Telegram announces plans to tokenize stickers, emojis as NFTs on TON blockchain

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Telegram is set to tokenize its stickers and emojis, transforming them into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the TON blockchain, said Pavel Durov, the co-founder and CEO of Telegram, at the Token2049 event in Dubai this week.

“We believe in NFTs that are deeply integrated into human culture, into human interaction, into our communication,” Durov emphasized the potential of socially relevant NFTs. “NFTs that you can see tens of billions of times and they 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.”

“Stickers are very very popular. More than 700 billion times stickers are shared each month on Telegram. The number of views of stickers is incredible. We believe that emojis can be an NFT as well,” he added, saying that sticker sets and emoji sets can also become a memecoin.

Following the successful tokenization of usernames and anonymous numbers, which allowed users to claim up to 95% of sales revenue, Telegram now focuses on stickers and emojis. This move is expected to further embed the TON blockchain into the app’s ecosystem.

The TON blockchain has been gaining traction, especially with the recent integration of Tether’s USDT and XAUT, which are now available on TON. This development opens up new avenues for peer-to-peer payments and decentralized applications on the TON blockchain, potentially benefiting Telegram’s vast user base of over 900 million people worldwide.

Durov claimed the TON blockchain is highly scalable, able to handle millions, even hundreds of millions, of transactions. This makes it a great fit for Telegram’s target scale.

With the tokenization of stickers and emojis, Telegram is not only expanding its blockchain capabilities but also pioneering a new form of NFT that could become a significant part of online communication.

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