Social and encryption, Telegrams next decade
In August 2023, the instant messaging protocol Telegram celebrated its tenth anniversary. In addition to celebrating more than 800 million monthly active users, Telegram highlighted the Story function on the anniversary day, which is a function for sharing video and picture updates with contacts. Metas social platform Instagram also has a similar function.
There are various signs that the paper airplane that started with independence, security and privacy seems to be able to escape gravity and fly higher.
One day in 2012, Telegram founder Pavel Durov and employees of his former company VK threw stacks of banknotes at passers-by in front of the office window in the busiest area of St. Petersburg.
For users who are familiar with encryption, the popular robot Bot services on Telegram are in the spotlight. The most well-known and most valuable project is Unibot. For this Bot product, which has been on the market for less than half a year but has a market value of more than 150 million US dollars, it has conquered many crypto users with Telegrams expectation of having a broad user base and its simple and convenient ease of use.
What its supporters like to tell the most is the narrative that Unibot is a hundred times better than Metamask, the largest wallet application in the current market, or with Telegrams 800 million users, Unibots Mass Adoption will surpass Metamask.
Why are so many people optimistic about products on Telegram? the reason is simple,Telegram, which has a wide user base and is sufficiently open, is a virgin land that has not yet been fully developed.
As founder and CEO Pavel Durov wrote in his 10th anniversary letter,
“In just 10 years, Telegram gained more than 800 million active users through word of mouth alone.
......
Telegram’s next step is to move beyond messaging and lead innovation in social media.We should use our visibility to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people, inspiring and uplifting people across the planet.
While the past 10 years have been exciting, the next 10 years will be when Telegram reaches its true potential.
super app
In recent years, Telegram has never stopped trying to transform from a communication protocol into a broader social platform. With the launch of Telegrams paid Premium subscription service in June 2022, Telegrams product update iteration frequency has quickly entered the fast lane.
Starting in 2022, the speed of Telegram product updates will increase significantly, mainly for social aspects
Its not just the recent launch of the Story video sharing function that rivals Instagram. After Telegram launched the Premium subscription service in June 2022 and provided value-added services to Premium users, it also successively reshaped the platforms emoticon system, launched a blockchain-driven anonymous number login function, and Topic functions - directly benchmarking Discords Multi-group management function.
It seems that whether it is Instagram or Discord, Telegram has to cover all the functions of excellent social media platforms at home and abroad. Not only that, Telegram is learning from WeChat and based on its extensive user base, trying to complete the triple jump from communication protocol to social platform and eventually becoming a super application.
Thanks to the open source nature of the Telegram client, various rich SDKs and the complete Bot API officially provided for developers, countless developers can create various service bots themselves and freely compete with official applications. Users can already easily find various services such as music, video, books and games on Telegram.
The TON Foundation, which has a close relationship with Telegram, also launched the Telegram Apps application center in August this year, integrating various applications in Telegram, from games to wallets to practical tools.
Telegram’s “Dark History”
Telegram and cryptocurrency seem to be very similar in some aspects. They were not favored in the early days and were often used for illegal purposes. We look forward to transformation and target open and transparent large-scale application scenarios.Not only that, Telegram has also chosen to issue coins - during the ICO boom in 2017, Telegram planned to develop the next generation blockchain platform TON (Telegram Open Network) and planned to name its cryptocurrency Gram. But the good times didn’t last long, and TON, which finally raised more than US$1.7 billion, stopped with the intervention of US regulators.
There is a reason why Telegram chose to issue a currency instead of going public like social giants Meta and Tencent: Founder Pavel Durov adheres to the stance of free speech and protecting privacy, which is evident from his early experience.
Pavel Durov, who has already shown considerable programming talent at a young age, and his genius brother Nikolai Durov, who has won multiple gold medals in mathematics and information Olympiads, founded VKontakte (VK), the most popular social networking site in the Russian-speaking area. While borrowing from Facebook, VK is the only product that has outperformed Facebook in free market competition.
With the expansion of VKs influence and the intensification of factional struggles in Russia at that time. For the sake of stabilizing public opinion, the Russian government asked VK to shut down the social pages of the opposition. Pavel flatly refused.
In order to insist on freedom of speech, the uncompromising Pavel had to flee Russia. Even so, Pavel was eventually forced to hand over VK - by selling VKs shares. In the end, VKs shares were resold to companies closely related to the Russian government. Pavel is rumored to have received hundreds of millions of dollars in the sale of his stake.
Pavel Durovs early response to the consortiums attempted acquisition of VK
The inspiration for Telegram comes from Pavels experience of fighting wits with the Russian government during the VK period. During an emergency, Pavel suddenly discovered that all his communication methods, including mobile phone calls and emails, might be monitored by the government.
