The Open Network

💎 Notcoin, a miniapp on Telegram, reached 35M active users in just a few months.

🐸 In this app, users could earn a game currency “notcoins” by clicking on the screen. Yesterday, the cryptocurrency Notcoin was minted on the TON blockchain and listed on all major cryptoexchanges. All of a sudden, Notcoin users who just played this game for fun could convert their in-game currency into real money 🤑

🚀 Notcoin instantly became a top-10 cryptocurrency in the world by trading volume, and reached almost $700 million in market capitalization. Imagine — hundreds of millions of dollars in value were created for Telegram users in this miniapp out of nowhere in a matter of months 😲

💪 This amazing success story shows how powerful the Telegram / TON ecosystems are for app developers. Telegram offers app developers more freedom than any other platform, providing unmatched opportunities to leverage social interactions for viral distribution. TON, in turn, provides scale and flexibility for any blockchain project on top of it 💎

We are now seeing a large wave of new miniapps being built on Telegram and TON. Notcoin, the leader of the pack, used its mighty paws to pave the way for many apps to come 🐺

After my last post, some people expressed concern that, as a result of ad sales exclusively for TON, Telegram may end up holding an unhealthy share of Toncoin, which will be too concentrated for a decentralized ecosystem. We acknowledge these concerns and have come up with a solution.

To limit Telegram’s share of TON at ≈10% of the supply, we’ll be selling the upcoming surplus of our TON holdings to long-term investors — under 1-4 years lockup and vesting plan, but at a discount to the market price. This way free-floating TON will get locked up, stabilizing the ecosystem and reducing volatility.

Potential investors in TON have been actively trying to reach out to us through various means. To make the process of any TON sales from Telegram fair and streamlined, we set up a new email address investors@telegram.org, where large investors ($1M+) can express their interest. Thanks to the participation of more long-term holders, TON will remain stable and decentralized.

😝 Next month, channel owners on Telegram can start receiving financial rewards from their work.

Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views monthly. Currently, only 10% of these views are monetized with Telegram Ads — a promotion tool designed with privacy in mind.

In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries. Channel owners in these countries will start receiving 50% of any revenue that Telegram makes from displaying ads in their channels.

To ensure ad payments and withdrawals are fast and secure, we will exclusively use the TON blockchain. Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners in Toncoin. This will create a virtuous circle, in which content creators will be able to either cash out their Toncoins — or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels 🤑