Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov announced significant intentions to tokenize functionalities and distribute advertising revenue among users on The Open Network (TON).
Durov, addressing a packed audience in Dubai, extolled the capabilities of blockchain technology to advance liberty and privacy before delineating ambitious strategies to expand The Open Network’s functionality.
“Why we adore blockchain technology.” This technology represents liberty. Our concern is liberation. “Even our logo, a paper airplane, represents the liberty to navigate in three dimensions,” Durov explained.
According to the app’s founder, which claims to have more than 900 million monthly users, the organization aims to enable users to construct tools, applications, and businesses on Telegram.
According to Durov, Telegram has implemented a distinct strategy for generating revenue from its user bases compared to prominent messaging and social media platforms that sell user data to advertisers. Through its Ad Network, Telegram recently announced its intention to share revenue with content creators on its platform.
Durov characterized the action as one of social media’s most benevolent revenue-sharing models. Moreover, he stated that channel proprietors and content creators utilizing TON’s network would receive fifty percent of the revenue Telegram earns from ad display and broadcast channels:
“All these transactions, the payments for ads, withdrawals of ads are powered by blockchain. We will use the TON blockchain exclusively for that.”
Durov hypothesizes that the advertising market operating on blockchain rails could be worth tens of billions of dollars, with content creators and proprietors of large group chats receiving a respectable portion of the revenue.
In addition, by implementing a blockchain protocol, Telegram can circumvent the restrictions on in-app purchases imposed by Google and Apple concerning payment processing.
Telegram has enabled merchants and app developers to offer physical products and services by integrating forty payment providers, including Stripe.
Durov says Telegram has already implemented tokenization in its user namespace, becoming the first social media platform. This in-platform market, according to the founder, generated $350 million in revenue, and he stated that the tokenization of additional platform components is imminent:
“The next step that we are going to undertake is tokenizing Telegram stickers.”
Durov stated that Telegram requires the scalability that TON’s network provides, as it can handle tens to hundreds of millions of transactions in the coming years.
In the aftermath of Durov’s conference address, Tether, a stablecoin operator, declared the introduction of the USDT token, anchored to the U.S. dollar, on the TON network. Additionally, on TON, Tether introduced the launch of gold-pegged Tether Gold (XAUT) stablecoin.
Although TON was originally in the works of Telegram, the messaging application ceased development in May 2020 due to a subsequent legal dispute with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
Following the assumption of control by a limited cohort of open-source developers, the endeavor culminated in the formation of the TON Foundation in May 2021.
