Telegram: Crypto Island's bridge to the mainland

Crypto is a relatively insulated emerging technology, making the path to mass adoption uniquely challenging. While blockchain projects promise to disrupt various established tech businesses, that would require establishing a thriving community of active users who’ve shifted their activity from those established rails to crypto rails. The problem is, this is one of the hardest challenges for blockchain projects, given that established technologies work pretty well, for the most part. To compound that, there are now thousands of blockchain projects, often similar to each other, and competing for the same attention and users. The vast majority of these projects are essentially “a tech idea trying to create a community — from nothing.”

Enter Telegram, crypto’s leading messaging platform that is on path to reach a billion active users. Telegram’s versatility, security, and speed makes it the go-to platform for crypto users. It enables seamless communication among individuals and teams. It’s instrumental in our industry for large-scale community building, providing the tools for projects to engage their audiences, disseminate information, and foster a sense of belonging. It is quite possibly the best tool for a crypto project to build a community.

Telegram’s massive user base and free and open APIs offer an unparalleled opportunity for crypto projects to integrate their products into an existing, vibrant community, with an extraordinarily large segment of crypto-active users. Recognizing this potential, TON stands out for being the most strategically aligned with Telegram. But there are indications that other blockchain ecosystems will further integrate into Telegram too.

The Telegram Superhighway

TON has gotten a lot of attention lately, outperforming the broader crypto market since being endorsed as Telegram’s “official web3 infrastructure” in September 2023 at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. At the event, Telegram and the TON Foundation jointly announced TON Space, a new self-custodial wallet built directly into the official Telegram Wallet, and the inclusion of the Telegram Wallet in the settings and attachment menus for all non-US users.

TON Space is a game-changer. While some might view it as Telegram merely adding a self-custodial wallet, the broader take is that Telegram has effectively become a self-custodial wallet with nearly a billion users, seamlessly connecting them to numerous in-platform crypto applications and allowing users to communicate in private or in groups without ever leaving the platform. No other wallet offers this level of user experience. Beyond simple swaps, most wallets lack direct app integrations or social features, requiring users to navigate a clunky sign-in process to separate browser-based applications, which severely limits usability. Telegram’s all-in-one de-fragmented experience, in my opinion, is crucial for mass adoption. Imagine if Instagram or X required you to log into a separate browser application to send messages or leave comments on a friend’s post, or if you had to use a different browser application to attach a file from cloud storage to an email.

It’s no wonder that the renewed collaboration between Telegram and TON has caught the eye of prominent VCs, with Pantera Capital making its largest investment ever in TON and others expressing their interest as of late. Unlike most blockchain projects that struggle to bootstrap a new community, TON’s deep integration into Telegram positions it as “a community integrating a blockchain.” As Pantera notes in their investment letter, “that’s just got to be easier.”

TON: The Spotify of Crypto

All the recent moves TON has made embedding into Telegram reminds me of Spotify’s partnership and integration with Facebook in 2011 — a pivotal moment for the music streaming industry. The Spotify-Facebook integration enabled users to share their listening habits and playlists directly on the giant social media platform, significantly boosting Spotify’s visibility and usage. Within just four days, Spotify gained 1 million new Facebook-connected users. And within six weeks, Facebook-connected Spotify users shared their listening activity over 1.5 billion times through Facebook’s Open Graph, which allows developers to integrate their applications into the social media platform. Since then, the rest is history.

Similarly, TON’s integration with Telegram allows TON developers to integrate their applications into Telegram’s extensive social network, making it easier for users to discover and use TON applications and services. As Spotify harnessed Facebook’s social graph to build communities around music sharing, TON harnesses Telegram to build communities around value transfer.

Since Telegram’s endorsement of TON, TON has seen consistent growth. Total value locked (TVL) in TON smart contracts recently surpassed $1 billion, two orders of magnitude larger than before the event.

TON daily active wallets continue to hit all-time highs.

TON token holders and trading volumes show a strong uptrend.

While reasoning by analogy has its limitations, there are striking parallels between the Facebook-Spotify and Telegram-TON integrations. When Facebook integrated Spotify in Q3 2011, Facebook had about 800 million users and Spotify had 2 million paying subscribers. Less than a year later, Spotify’s paying subscribers doubled to over 4 million. Similarly, when Telegram integrated TON in Q3 2023, Telegram also had about 800 million users, while TON had about 100,000 monthly active wallets. Less than a year later, TON has grown to about 5.5 million monthly active wallets.

Although the increase in active users for TON is an order of magnitude larger than Spotify’s, it’s important to note that comparing Spotify subscribers over a decade ago to active TON wallets now is not a direct comparison. What matters is that the adoption of a new technology saw significant growth after integrating into a massive social network.

Given that TON has only tapped into a small fraction of Telegram’s user base so far, it’s reasonable to expect its growth to continue as the technology improves and use cases expand.

Beyond TON: Crypto on Telegram

While Telegram has officially endorsed TON and granted it some exclusive benefits on the platform, they are likely to remain separate organizations due to legal complications. This is good for other blockchain projects, as Telegram keeps their API free and open to their developers, allowing for healthy competition and innovation.

Given the discussion on TON and Telegram, it’s important not to sleep on other ecosystems integrating into Telegram. In particular, NEAR stands out as possibly the second most Telegram-integrated chain, quietly making moves to establish a strong presence on Telegram.

