Telegram to Launch NFT-like Smart Contracts to Auction Usernames

• Telegram’s founder proposed a marketplace to employ NFT-like smart contracts to auction off popular usernames.
• Wallet.ton was sold for 215,250 Toncoin ($260000), while casino.ton went for  $244000.
• TON was to serve as a digital payments network for Telegram until it encountered issues with SEC.

Pavel Durov, the founder of the secure messaging service Telegram, has proposed the notion of a marketplace that would employ non-fungible token (NFT)-like smart contracts to auction off popular usernames.

Durov made the recommendation in a message to his private Telegram channel after the success of the domain name auctions by The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain first created by the Telegram team.

According to Durov, a new marketplace for buying and selling catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal and all four-letter usernames might be launched by Telegram using comparable technologies. In his words:

Imagine how successful Telegram could be with its 700 million users if we put reserved @usernames, group, and channel links for auction. In addition to millions of catchy t.me addresses […], all four-letter usernames could be available for sale.

Notably, Wallet.ton was sold for 215,250 Toncoin ($260000), while casino.ton went for  $244,000. On July 30, the first TON DNS auctions (“.ton”) went live, identical to the “.eth” domains offered by the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). With it, users could access decentralized apps without writing a large string of characters from their wallet addresses.

The purpose of TON was originally to serve as a digital payments network for Telegram.  But it soon encountered issues with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over an unregistered preliminary sale of $1.7 billion in Gram tokens.

Midway through 2020, Durov withdrew from the project to concentrate on Telegram after losing the legal battle with the SEC. Nonetheless, open-source developers have resurrected the project under the name The Open Network.