Telegram Founder Wants NFT-Like Smart Contract To Auction Usernames

Telegram founder wants NFT-like smart contracts to auction usernames, by creating a marketplace where he could do exactly that. Of course, these will be only highly sought-after usernames.

The notion came from Pavel Durov, Telegram founder,  following the “success” of domain name auctions by The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain created by the Telegram team. In mid-July, the blockchain project introduced the TON DNS service, which allows users to provide human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts, and websites.

On Aug. 23, he said on his personal Telegram channel “Durov’s Channel” that he was “very surprised with the success of the auction TON recently performed for its domain/wallet names.” And now because of that, the Telegram founder wants NFT-like smart contracts to auction off usernames.

“Imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel links for auction,” said Durov.

Durov proposed that Telegram employ comparable technologies to launch a new marketplace for buying and selling catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal, as well as all four-letter user names.

“This would create a new platform where username holders could transfer them to interested parties in protected deals — with ownership secured on the blockchain via NFT-like smart contracts.”

“Other elements of the Telegram ecosystem, including channels, stickers or emoji, could later also become part of this marketplace,” he went on.

The first TON DNS auctions took place on July 30, and, like the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) “.eth” domains, the “.ton” variation allows users to access decentralized apps without having to write a large string of letters and numbers from their wallet addresses.

The FunC programming language is used by the TON network to run the TON Virtual Machine and to execute particular smart contracts on the blockchain. If Telegram launches NFTs, they will very certainly be based on this standard.

Given that Durov and his colleagues created TON, formerly known as the Telegram Open Network, alongside the messaging app in 2018, a comparable connection would likely be relatively straightforward for Telegram.

“Our team can write bullet-proof smart contracts for TON (since it was us who invented its smart-contract language), so we are inclined to try out TON as the underlying blockchain for our future marketplace,” Durov wrote.

TON was created to serve as a digital payments network for Telegram, but it quickly came into difficulty with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an unregistered preliminary sale of $1.7 billion in Gram tokens.

Durov left the project after losing a legal battle with the SEC in mid-2020 to focus on Telegram. Since then, open source developers have resurrected the project as The Open Network.

The TON network employs a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus process and allows staking, NFTs, and decentralized apps. Toncoin (TON), its native asset, has risen 14.70% in the last 24 hours to $1.33 at the time of writing, according to CoinMarketCap statistics.

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