Telegram to turn usernames and stickers into NFTs on TON: here’s how to get on board
All those fun Telegram stickers and emojis may soon become NFTs on the TON blockchain — so it’s time to familiarize yourself with this L1 chain supported by XP.NETWORK. We’ll explain how to get a TON wallet right in the messenger.
The backstory: Telegram and TON
Back in 2018, Telegram ran the biggest ICO ever to build a blockchain called Telegram Open Network. Eventually it had to refund the investors due to the pressure from the SEC, but since the source code was made open source, the project continued its life as The Open Network (TON). What was originally a successful testnet became the mainnet, and the testnet token became TON, the coin that now has a billion-dollar market cap.
TON is a very interesting blockchain from a technical standpoint. For example, it uses sharding, and the number of shards can both increase and decrease dynamically depending on the network needs. Also, each NFT collection on TON has as many smart contracts as there are NFTs in it — plus one contract for the collection as a whole.
TON also boasts a lively NFT ecosystem. We’ve long integrated it into our cross-chain NFT bridge, and hundreds of non-fungibles have already been transferred between TON and chains like Ethereum, Polygon, and MultiversX.
For more on TON and its NFT ecosystem, see our detailed case study.
It’s important to remember that Telegram and TON are now two independent entities, with the blockchain being supervised by the TON Foundation. Still, Telegram’s creator Pavel Durov has personally endorsed TON, and the two projects are developing a strategic partnership, with TON-based Web3 services gradually being integrated into Telegram.
The most important of these is a crypto wallet, which you can use right in the messenger via a helpful bot. Telegram is the first major messenger that allows users to send crypto to each other.
NFTs are coming to Telegram
During the Token2049 event in Dubai, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov made an exciting announcement: stickers and NFTs will soon become Web3 assets on TON.
Stickers aren’t the first Telegram feature to be tokenized on TON, though. Back in 2022, it became possible to buy usernames as NFTs at an auction on Fragment.com — a scheme that has earned some owners over 1000% in profit when they later resold the usernames.
As for stickers and emojis, Durov stressed that Telegram users send 700 billion stickers every month. Many of them become viral and get shared millions of times, which makes them perfect source material for NFTs.
Durov didn’t share many details, but we can imagine that the creators of popular stickers will be able to earn some sort of royalties once their stickers are minted and traded as NFTs. Could non-fungible stickers do the same for the NFT market on TON as Ordinals did for Bitcoin, earning it a place in the elite club of the biggest NFT blockchains? Quite possibly.
Tether (USDT) stablecoin has also launched natively on TON, so we can expect that NFT stickers will eventually be traded for USDT, too. This would give the ecosystem an additional boost.
How to get on board
If you use Telegram, chances are you use stickers. No other social app can boast such a wealth of creative (and free!) sticker collections. However, most Telegram users have never tried NFTs on TON. So how can you prepare for the launch of sticker NFTs?
The first thing to do is to get a wallet that supports TON. As it’s a non-EVM network, you can’t add TON to MetaMask, but there are a lot of TON-friendly wallets out there, such as Tonhub and Tonkeeper.
Another wallet you should get familiar with is TON Space — a unique wallet bot built into the messenger itself. It allows you to buy crypto, make swaps, and send TON to other Telegram users.
To start, open the wallet in Telegram and click/tap Open Wallet. Then choose the option that interests you, such as Add Crypto (if you don’t have any TON yet). You can buy TON, USDT, or BTC using a bank card or via P2P. You can also send coins from another TON wallet.
The only downside of Ton Space is that it doesn’t support NFTs — yet. However, one can expect that with the launch of non-fungible stickers this feature will be added, too — after all, it would be logical to handle the whole NFT sticker flow within the wallet bot, without making users leave the messenger and switch to an external wallet.
We at XP.NETWORK are really excited about this development, as all those NFT stickers will be transferrable over our NFT bridge. We hope to see them bridged over to other blockchains, allowing more users to learn about the TON ecosystem and forging new links between different NFT markets. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of NFT integrations in Telegram, so keep reading the blog!
