Pavel Durov, the founding father of encrypted messaging app Telegram, has floated the thought of a market that would use “NFT-like sensible contracts” to public sale coveted usernames.
Durov made the proposal following the “success” of area title auctions by The Open Community (TON), a Layer 1 blockchain initially designed by the Telegram staff. The blockchain challenge launched the TON-DNS service in mid-July, permitting customers to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, sensible contracts, and web sites.
In a message to his private Telegram group dubbed “Durov’s Channel” on August 23, he famous that he was “actually impressed with the success of the public sale TON just lately held for his or her area/pockets names.”
“Think about how profitable Telegram, with its 700 million customers, may very well be if we put reserved @usernames, group and channel hyperlinks up for public sale,” he stated.
Durov instructed that Telegram might use comparable know-how to launch a brand new market the place “catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal and all four-letter usernames” may very well be purchased and bought.
“This might create a brand new platform the place username holders might switch them to events in protected offers – with possession secured on the blockchain through NFT-like sensible contracts.”
“Different components of the Telegram ecosystem, together with channels, stickers or emojis, might later additionally turn out to be a part of this market,” he added.
The primary auctions on TON DNS went reside on July 30, and much like the Ethereum Title Service (ENS) “.eth” domains, the “.ton” variant permits customers to simply entry decentralized functions with out typing a sequence of letters and numbers from their pockets addresses.
The TON community makes use of the FunC programming language for the TON Digital Machine and to launch particular sensible contracts on the blockchain. If Telegram have been to launch NFTs, they’d almost definitely be primarily based on this normal.
An analogous integration would possible be pretty straightforward for Telegram, as Durov and his staff developed alongside the messaging app TON, previously generally known as Telegram Open Community, again in 2018.
“Our staff can write bulletproof sensible contracts for TON (since we invented its sensible contract language), so we’re leaning towards exploring TON because the underlying blockchain for our future market,” he wrote.
TON was initially developed to behave as a digital funds platform for Telegram, but it surely shortly bumped into hassle with the SEC over an unregistered tentative sale of $1.7 billion in Gram tokens.
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After dropping the authorized battle with the SEC in mid-2020, Durov resigned from the challenge to concentrate on Telegram. Since then, open supply builders have revived the challenge below the banner of The Open Community.
The TON community makes use of a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and helps numerous capabilities equivalent to staking, NFTs and decentralized functions. Based on information from CoinMarketCap, its native asset Toncoin (TON) has surged 14.70% over the previous 24 hours to $1.33 on the time of writing.