Telegram has started an auction on short usernames on the TON blockchain. Here’s a good explanation of the historical context of the TON blockchain. For those who don’t know, initially, TON was developed by Telegram, and there were plans to do ICO, but SEC intervened, and Telegram was forced to “distance” itself from the project, but here we are, and TON is part of the in-app experience.
- You can see the auction here.
What’s going on with the top 200
There are some outliers that I excluded to be able to plot the majority of auctions.
Most of the usernames are being sold between 755$ and 1000$.
If we plot all of the bids on a single line:
We can see that some usernames go for up to a million.
It’s interesting to see how the most popular usernames are related to existing brands. It’s not surprising, though, if you know the economics of domain name prices. A more accessible and catchier domain name makes it easy to discover/remember your website. Website visits translate into $ pretty quickly.
Not sure if official brands are buying Telegram usernames or if those are speculators trying to flip a famous brand’s name, or if someone with a lot of TON does it for some other purpose (for fun?).
The auction has been enough to generate a price movement on TON, although it was much less than in November 2021.
What’s the bigger picture?
Telegram has 700 million users, and Twitter has 230 million.
Telegram distills the social network model of FB to the bare minimum, a communication channel between people. Now that it has a vast reach, it monetizes using standard internet practices. It has a payment system supported by TON, sells addresses to companies or individuals, adds facilities to manage large channels, allows the publication of different types of content, and has voice chat … You get the point.
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