dm.fun alternatives: Solana chat-and-trade apps compared

This list is for anyone running a Solana community who is weighing dm.fun against the other places it could live. Six options people search for as a dm.fun alternative in September 2026: dm.fun, Telegram with a buy bot, Discord with a verify bot such as Matrica or Collab.Land, Cherry, Towns, and the Coinbase app that carried the Base App name until September 10 2026. Cherry (cherry.fun) is the wallet-to-wallet messenger and community app that publishes this page, so its entry is written first-hand.

How we picked

Five criteria for a community owner choosing where a token community, an alpha group, or a holder room lives.

1. Wallet identity. Their own wallet, or one the app made for them?
2. Gating. Does the room check holdings on-chain itself, and keep checking?
3. Paid groups. What can you charge, in what currency, and what does the app keep?
4. Trading in chat. Can members buy without leaving the conversation?
5. Open to builders. Can a third party ship an app, bot, or embed on it?

An option made the list if a Solana community owner could run a community on it today. Launchpads with no chat were left out.

dm.fun

dm.fun is a Solana-only chat app from Matrica Labs that creates a chat room for every Solana token the moment its contract address exists on-chain. Each token chat carries a chart, one-tap swaps, a buy bot, and a raid bot, so a deployer gets a room with no setup. It went “officially live” on web, Seeker, iOS, and Android on May 21 2026, having been on the Solana dApp Store since December 2025, adding DMs, private groups, and paid alpha groups billed in USDC. Polymarket prediction markets run inside chats, and a Collector Crypt integration posts Pokémon card pulls into chat. Wallets are Privy embedded wallets rather than the wallet you already hold. Its token, $FUN, had its TGE on October 30 2025.

dm.fun reported 1,000+ beta users in January 2026, 2,000+ new users over the May 2026 launch weekend, and 150K messages on June 15 2026. In June 2026 Google Play showed 1K+ installs and 3.2 stars from 5 reviews and the App Store 5.0 from 5 ratings, both listings last updated on June 25 2026. No SDK or third-party app program is documented.

Fit: the memecoin community that wants a room to exist before anyone asks for it. Less of a fit if members insist on their own wallet or if you want an indexable public page; as of 10 September 2026, dm.fun group links open as “download the app” interstitials.

Telegram with a buy bot

Telegram is where most Solana communities live: a group plus a buy bot that posts each purchase with a chart link. Telegram knows a phone number, not a wallet. Anything about holdings comes from a third-party bot: a verify link, a wallet connected on an outside page, a re-check on a schedule, and one more phishing surface for scammers to copy. Under Telegram’s bot payment rules, anything digital sold through a bot or mini app has to be priced in Telegram Stars, its in-app currency; paid access to a group otherwise runs through an outside bot. Moderation is mature and reach is unmatched.

Fit: reach above everything, or a team that needs a channel every partner can find. The costs: no wallet identity, verify-link spam, fake OTC screenshots, and scam DMs to every new member.

Discord with Matrica or Collab.Land

Discord plus a verification bot is the NFT-era standard. Matrica Labs, which builds dm.fun, has provided this gating and holder voting for “1,000+ communities”, as Tekedia reported; Collab.Land and Guild.xyz do the same job. The mechanism is the same verify-link loop, ending in a role that a periodic re-check strips when holdings change. Discord has no wallet concept and no native token trading. Channels, threads, voice, and roles are the strongest of any option here.

Fit: an NFT collection or DAO whose members have Discord open all day and whose main need is roles, not trading. If they trade, a Telegram or a terminal stays open next to it.

Cherry

Cherry is a wallet-to-wallet messenger and community app for crypto from Cherry Technologies, S.A. (more on the about page ). You sign in by signing a message with your own wallet, with no phone number, email, or KYC, and that wallet is your identity in groups and in DMs to any wallet address . Token-gated chat is checked by Cherry itself: seven rule types (a token balance, an NFT collection, a Metaplex Core collection, a domain such as .sol or .skr, a wallet balance or trading-volume threshold, the wallet app a member signed in with, and payment), up to five per group with all-or-any logic, and background re-verification that removes a member who sells. Nobody posts a verify link. Paid communities and channels take a one-time SOL or USDC entry fee, or a USDC membership billed daily, weekly, or monthly from 1 to 10,000 USDC per period; as of 10 September 2026 the owner keeps 70%, Cherry 30%. Every public group has a storefront page at chat.cherry.fun/@<handle> with member count, rules, and verified-member reviews.

Type $TICKER or paste a contract address and the message renders a token card; on web, Buy opens a Jupiter swap, and on iOS, Swap and Buy are outbound links (App Store rules). A call bot, where the owner enables it, ranks the group’s best calls by peak multiplier. A trade another member shares can be copied in one tap through the same swap flow. Perps and tokenized stocks come from the Trading Terminal mini app and prediction markets from the Polymarket mini app (160 and 978 members on 11 September 2026), and builders get the Mini App SDK , an embeddable chat widget , and an API with bots , all free.

Cherry hosts 200+ communities and ranks #1 on the Seeker dApp Store with 4.8 stars from 4,000+ reviews, as of September 2026. Seeker Club, gated by a .skr domain, had 8,637 members on 11 September 2026.

