proves ownership, how often the tool checks again, which rule types it supports, which chains it reads, whether it can charge for membership, and the price. Prices are as of 11 September 2026.
Collab.Land
Collab.Land adds gating to Discord and Telegram servers with a bot, while the chat itself stays where it is. A member clicks the bot’s “Let’s Go” button, picks a wallet on a Collab.Land page, and signs a message on the first connection; later verifications of an already connected wallet need no signature. In September 2026 its pricing page advertised 50+ blockchains and 35+ wallets, while the home page said 40+ chains and 30+ wallets.
Two details from its documentation decide whether it fits. Background balance checks run “every 7 days” on the free Starter tier and “every 24 hours” on Basic and above, and “Balance checks do not assign new roles, they only remove them”, so a member who buys in has to go back and verify again to get the role. Real-time event listeners, which close that gap, sit on the paid tiers: the Ethereum listener from the $35 Premium tier, the Solana listener from the $149 Exclusive tier.
Pricing as of 11 September 2026: Starter $0 for up to 25 verified members, Basic $17.99, Premium $35, Exclusive $149, Elite $449 per month, scaling to 7,500 verified members.
Fit note: choose Collab.Land if the community already lives in Discord or Telegram, the collection is on an EVM chain, and a daily role sweep is accurate enough.
Guild.xyz
Guild.xyz gates the same two chat products and adds growth mechanics on top. Its docs describe managing access to “Discord and Telegram” as well as “Twitter, GitHub, and more”, and say Guild “connects your community across 60+ EVM chains”. Requirements go past holdings into on-chain activity, social activity, points and leaderboards, and gated forms, which is why quest-style communities pick it.
Two things to know before you budget. The pricing page lists three paid plans, Starter $29, Pro $99 and Growth $399 per month, with no free tier, while the home page invites you to “Start for free. Upgrade when you need more”. And Guild.xyz does not say how often access is re-checked.
Fit note: choose Guild.xyz for an EVM community where roles depend on behavior as much as holdings. Solana is not among the chains it advertises.
Matrica
Matrica is the Solana-first option among the gating bots. Its docs list eight chains, Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Eclipse, Base, Monad and ApeChain, and it verifies for Discord and Telegram. Members link several wallets to one Matrica profile, so a holder who splits a collection across wallets keeps the role.
Its role setup guide gives a number worth planning around: “the initial sync and distribution of the role will take ~1 hour to verify 1,000 users (~75 roles / 5 minutes)”. Pricing is Premium $99 per month, Pro $199 per month and custom Enterprise, with no free plan; Premium includes 20 token gated roles and extra roles cost “$15/month per 10”. Telegram gating, fungible tokens and attribute-based roles sit on Premium and above.
Fit note: choose Matrica for a Solana NFT collection whose members are staying in Discord, especially if traits and multi-wallet holders matter.
Cherry
Cherry moves the chat instead of gating someone else’s. There is no verify bot and no verification site: the app reads the chain when you ask to join a room, and keeps reading it while you are a member. Seven rule types cover a minimum token balance, an NFT from a collection, a Metaplex Core collection, a domain TLD such as .sol or .skr, a wallet balance or trading-volume threshold, the wallet app you signed in with, and payment. A group combines up to five of them, and the settings screen asks whether members need “All of these” or “Any one” of the requirements.
Enforcement is where the mechanism differs from a role sweep. A wallet that sells loses access at a background re-check, which is not instant: a seller can keep access for several days after the sale, and if the chain cannot be read when Cherry checks, nobody is removed. A soulbound .skr domain is verified once. A member who loses access keeps the room in their list while the message content is withheld, and the paywall screen carries a “Re-check” button that reads the chain again on demand. Buying back in restores access without asking anyone for a role.
Rooms run on Solana today, with token-gated chats for ERC-20 and ERC-721 holders on Base, Ethereum and Robinhood Chain, and for BEP-20 holders on BNB Smart Chain. Two live examples: Seeker Club, gated by a .skr domain, had 8,637 members and 58,206 messages on 11 September 2026, and the .sol-gated SNS Club had 1,455 members the same day.
Creating a group is free at any size. Paid entry in SOL and recurring USDC memberships (daily, weekly or monthly, 1 to 10,000 USDC per period) are built in, split 70% to the owner and 30% to Cherry as of 10 September 2026. The mechanism is covered in token-gated chat , NFT-gated chat and paid communities and channels .
Fit note: choose Cherry if the wallet should be the account, if your holders are on Solana, or if you want gating and payment in the same room without a second vendor.
Towns
Towns is an onchain group chat on Base, and it is the closest thing to Cherry in shape. Every group is minted on-chain and every membership is an NFT, each account gets an embedded wallet, and on 11 September 2026 towns.com led with “Discover the best money making group chats” and showed $31,232,500 in total earnings. Towns offers free, paid, NFT-gated, token-gated and creator-coin-gated groups; USDC-priced memberships landed in January 2026, and Town owners take a 0.25% split of trades in their group, announced June 2025. Towns said in July 2025 that it has raised $46M, with a16z crypto leading.
Two frictions matter to a community owner: the iOS app rebuilt in February 2026 asks for a new account and your phone contacts, and it is separate from the web app that serves large communities. Membership NFTs are transferable and resell on OpenSea, which is either a feature or a moderation problem depending on your group.
Fit note: choose Towns if your members are Base-native and you want membership to be a tradable NFT. The head-to-head is Cherry vs Towns , and the wider field is in Towns alternatives .
