Token gated Discord alternatives that check the chain

A token gated Discord is an ordinary server with a bot bolted to the side: the bot sends each member to a wallet-connect site, reads what the wallet holds, and hands back a role that Discord’s channel permissions respect. The pattern goes back to spring 2020, when Collab.Land says it began serving tokenized communities, and the seams show in predictable places. This page explains that machinery, then compares six options for September 2026. One is Cherry (cherry.fun), which we build: 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 a token gated Discord works today

Four parts have to agree, and only one of them is Discord. Discord stores no wallet data. Its developer documentation describes linked roles as “a type of role in Discord that requires a user to connect to 3rd-party services and meet defined criteria”, where an outside app answers a few fields over OAuth2. The developer reference caps that set: “An application can have a maximum of 5 metadata records.”

So the bot carries the gate. In Collab.Land, the incumbent, a member clicks a “Let’s Go” button, picks a wallet on a Collab.Land page, and signs. Collab.Land’s wallet documentation puts it this way: “If this is the first time you are connecting a wallet to your account, you will be required to sign a message.” The bot maps the result to a Token Gating Rule and Discord grants the role.

Then the checking goes quiet. Collab.Land’s documentation puts background balance checks at “every 7 days” on the free Starter tier and “every 24 hours” on Basic and above, while its pricing page advertises “Every 24h” on all six plans, as of 11 September 2026. The direction matters more than the cadence: “Balance checks do not assign new roles, they only remove them.” A seller keeps the role until the next sweep. A buyer goes hunting for the verify channel again.

The fourth part is the one nobody designs. The flow teaches members that a link in Discord followed by a wallet signature is routine. Check Point Research’s report of 7 May 2025 traced a fake Collab.Land bot inside a Discord server to a phishing site copying Collab.Land’s interface, the missing “Verified App” checkmark being the visible tell. That report counts “more than 30,000 wallets” drained by Inferno Drainer across all its campaigns in six months, “resulting in at least $9 million in losses”.

How we picked

Six options, split by where the conversation ends up. Three keep your server and change the bot: Collab.Land, Guild.xyz, Matrica. One keeps the bot and changes the chat: Telegram. Two replace both, because the app reads the chain itself: Cherry and Towns. Each had to be live and documented in September 2026 and usable without writing code. Each is compared on what proves ownership, how often the check repeats, the rule types, the chains and the price. This list is for the person who administers a gated server today: a community owner, a DAO contributor, or an NFT collection admin.

Collab.Land

Collab.Land is what most crypto Discords already run, and reach is the reason to stay. Its home page on 11 September 2026 says “We support 40+ chains, 30+ wallets, and the list is always growing”, while its pricing page lists 50+ blockchains on every tier. It says tens of thousands of communities have used it over four years, and it gates Telegram groups too. Pricing on 11 September 2026: Starter free for 25 verified members, Basic $17.99 for 100, Premium $35 for 1,000, Exclusive $149 for 2,500, Elite $449 for 7,500. The real-time listeners that close the sweep gap are tiered by chain: an Ethereum event listener on every plan, including the free Starter tier, and a Solana one from Exclusive at $149 a month.

Fit: keep Collab.Land if your members will not leave Discord and the collection is small enough for the free tier, or large enough to justify $149 a month for live Solana checks. More in Collab.Land alternatives .

Guild.xyz

Guild.xyz gates the same two chat products and pushes past holdings into behaviour. Its home page on 11 September 2026 leads with “Build engaged and unified communities” and claims more than 100 integrations and 1000+ teams. Its docs say Guild connects a community across “60+ EVM chains” and gates Discord, Telegram, Twitter and GitHub. Requirements combine on-chain activity, social activity, points and role ranking, sybil resistance and gated forms, which is why quest-heavy communities pick it. Pricing is Starter $29, Pro $99 and Growth $399 per month, with no free plan on the pricing page, though its home page invites you to start for free. Neither page states how often access is re-checked.

Fit: choose Guild.xyz for an EVM community where a role should reflect what a member did, not only what a wallet holds. Solana is not among the chains it advertises.

Matrica

Matrica is the Solana-first bot of the three. Its docs on 11 September 2026 list eight chains, Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Eclipse, Base, Monad and ApeChain, and it runs holder verification for Discord and Telegram, with X usernames usable as a requirement. The rule catalogue is the deepest here: fungible token, amount-based, attribute-based, AND/OR, verified collection, wallet address, validator stake, inscription-number and royalty-based roles. Members link several wallets to one Matrica profile, so a collector who splits a collection keeps the role. Plan for the sync: the role setup guide states that “the initial sync and distribution of the role will take ~1 hour to verify 1,000 users (~75 roles / 5 minutes)”. Premium is $99 per month with 20 token gated roles and Pro $199, extra roles “$15/month per 10 Token Gated Roles”; Telegram gating and SPL, ERC-20 and BRC-20 support start at Premium.

Fit: choose Matrica for a Solana NFT collection staying in Discord, especially when traits, validators or multi-wallet holders decide the role.

Telegram with the same bots

Moving a gated Discord to Telegram changes the room and keeps the machinery. Collab.Land gates Telegram groups, and Matrica does from Premium up. Telegram adds reach and OTC culture. It adds no wallet identity, so an announcement in a large group is still followed by impersonation DMs from accounts copying your admins’ display names.

Fit: a sideways move worth making only if your members already live there, since the verify bot comes along unchanged.

Cherry

Cherry moves the chat, so there is no bot to add. The app reads the chain when a wallet asks to join a room, and keeps reading it while that wallet is 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 or trading-volume threshold, the wallet app the member signed in with, and payment. A group combines up to five of them, and the create-room screen asks whether members need “All of these” or “Any one”.