The technical basis for Telegrams success comes from the underlying encryption protocol MTProto developed by Pavels brother Nikolai and led by a group of top geeks. At the same time, the competition between Pavel and Mark Zuckerberg also shifted from social media to communication protocols - Facebook acquired WhatsApp in February 2014. Today, there are frequent spats between Telegram and WhatsApp over privacy issues.
Even though the plan to issue coins to provide operating funds was stopped by the U.S. government, Telegram has never forced users to charge fees. In the early days, Telegrams operating funds mainly came from the personal property of the two Pavel brothers. As the number of users continued to grow and product features were upgraded, Telegrams operating costs surged. In the end, Pavel chose to finance Telegram in the form of bonds.
Telegram has received a total of two external funds since 2021. The first time was in March 2021, PavelAnnounceMore than $1 billion was raised in bond sales. The second time is in July 2023, PavelAnnounceIn order to maintain operations, Telegram issued $270 million in bonds, of which Pavel himself purchased 25%. In this letter, Pavel also revealed two important pieces of information: Telegram adds 2.5 million new users every day;Pavel himself does not own real estate, private jets or other standard necessities for wealthy people. He only owns Telegram, some Bitcoins and Toncoin.
Telegrams Encrypted Landscape
Following the example of Meta and WeChat in building social media and more open super applications can only be regarded as building a plank road, while introducing and promoting encryption can be regarded as a secret strategy to overcome Chen Cang.
Build plank roads in the open, cross Chencang secretly
Although Telegram’s official blockchain platform Ton Network came to an end in 2020, at the end of 2021, Pavel Durov suddenly posted on his Telegram personal channelpostsay,
“I am encouraged to see the winners of the Telegram programming competition continue to develop the open source TON project and rebrand it as Toncoin.
......
Toncoin is different from the original TON, it is independent of Telegram. But I hope their team can achieve the same success.
Note, Toncoin is the token of The Open Network, TON
This passage was regarded as one of Telegrams efforts to endorse the TON project, and this speech also received more than 7 million views, far exceeding the daily data of Pavels channel.
Afterwards, TON was often accompanied by Telegram in an unofficial but more official form.
In 2022, Telegram launched a domain name system based on Ton Network, and plans to auction Telegram usernames in the form of NFTs and settle them in TON tokens.Telegram, which advocates freedom, even used centralized and coercive methods in the process of promoting the market-free domain name system.
According toTwitterandV2 EX usersAccording to the news, Telegram has not logged in for a long time and some high-quality user names using the announcement channel have been recycled without warning. “No one wants to pay about $160 for a Telegram username,” said one user whose username was revoked. But he obviously underestimated the enthusiasm of the encryption industry, and several user names have been sold for more than 2 million US dollars.
Data source: statista, unit 1000 USD
In October of the same year, Pavelexpress, personally, and together with four other people, built Fragment, a decentralized auction platform based on TON, in only 5 weeks. Not only the user name, but also the anonymous number and Premium functions launched by Telegram have also been launched on the Fragment platform, and support TON token payment.
The non-custodial wallet Wallet (TON Space) built into Telegram will be launched in August 2023 and currently supports three currencies: USDT, BTC and TON.
As Telegrams expected financial settlement method, the built-in non-custodial wallet not only ensures security, but also eliminates the need to introduce a third-party payment and settlement platform as Telegrams hidden risk point. It also unlocks the financial attributes of the Telegram platform itself, integrating financial security and Pass it freely to more users. Let Telegram function composability and user stickiness doubled.
DisenchantmentThe Open Network
As for the closeness of the relationship between Telegram and TON, no one can fully clarify except Pavel and his small circle.
According to drawesomedoge, a member of the former TON core development teamintroduce, we can tease out some details of the development process of TON and TON tokens.
New Ton, which was TON before the name change, has a core development team of 13 members from Slavic languages such as Russia and Ukraine. It continued to maintain and develop after the initial official TON was announced to be discontinued, and was recognized by Pavel at the end of 2021. With the upper position of New Ton, another branch named Free TON chose to leave, changed its name to Everscale, and changed its programming language.
As for the distribution of TON tokens, it is more mysterious. In general, TON tokens have already been distributed through Proof of Work (PoW) mining, and the information of most of the token owners is basically unknown.
According to drawesomedoge, out of the 5 billion total TON, about 100 million to 200 million points are given to the earliest developers. The remaining tokens are divided into 4.7 billion and 100 million, which are put into two Proof of Work (PoW) smart contracts for mining. Among them, the 4.7 billion TON tokens, which accounted for the vast majority, were mined within two or three months in the middle and late 2020.