Push Chat
Push Chat is the protocol option on this list, and its status needs care. As of 11 September 2026 the chat docs at comms.push.org describe “Creating groups for communities” with “Conditional/Gated access for joining of the group or sending message” and cross-chain addressing. The parent site tells a different story: push.org is titled “Push Chain | The Universal Blockchain for Apps” and lists Push Chain, Push Portal, Push Scan, a faucet, Zappi and PUSD as its products, with no Push Chat among them.
Fit note: Push Chat suits a developer embedding wallet-to-wallet chat in an EVM app. It ships an SDK, so a community owner should confirm the protocol’s roadmap before building on it.
Side by side
| App | How it verifies | Re-verification | Rule types | Chains | Paid memberships | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collab.Land | Bot posts a verify link in Discord or Telegram; wallet signature on first connect | Every 7 days on Starter, every 24 hours on paid tiers; checks only remove roles | Token balance, NFT holdings | 50+ blockchains | Not stated | $0 for 25 members, then $17.99 to $449 per month |
| Guild.xyz | Verify link on guild.xyz; connect wallet | Not stated | Holdings, on-chain activity, social activity, points, gated forms | 60+ EVM chains | Not stated | $29, $99 or $399 per month; no free tier listed |
| Matrica | Verify link; multi-wallet profile linked to Discord or Telegram | Not stated; initial sync about 1 hour per 1,000 users | NFT collection, traits, amounts, fungible tokens, Ordinals | Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Eclipse, Base, Monad, ApeChain | Not stated | $99 or $199 per month; 20 roles included |
| Cherry | The app reads the chain on join; no bot, no verify site | At join, then in the background; a sale can take several days to register | 7 types (token, NFT, Metaplex Core, domain, wallet balance or trading volume, wallet app, payment), up to 5 with all or any logic | Solana, plus Base, Ethereum, BSC and Robinhood Chain | One-time SOL entry, recurring USDC, 70/30 split | Free |
| Towns | Membership minted as an NFT on Base; embedded wallet per account | Not stated | Free, paid, NFT, token and creator-coin gated groups | Base; in-chat trading covers Base and Solana tokens | One-off and recurring USDC memberships | Not stated; 0.25% trade split to owners |
| Push Chat | Wallet signs in through the SDK; the protocol evaluates group rules | Not stated | Conditional access to join or to send | EVM addresses, with non-EVM addressing in the docs | Not stated | Open-source SDK |
Which is the best token gated chat app for your community
Start with where the conversation has to happen. If your members will not leave Discord, the question is only which bot: Collab.Land when you need Solana alongside EVM chains and a free tier, Guild.xyz when roles depend on activity as much as balances, Matrica when the collection is on Solana and traits matter. All three leave the same seam: a member who buys in waits for a sweep or re-verifies by hand.
If you are picking where the community itself lives, that wait disappears. Towns fits a Base-native group that wants membership to be a tradable NFT and is fine with a separate account on iOS. Cherry fits a Solana-first group that wants the chat, the gate and the paywall in one room, with re-checks running in the background and no verify link for members to fall for. Push Chat fits a developer, not an owner. If you run a paid alpha group, compare the money stack as well: Cherry and Towns both charge in USDC, while the Discord bots charge you and leave payments to another vendor.
Create a gated group at chat.cherry.fun in a few minutes, or follow the step-by-step in create a token-gated group chat .
FAQ
Which app is best for a token gated community?
If your members are already in a Discord server you do not want to move, use Collab.Land or Guild.xyz on top of it, or Matrica if the collection is on Solana. If you are choosing where the community itself lives, pick Cherry for Solana-first wallets, domains and paid rooms, or Towns for Base-native membership NFTs.
What is the best NFT gated chat app?
For an NFT collection on Solana, Matrica and Cherry both read the collection directly: Matrica assigns Discord or Telegram roles, Cherry gates the chat room itself and re-checks holders in the background. For an EVM collection, Collab.Land advertises 50 or more blockchains and Guild.xyz 60 or more EVM chains, and Towns mints the membership itself as an NFT on Base.
Is there a free token gating tool for communities?
Collab.Land has a free Starter tier limited to 25 verified members, with balance checks every 7 days. Creating a token gated or NFT gated group on Cherry is free at any size, and Cherry takes its 30% share only when a group charges for entry. Guild.xyz and Matrica list no free plan on their pricing pages as of 11 September 2026.
Do token gated chats need a verify bot?
Only when the chat lives on Discord or Telegram, which have no idea what a wallet holds. Collab.Land, Guild.xyz and Matrica exist to fill that gap with a verify link and a role. An app that reads the chain itself, such as Cherry or Towns, has no bot and no verification site in the flow.
How often is a token gated chat re-checked?
It varies by tool. Collab.Land’s docs state every 7 days on Starter and every 24 hours on paid tiers, and say those checks only remove roles. Cherry checks the wallet at join and re-checks members in the background, so a wallet that sells loses access, though a sale can take several days to register. Guild.xyz, Matrica and Towns do not state a cadence.
Can you gate a Telegram group by a Solana token?
Yes, with Collab.Land, whose bot works in both Discord and Telegram, or with Matrica, where Telegram gating starts on the $99 per month Premium plan. Cherry takes the other route: the Solana rules gate a Cherry room instead of a Telegram group, so there is no bot in the members’ way.
Sources
Try Cherry
Sign in with a wallet, DM any address, and join token-gated and paid communities. No phone number, email, or KYC.