Telegram

A well known messaging app

Basics

• Started in:
• Based in: Russia
• Telegram is a chat app similar to Whatsapp. It is widely used in the crypto community.
• As FlatOutCrypto put it (23-10-2019):

"Why use Telegram?

Because you really can’t be bothered to keep up to date with crypto but want to waste time anyway, so you join mindless project Telegram groups to kid yourself that you’re just “keeping up to date with developments”.

Any good stuff on it?

If you’re lucky you’ll stumble upon a few sensible groups with focused discussion. Many project groups can be good sources of debate prior to the influx of bots and moonbois at ICO. And you’ll be forced to use it at some point if you hold assets for substantial periods because otherwise you’ll miss (or more realistically, feel like you’re missing) important project updates.

Also, where else can you go to abuse the project teams of coins you’ve lost money on? Or at least, the third party community admins they’ve hired to manage the groups for them."

• Was planned to launch their own blockchain in 3-2019 but got closed down (12-5-2020) as an official Telegram project. However, the TON blockchain itself kept running and is still used by Telegram (1-12-2022). Telegram will be using TON for its Ad Platform (28-2-2024).

Projects

• From Decrypt (1-12-2022):

"Pavel Durov—the messaging platform’s founder and CEO—announced that the company would begin building “non-custodial wallets” and “decentralized exchanges” that would let millions of users safely trade their crypto. The executive argued that the project should be more than feasible: the development of Fragment, Telegram’s decentralized auction platform, “took only 5 weeks and 5 people, including myself,” according to Durov. The marketplace, which launched last month, has already raked in $50 million worth of Toncoin by selling tokenized usernames on the blockchain."

Competition

• A comparison (21-4-2020) with Status and Signal was done by Status.

Team, Funding, Partners

Funding

Telegram revealed that they held $400M in crypto on their balance sheet and that 40% of their revenue came from crypto features (30-8-2024).