According to the information from TON official website,
“In order to prevent the team’s suspension of work from affecting the development of the project, and to allow enthusiasts to continue to study the technology, the Telegram team put all available tokens in the network into smart contracts so that anyone can mine fairly.
Starting June 2020, all negotiable Toncoin tokens (98.55% of the total supply) will be open for mining. Subsequently, the miner code was published in the code repository, and tutorials on how to mine were also published on the project website. At that time, the blockchain was still in the testnet stage, and the tokens had no value and could only be used for testing purposes.
On June 28, 2022, the last Toncoin was mined and the initial distribution of TON ended successfully.
Todays TON has been transferred to Proof of Stake (PoS), and is issued at a rate of 6/1000 per year, about 30 million TON per year.
The suspicion of TON distribution is like the sword of Damocles, hanging in the hearts of all fans. As for who took away the largest portion of TON, drawesomedoge believes it may be early developers and enthusiasts. He also mentioned that it is worth noting that the tokens held by the TON Foundation are actually larger than the TON Core More developer tokens.
Here we have to mention the TON Foundation, which is responsible for finance, marketing and other work except development. It can be said that it is one of the few entities that exposes TON to the outside world. According to drawesomedoges speculation, TON Foundation members may be early investors in Telegram. At the same time, according to LinkedIn data, many members of the TON Foundation are located in Dubai, which is also the headquarters of Telegram.
Among the founding members of the TON Foundation, we also found Andrew Rogozov, the former CEO of VK founded by Pavel. Andre has worked at VK for 7 years and will step down as VK CEO in 2021, which is a critical time for the launch of TON tokens and mining allocation.This aggregated information inevitably makes people wonder whether all this is a trick implemented by Pavel to avoid US supervision.
Encrypted services growing wildly
Compared with Telegram’s “son” TON, Telegram, as the most encryption-friendly platform, is more famous for its various encrypted communication groups, robots and announcement platforms. A large number of real users migrated from Slack and WeChat groups have brought a large number of fresh and high-quality users to Telegram, and have also given birth to various news, CEX announcements, large transfer notifications, daily push notifications and other services. All in all, Telegram has the two things that major Layer 1s need most - users and developers.
Innovation thrives from this open and dynamic soil.
Although the core functions of Telegram will not be developed for third-party developers, transaction Bots that simplify user operations and directly interact with blockchain networks such as Ethereum through instructions are still popular. Not only are they more widespread than TON, but they are also It has strong data support - the trading volume through Unibot accounted for 2% of the entire Uniswap on August 26. Referring to Uniswaps absolute leadership in the DEX track, the trading volume through Unibot may exceed the DEX supported by some famous VCs.
Not only is the transaction volume high, but the income from this type of tool products is also high. According to Twitter user Simi SammistatisticsUnibot, the leader in the field, is expected to earn more than 6 million US dollars in monthly income from transaction taxes and transaction fees on the token itself. MaestroBots relies entirely on subscription fees and transaction fees, and its monthly project income exceeds 4 million US dollars.
The Telegram Bot craze triggered by this has led to the emergence of many types of Bot services on this track, such as leveraged contracts, sports event prediction markets, airdrops, and derivatives. The encryption data analysis website Coingecko has also added a new category of Telegram Bots, with more than 100 projects included in it, with a total circulating market value of more than 250 million US dollars.
It is even conceivable that in a few years, when people like Musk call for orders for a new generation of Dogecoin, users who get the news will no longer open their wallets, start DEX or CEX and conduct personal authentication. Instead, open Telegram, enter the token code and quantity in the top Bot window, and send instructions directly to Ethereum through the Bot protocol to complete the purchase.
Unlocking the phone and entering commands replaces entering wallet passwords and opening web pages, which is not only smoother, but also faster.
For cryptocurrency, each user can call various data and contracts anytime and anywhere through Bot. As for Telegram, which has a built-in wallet function, industries such as e-commerce and food delivery are also likely to be integrated and migrated to Bot. We may be able to look forward to a future where most of the daily needs of ordinary people can be solved through Telegram.
Whether it is TON or those Bot products based on Telegram, they are an important part of stimulating market vitality and imagination and promoting Mass Adoption. As Jerry, a TON ecology enthusiast, said, A product with 800 million monthly active users does not need a portrait, it has everything you want.
Telegram, which has a large number of users and is still growing, is using encryption to target social networking and open up a broader world for itself and the encryption industry.
Telegram has spent 10 years telling users what an independent and secure communication protocol is, and what Telegram is doing and will do will probably be difficult for giants of the same magnitude to learn, and they will not be able to learn it.
