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Pavel Durov, the founder of messaging app Telegram, came up with the idea of a marketplace that could use NFT-like smart contracts to auction highly sought-after usernames.
Durov made the proposal following the success of cuPavel Durov, founder of messaging app Telegram, came up with the idea of a marketplace that could use NFT-like smart contracts to auction highly sought-after usernames by The Open Network (TON). a layer 1 blockchain originally designed by the Telegram team. The blockchain project launched a TON DNS service that allows users to assign human-readable names to cryptocurrency wallets, smart contracts, and websites in mid-July.
In a message sent to his personal Telegram group called “Durov’s Channel” on August 23, he noted that he was really impressed by the success of the auction that TON conducted recently for their domain/wallet.
The first auctions on TON DNS took place live on July 30, and like the Ethereum Domain Name Service (ENS) “.eth” domains, the “.ton” variant allows users to access decentralized applications in a simple way without having to enter strings of letters and numbers from their wallet addresses.
The TON network uses the FunC programming language for the TON Virtual Machine and to launch specific smart contracts on the blockchain. If Telegram launches NFTs, they will most likely be based on this standard.
The same integration will likely be fairly straightforward for Telegram, as Durov and his team developed TON, formerly known as Telegram Open Network, along with the messaging app in 2018.
TON was originally developed to act as a digital payment platform for Telegram, however, it quickly ran into trouble with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over an unregistered preliminary sale of $1.7 billion of Gram tokens.
