After launching paid subscription Telegram Premium, which users met without much enthusiasm, the founder of the messenger Pavel Durov, it seems, continues to actively look for ways to monetize his service. His next step could be the emergence of a blockchain-based platform for the sale of nicknames and in the future even channels, stickers, and emojis in Telegram. Durov wrote about this in his Telegram channel:

I’m really impressed with the success of the recent TON auction for their domain names/wallets. Wallet.ton was sold for 215,250 toncoins (~$260,000) and casino.ton for ~$244,000.

If TON was able to achieve these results, imagine how successful Telegram, with its 700 million users, could be if we auctioned reserved @usernames, links to groups and channels. In addition to the millions of catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal, all four-letter usernames can be made available for sale (@bank, @club, @game, @gift, etc.).

This would create a new platform where username owners could transfer them to interested parties in secure, ownership-protected transactions on the blockchain using NFT-like smart contracts. Other elements of the Telegram ecosystem, such as channels, stickers or emojis, may also become part of this market at a later date.

In terms of scalability and speed, TON probably has the best technology for such decentralized sales. Our team can write bulletproof smart contracts for TON (since we invented its smart contract language), so we tend to test TON as the base blockchain for our future market.

Let’s see if we can add some Web 3.0 to Telegram in the coming weeks.

As noted by the Mezha.Media editors, the post about the sale of nicknames in Durov’s Telegram channel initially gained more than 22,000 dislikes, but later the reactions in the channel of the Telegram founder were simply turned off. Now they are not for any post in his channel. It seems that Durov did not like the reaction of service users to the new monetization model.