The most notable example is NEAR’s self-custodial HERE Wallet and its new lightweight Telegram implementation, HOT Wallet, launched in early February. HOT Wallet emphasizes user engagement and simplified onboarding to the NEAR ecosystem via Telegram, serving as NEAR’s answer to the Telegram TON Wallet.

Creating a new NEAR account with HOT Wallet is as simple as opening the Telegram app and tapping the screen a few times to generate a human-readable NEAR address automatically assigned from your Telegram handle (e.g., blockhiro.tg).

To drive engagement, HOT Wallet adopted gamification strategies from the viral Notcoin app on TON, which launched just a month earlier and attracted millions of users within the first week. Similar to Notcoin, HOT Wallet users can mine its native token directly on the app through a fun game incorporating social features, quests, and level-ups.

Within 10 days of its launch, over a million Telegram users created NEAR accounts on HOT Wallet. Since its launch, it has reached the #1 spot on DappRadar multiple times.

In Q1, Hot Wallet averaged about 370,000 daily users, and accounted for nearly 30% of daily active addresses on NEAR. That number is now up to an average of 500,000 daily active users so far in Q2.

Seeing the success of NEAR’s moves into Telegram raises the question: Will TON remain *the* web3 infrastructure of Telegram, or become *a* web3 infrastructure of Telegram among others? While TON has stolen the spotlight, NEAR and potentially other blockchain projects shouldn’t be overlooked. I’d keep a close eye on moves from other blockchain ecosystems in the coming months and years.

tApps

Recent UX improvements in crypto apps on Telegram (let’s call them “tApps”) — evolving from monotonous proxy-page-like trading bots to full-fledged apps — have paved the way for the rise of more high-engagement mining games, and tApps more generally. Notcoin and HOT Wallet were just the beginning. Now, there are already a number of popular “mining+” tApps on multiple chains that have amassed millions of players by offering a simple and fun way to play and earn. Here are some examples:

The growth in user numbers for these deceptively simple apps is extraordinary! For example, Hamster Kombat reached 100 million users in under three months, placing it between ChatGPT and TikTok in terms of user acquisition speed. Simple napkin math puts that at roughly 10% of Telegram users at least trying out the game within months of its launch, demonstrating the power of Telegram for web3 user acquisition (retention is another story).

As the tApp category evolves, there are indications of going multichain (e.g., MemeFi, Blum) and beyond Notcoin imitators (e.g., AVACOIN, PixelTap). Some associate the category with memecoins, given the meme-iness of Notcoin that started it all, but I beg to differ. In some ways, current tApps and memecoins are similar in their emphasis on ease and fun — a refreshing contrast from the often serious technical mumbo jumbo we see in crypto. But unlike memecoins, tApps offer full-fledged features such as games and quests that attract real usage from potentially hundreds of millions of crypto-ready users already on Telegram or willing to join Telegram just to participate.

Crypto-integrated applications on Telegram started with humble beginnings, but now the time is ripe for their evolution into more sophisticated platforms that rival other mobile applications. The new tApps can combine and blend gaming, social, and other engagement mechanisms to offer a richer UX to crypto natives and newcomers alike.

tApps spanning multiple blockchain ecosystems beyond TON would further solidify Telegram’s role within the broader crypto industry, strengthening the existing bonds between various crypto communities and Telegram. And if these apps can not only leverage Telegram’s existing user base, but also attract new users and developers, it could incentivize Telegram to offer more support to more chains. This could come in the form of more extensive API access, higher server-side rate limits, or extended availability in settings and menus.

Some parting thoughts

Sometimes, we miss the forest for the trees. To solve for mass adoption, we should look beyond TON, or any specific blockchain protocol, and consider Telegram within the broader context of the digital assets landscape, information security, and globalization. Telegram has become a global communication powerhouse, with significant penetration across North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Its massive user base, combined with innovative features at the forefront of information security and technological adoption, position Telegram as the best platform we have to bridge Crypto Island to the mainland. Just as Facebook was the right product at the right time to catalyze the rise of Spotify and music streaming in the 2010s, Telegram is the right product at the right time to accelerate blockchain adoption and normalize onchain value transfer in the 2020s.

In conversations around obstacles to crypto mass adoption, the most common argument I hear is about UX. Many believe that the main thing holding back crypto from mass adoption is poor UX. But, I don’t think that’s the case so much anymore. The rapid growth of accounts and activity on Telegram Wallet, Here Wallet, and tApps like Notcoin and Hamster Kombat suggests that crypto UX is pretty much ready for mainstream use. If it wasn’t, these apps wouldn’t be able to grow to millions of users within days. I think the real bottleneck is the lack of integration between insular blockchain projects and larger social networks. Just imagine the activity on these games if they were launched as standalone apps outside of Telegram.

As streaming technologies revolutionized how we consume audio and visual content by making it more accessible and convenient than ever before, the goal for blockchain projects should be to achieve the same for value transfer. This won’t happen on an island, in a bubble, or within an echo chamber. It will happen on platforms like Telegram, where blockchain-based apps can actually make value transfer among individuals, groups, and applications more accessible and convenient than elsewhere.

If you’re building in these spaces or this post resonates with you, let’s chat!