Limits, stated plainly. Group chats are not end-to-end encrypted, by design, so moderation and bots can work; DMs are. OTC escrow is in the mobile app, not the web app. Cherry does not spin up a room per contract address; someone creates it.

Fit: an alpha group or token team that wants holders verified by the wallet they already use, and the chart and the swap in one thread. Less of a fit if you want zero-setup rooms per CA or Discord-grade voice.

Towns

Towns is an on-chain group chat app on Base, built on the Towns Protocol by Towns Labs. Every group (a Town) is minted on-chain and every membership is an NFT. Each account gets an embedded wallet, with WalletConnect for an external wallet since November 2025. The money stack is the closest match to Cherry’s on this list: USDC memberships one-off or recurring, tipping, in-chat trading of Base and Solana tokens, Hyperliquid perps since December 2025, Polymarket since January 2026, and a 0.25% trade-fee split to the Town owner. Towns announced $46M raised, a16z crypto leading, in July 2025, and launched the $TOWNS token on August 5 2025. It reported 450,000+ groups and 1.7M memberships in February 2026, the same membership count it reported in August 2025. Its February 2026 iOS app requires a new account, and Towns’ App Store privacy details list a phone number as data linked to you; the web app keeps the large communities. Towns says its chats are end-to-end encrypted.

Fit: a creator or trading group on Base that wants NFT memberships with a resale market, plus perps and bets inside the chat. Less of a fit for a Solana-native community: Solana appears only as tradable tokens, with no Solana wallet identity stated.

Base App, now Coinbase Wallet again

Base App was Coinbase’s July 2025 rebrand of Coinbase Wallet into an “everything app” on Base: a Farcaster-protocol social feed, encrypted XMTP messaging, mini apps, trading, and USDC payments, with a smart wallet created on sign-up. On 10 September 2026 Coinbase announced that the app returns to the Coinbase Wallet name. As of 11 September 2026, base.app and wallet.coinbase.com serve the same Coinbase Wallet page, pitching swaps, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, and perps, with no mention of messaging, a feed, or mini apps. On September 10 2026 The Block put the renamed app at eleven networks including Base, Solana, and Ethereum, and reported that CEO Brian Armstrong said in March 2026 the social experiment “didn’t quite work”. Whether XMTP messaging and mini apps stay is not stated.

Fit: a trader who wants one self-custodial wallet for spot, perps, and prediction markets across chains. It was never a group-chat product: token-gated rooms, paid groups, and channels are not stated for either era.

Side by side

“Not stated” means the company has made no public statement either way as of September 2026; dates are in the entries above.

Which one to pick

Memecoin communities. If the coin was deployed an hour ago and you want a room with a buy bot before you have a mod, dm.fun already has one for the CA, if members accept its embedded wallet. Once the community settles and you want holders verified by the wallet they trade from, create the room on Cherry and gate it by a minimum token balance.

Alpha groups. A paid group is a storefront, so the choice comes down to billing and identity. Cherry bills a recurring USDC membership and paywalls a member whose renewal payment fails. Towns does recurring USDC too, with NFT memberships that can be capped and resold, and is the stronger pick for members on Base who want Hyperliquid perps in the chat.

Token teams, CTOs, and NFT collections. A holder room that checks the chain itself, an NFT-gated room for a collection, and airdrop campaigns paid to eligible wallets are Cherry’s case; SNS Club, gated by a .sol domain, had 1,455 members on 11 September 2026. Discord with Matrica or Collab.Land wins when the community already lives there and only needs roles.

If Cherry is the pick, create a group at chat.cherry.fun, add a gating rule or a price, and claim your handle.

FAQ

What are the best crypto chat apps on Solana in 2026?

For wallet identity and on-chain gating, the Solana-native choices in September 2026 are Cherry and dm.fun; Telegram with a buy bot is still the default for reach. dm.fun gives you a zero-setup room per contract address, Cherry a room you create and gate, with paid USDC memberships and an indexable storefront page.

Is there an all in one crypto chat app?

dm.fun markets itself as chat, meme, and trade in one app: swaps, Polymarket prediction markets, and Pokémon card packs inside its token chats (as of May 2026). Cherry combines wallet DMs, gated and paid groups, token cards with Jupiter swaps on web, and mini apps for perps, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets. Neither replaces a trading terminal for size.

Is dm.fun still active?

Yes. The dm.fun home page was live on 10 September 2026, and on 8 September 2026 dm.fun announced that chats for the tokenized stock $NKE were live the moment its contract address existed on-chain.

Does a dm.fun alternative need an embedded wallet?

No. dm.fun uses Privy embedded wallets and Towns gives each account an embedded wallet, with WalletConnect for external wallets since November 2025. Cherry signs you in with the wallet you already use, including the Seed Vault Wallet on Seeker, and never holds your funds.

Sources

• dm.fun
• dm.fun on the App Store and dm.fun on Google Play
• Tekedia on Matrica Labs revealing dm.fun
• Telegram Bot Payments documentation on Telegram Stars
• Towns and Towns on the App Store
• CoinDesk on Coinbase Wallet becoming Base App , 17 July 2025
• The Block on the rename back to Coinbase Wallet , 10 September 2026
• base.app and wallet.coinbase.com
• Seeker Club on Cherry , SNS Club on Cherry , and the Trading Terminal and Polymarket mini app rooms