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Telegram to Tokenize Stickers and Emojis as NFTs and Meme Coins on TON Blockchain, Says CEO Durov
Telegram co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Pavel Durov has announced Telegram’s plans to tokenize stickers and emojis, allowing users to truly own these assets as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and earn from creating and selling them.
Durov Explains Tokenization of Stickers on Telegram
Durov spoke earlier today at the Token2049 conference in Dubai, highlighting Telegram’s affinity with decentralization and blockchain technology. According to Durov, Telegram is the first social media platform to tokenize usernames and anonymous numbers, a feature that has now generated $350 million in sales and pays owners 95% of the revenue generated. Telegram already began auctioning usernames in 2022, with unique usernames like casino.ton selling for more than $200,000.
The Telegram founder mentioned that people who have bought and resold some of these usernames have been able to 33x the prices of these names. However, to the Telegram team, there is room for more. Pavel Durov said:
“We don’t want to stay there. We want to go further. You see, we believe in socially-relevant NFTs. We believe in NFTs that are deeply integrated into human culture, into human interaction, into our communication. NFTs that you can see tens of billions of times and… have a lot of potential [to] spread virally. These are the right NFTs. That’s why the next step that we are going to undertake is tokenizing Telegram stickers.”
To buttress his point, Durov displayed a sticker of a smoking duck, created a few years ago by a sticker artist working with Telegram. The CEO pointed out that since it was created, the sticker has become a viral meme and a cultural phenomenon even outside of Telegram, now with hundreds of millions of views at least.
“Imagine someone owned this as an NFT when it first came out a few years ago. I think the price increase will challenge what we have experienced with anonymous numbers,” Durov said.
Explaining the reason for the development, Durov says that stickers are very popular and shared more than 700 billion times monthly on Telegram.
Telegram Emoji Meme Coins
Interestingly Telegram wants to take all of these even further by tokenizing emojis as well. Durov also hinted that after this is successful, Telegram may decide to tokenize sticker sets and emoji sets so that they become meme coins.
Durov’s entire speech considerably dialed on blockchain technology, specifically The Open Network (TON). He mentioned that all of the tokenization of stickers and emojis will happen on the TON blockchain because it is highly scalable.
“At our scale, we need something that can process tens of millions, potentially hundreds of millions of transactions,” said he.
The CEO said that to properly offer services where there are millions of stickers and emojis tokenized, the blockchain should be able to handle the volume.
In addition to tokenizing stickers and emojis, Durov spoke on Telegram’s model of harnessing the blockchain, highlighting the decentralization users, channels, and content creators currently enjoy. For instance, Telegram launched ad revenue sharing, where channels get 50% of all revenue, with payments and withdrawals powered by TON. He also said Telegram will introduce a new Tips for Creators revenue sharing model, where creators will receive 70% of all revenue.
Telegram to Tokenize Stickers and Emojis as NFTs and Meme Coins on TON Blockchain, Says CEO Durov
