Seems Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and CEO, didn’t expect to get so many dislikes for his recent post about username auctions, TON, and Web3. Initially, followers could react to a message. But when it gathered over 21,000 dislikes vs 6,500 likes, Durov hid reactions. OneArt tells the whole story and speculates about possible benefits for users.
Apparently, users got hooked on the idea of paid t.me addresses. And Durov came up with it, impressed by the TON DNS auction with over 2,000 .ton domain names sold. Perhaps, he eyes repeating the success of ENS, which has already surpassed 2 million domain names created. What is more, the registrar managed to get from 1 million to 2 million registrations in just 3.5 months.
Whether the usernames auction will be able to repeat the success is a big question since Telegram users are used to a free service. As it was promised.
However, in June Telegram introduced paid subscriptions, hoping to cover its costs if about 3% of users sign up for Premium.
And what about Web3 options?
- According to Durov, a new TON-based marketplace will be launched with bullet-proof smart contracts.
Yep, it’s the blockchain abandoned by Telegram in 2020 after the battle with SEC. 🤷♀️
Now Durov is pointing to its scalability and speed.
- Holders would be able to transfer usernames via non-fungible token-like smart contracts. Later, stickers, emojis, and even channels may be added to the marketplace.
Will we benefit?
We might. Adding stickers, emojis, and channels to the NFT-based marketplace means more monetization options for creators. Who knows, maybe you could make some money on your kitten sticker packs which are free of charge now. And given the smart contract rules, it would be easier to control ownership rights and payments.
The TON Foundation has already benefited. Toncoin has soared over 17% in the last 24 hours amid the news about the new blockchain-based marketplace.
Does the idea sound real?
For Telegram, integrating smart contracts and NFTs seems to be not that hard since its team developed the smart contract language for TON. The latter was initially aimed to be a “digital payments platform for Telegram,” sort of a decentralized alternative to Visa or MasterCard designed to enable millions of transactions per second.
We’ll wait and see how far the idea of bringing a bit of Web3 to Telegram goes. Currently, the very concept of a fully decentralized blockchain-based web sounds utopian. Amid all the hype, more and more companies and projects are trying to tap into the new ecosystem. But the long-awaited one is far from real life, with Alchemy, Infura, OpenSea dominating the market.
But if Telegram succeeds in implementing some of Web3, it will become the largest social network with blockchain elements. In 2022, it entered the top 5 list of the most downloaded apps globally with 700+ million MAU.
What are the odds of Telegram tapping into Web3? Let us know in the comments below!