Enforcement runs both directions. Cherry re-checks members in the background, so a wallet that sells loses access, and access comes back once the holdings do. The re-check is not instant: a seller can keep access for several days after the sale. If Cherry cannot read the chain when it checks, during an outage for example, nobody is removed. Owners and admins are exempt.

Rooms run on Solana today, and there are token-gated and NFT-gated chats for ERC-20, ERC-721 and BEP-20 holders on Base, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain and Robinhood Chain. Paid access uses the same rule set: one-time entry of 0.0001 to 100 SOL, or 1 to 10,000 USDC per period, split 70% to the owner as of 10 September 2026. Creating a group is free at any size. On 11 September 2026, two live rooms show the range: Seeker Club, gated by a .skr domain, had 8,637 members and 58,198 messages, and the .sol-gated SNS Club had 1,455 members.

Two caveats: group chats are not end-to-end encrypted, by design, so moderators and bots can read what they moderate, and a paid group has to be public, because it is a storefront. DMs are end-to-end encrypted with keys derived from your wallet.

Fit: choose Cherry when the wallet is the account, your holders are on Solana, or gating and payment belong in one room without a second vendor.

Towns

Towns is an onchain group chat on Base, the other option here that gates natively. On 11 September 2026 towns.com described “an open messaging protocol built on Base that powers private groups and decentralized finance” and showed $31,232,500 in total earnings. Every group is minted on-chain and every membership is an NFT, each account gets an embedded wallet, and groups can be free, paid, NFT-gated, token-gated or creator-coin-gated. Recurring memberships arrived in October 2025, USDC pricing in January 2026, and owners take 0.25% of trades in their group, announced June 2025. Towns said in July 2025 that it had raised $46M with a16z crypto leading, and reported 450,000+ groups and 1.7M memberships on 13 February 2026, the same membership figure it gave in August 2025. Towns announced its iOS app, rebuilt in February 2026, as “new app, new account”, separate from the web app large communities use, and the App Store listing declares a phone number linked to the user. Membership NFTs are transferable, so access can be resold.

Fit: choose Towns when your treasury, token and members are already Base-native. The head-to-head is Cherry vs Towns .

What a DAO needs past a role

A DAO rarely needs one gated room. It needs three, and the shape of the tool decides how cleanly you get them.

The holder room is the easy one: gate by a minimum balance of the governance token and let the app keep checking. The council room is where bots struggle, because on Discord a private contributor channel is still a permission on a public server, administered by whoever holds Discord admin. On Cherry an asset-gated group can be private, so a contributor room gated by a signer NFT or a wallet threshold is invisible to everyone else. Roles are owner, admin, moderator and member, with kick, ban, mute and pinned messages.

Announcements are the third. A Cherry channel is a broadcast-only group where only the owner and admins post, the right container for proposal notices and vote reminders. Cherry Announcements, the channel every signed-in wallet belongs to, had 77,443 members on 11 September 2026. Governance stays where it is: Cherry hosts the conversation and the verified membership, not the vote.

Side by side

Facts as of 11 September 2026.

Which token gated Discord alternative to pick

• Keep Discord and change the bot if your members will not move: Collab.Land for breadth and a free tier, Guild.xyz when behaviour decides the role, Matrica when the collection is on Solana.
• Move to Telegram only when your community already talks there, and accept that the verify bot comes along.
• Choose Cherry when the wallet is the account, buyers should get in without a verify link, and a DAO wants a holder room, a council room and a broadcast channel in one app.
• Choose Towns when Base-native membership as a tradable NFT is worth a separate account on iOS.
• The wider field is in best token gated chat apps .

Create a gated group at chat.cherry.fun by following create a token-gated group chat .

FAQ

What is a token gated Discord?

It is a Discord server where a third-party bot, not Discord, reads a member’s wallet and grants a role that channel permissions respect. Discord itself stores no wallet data: its linked roles feature asks an outside app to answer up to five metadata fields, and the app decides who qualifies.

Is there an alternative to Discord verify bots?

Yes, if you move the chat to an app that reads the chain itself. Cherry checks holdings when a wallet asks to join a room and re-checks members in the background, and Towns mints each membership as an NFT on Base. Both take the verify link out of the member’s path.

Why do members of a token gated Discord lose a role after buying back in?

Because the background check is one-directional on the common tools. Collab.Land’s documentation states that balance checks run every 7 days on Starter and every 24 hours on paid tiers, and that “Balance checks do not assign new roles, they only remove them”, so a member who tops up has to verify again by hand.

What is the best Discord alternative for a DAO?

A DAO usually needs three rooms: a holder room gated by the governance token, a private council room for contributors, and a broadcast channel where only admins post. Cherry gives all three with owner, admin and moderator roles, and asset-gated groups can stay private. Towns fits a DAO whose members and treasury are already on Base.

How much does token gating a Discord cost?

As of 11 September 2026, Collab.Land is free for up to 25 verified members and runs $17.99 to $449 per month above that, Guild.xyz lists $29, $99 and $399 per month with no free plan on its pricing page, and Matrica lists $99 and $199 per month with 20 gated roles on Premium. Creating a gated group on Cherry is free at any size.

Sources

• Discord developer docs: linked roles and role connection metadata .
• Collab.Land , Collab.Land pricing , and its docs on background balance checks , verifying your wallet and creating a TGR .
• Guild.xyz , Guild.xyz pricing and Guild.xyz docs .
• Matrica docs , its role setup guide and pricing guide .
• Check Point Research: Inferno Drainer Reloaded , 7 May 2025.
• Towns
• Towns on the App Store
• Seeker Club on Cherry , SNS Club on Cherry and Cherry Announcements .