“Imagine however successful Telegram with its 700 million users could bell be if we place reserved usernames, cluster and channel links for auction,” the Telegram founder wrote.
Pavel Durov, the founder of encrypted messaging application message, has floated the thought of a marketplace that might utilize “NFT-like sensible contracts” to auction highly-sought once usernames.
Durov created the suggestion once the “success” of domain name auctions by The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain originally designed by the message team. The blockchain project launched the TON DNS service, facultative users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, sensible contracts and websites in period.
In a message to his personal message cluster named Durov’s Channel on Tuesday, he noted that he was “really affected by the success of the auction TON recently conducted for his or her domain/wallet names.”
“Imagine however prospering message with its 700 million users might bell be} if we place reserved @ usernames, cluster and channel links for auction,” he said.
Durov suggested that telegram could faucet into similar technology to roll out a replacement marketplace that might be wont to obtain and sell “catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal, and every one 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 components of the message system, including channels, stickers or emoji, might later also become part of this marketplace,” he added.
The first auctions on TON DNS went carry on July 30, and far just like the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) “.eth” domains, the “.ton” variant permits users to access decentralized applications in a very simple manner while not having to type a long string of letters and numbers from their wallet addresses.
The TON network utilizes the FunC artificial language for the TON Virtual Machine and to launch specific sensible contracts on the blockchain. If message were to launch NFTs, they might possibly be supported this normal.
A similar integration would doubtless be quite straightforward for message, only if Durov and his team developed TON, at one time called the message Open Network, aboard the electronic messaging app back in 2018.
“Our team will write bullet-proof sensible contracts for TON (since it absolutely was us who unreal its smart-contract language), therefore we are inclined to do out TON because the underlying blockchain for our future marketplace,” he wrote.
TON was at first developed to operate as a digital payments platform for message. However, it promptly suddenly met bother with the u. s. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerning an unregistered preliminary sale of $1.7 billion of Gram tokens.
( Brian Quarmby, Cointelgraph, 2022 )