Nftnews Today Telegram founder suggests ‘NFT-like smart contracts’ to auction usernames

Pavel Durov, the founding father of encrypted messaging software Telegram, has floated the thought of a market that might make the most of “NFT-like sensible contracts” to public sale highly-sought after usernames. 

Durov made the suggestion after the “success” of area title auctions by The Open Community (TON), a layer-1 blockchain initially designed by the Telegram staff. The blockchain venture launched the TON DNS service, enabling customers to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, sensible contracts and web sites in mid-July.

In a message to his private Telegram group named Durov’s Channel on Tuesday, he noted that he was “actually impressed by the success of the public sale TON just lately carried out for his or her area/pockets names.”

“Think about how profitable Telegram with its 700 million customers may very well be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel hyperlinks for public sale,” he mentioned. 

Durov advised that Telegram may faucet into related expertise to roll out a brand new market that may very well be used to purchase and promote “catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal, and all four-letter consumer names:”

“This could create a brand new platform the place username holders may switch them to events in protected offers — with possession secured on the blockchain through NFT-like sensible contracts.”

“Different parts of the Telegram ecosystem, together with channels, stickers or emoji, may later additionally develop into a part of this market,” he added.

The primary auctions on TON DNS went dwell on July 30, and very similar to the Ethereum Title Service (ENS) “.eth” domains, the “.ton” variant permits customers to entry decentralized purposes in a easy method without having to kind an extended string of letters and numbers from their pockets addresses.

The TON community makes use of the FunC programming language for the TON Digital Machine and to launch particular sensible contracts on the blockchain. If Telegram have been to launch NFTs, they might most probably be based mostly on this customary.

An analogous integration would possible be fairly easy for Telegram, provided that Durov and his staff developed TON, previously often known as the Telegram Open Community, alongside the messaging app again in 2018.

“Our staff can write bullet-proof sensible contracts for TON (because it was us who invented its smart-contract language), so we’re inclined to check out TON because the underlying blockchain for our future market,” he wrote.

TON was initially developed to perform as a digital funds platform for Telegram. Nonetheless, it promptly bumped into bother with the USA Securities and Alternate Fee (SEC) relating to an unregistered preliminary sale of $1.7 billion of Gram tokens.

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After shedding the courtroom battle with the SEC in mid-2020, Durov stepped away from the venture to concentrate on Telegram. Since then, open supply builders have revived the venture underneath the banner of The Open Community.

The TON community makes use of a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, and it helps varied options corresponding to staking, NFTs, and decentralized purposes. Based on knowledge from CoinMarketCap, its native asset Toncoin (TON) has pumped 14.70% over the previous 24 hours to sit down at $1.33 on the time of writing.