The mini-apps are probably the current major competitive advantage of Telegram, thanks to products like Hamster Kombat that allow earning crypto. 

Yesterday, the founder and CEO of the eponymous company that develops and manages the messaging app, Pavel Durov, wrote on his personal Telegram channel that this month they will add a mini-app store and an in-app browser with support for Web3 sites.

The mini-apps on Telegram: the store is coming 

The so-called mini-app of Telegram are internal bots within the Telegram app that can operate like apps.

On one hand, this allows mini-apps to perform only certain operations, executable through the Telegram app, slightly limiting the creativity of developers, but on the other hand, it has the significant advantage of not requiring any downloads or installations. 

The bots of the mini-apps on Telegram, in fact, already work upon their opening, so it is sufficient to search for one and open it to start using it. 

Currently, however, there is no public list of mini-apps, but this shortage will be addressed in the coming weeks with the launch of the internal mini-app store. 

It will presumably be something similar to the Google Play Store for Android, or the Apple App Store for iPhone. 

The substantial difference, however, will lie in the fact that the mini-apps on the Telegram store will not need to be downloaded and installed, but it will be sufficient to open them to start using them immediately. 

Blockchain and crypto

Durov also wrote that 2024 will go down in history as the year when hundreds of millions of people became familiar with the blockchain. 

This is made possible by the fact that Telegram has about 900 million active users worldwide, more than the estimated number of cryptocurrency holders. 

Telegram for some time now has not only embraced blockchain technology, with the TON project, but has also started promoting its use through one of the various mini-apps, the crypto wallet (@wallet). 

It is an integrated, official, and custodial crypto wallet that allows you to receive and send Bitcoin, USDT, and TON, and to stake TON. 

Durov also wrote that they will allow organizations to use their mini-apps to issue labels for channels, creating a decentralized market for third-party verification.

As of today, as far as we know, Telegram is the only major messaging app in the world to have integrated criptovalute and services based on blockchain.

Telegram: the mini-app Hamster Kombat will finally have a store

One of these is the mini-app of Hamster Kombat.

This is a mini-app that allows you to play with virtual hamsters that fight, and above all to earn crypto. 

It was launched only in March of this year, and in a short time it has become the most used mini-app within Telegram.

Among other things, this month of July their official token, HMSTR, should also be launched on the crypto market.

The mini-app is simple, but perhaps that’s exactly why it has been so well-received. In fact, earning crypto by playing a really straightforward game has attracted many users. 

The same Durov a few days ago had written that Hamster Kombat has obtained 239 million subscribers in just 3 months. It took only 73 days to reach 100 million monthly users, with 4 or 5 million new users joining every day to play. According to Durov, it would be the fastest-growing digital service in the world.

He also added that a new wave of mini-apps is coming to Telegram.

The role of the crypto Toncoin (TON)

Toncoin is the native cryptocurrency of the TON blockchain, which is the crypto ecosystem of Telegram. 

Now steadily among the top 10 cryptocurrencies in the world by market capitalization for a few months, it debuted on the crypto markets in 2021, in the midst of a bullrun, but recorded its all-time highs only a month ago. 

Since the beginning of the year, it has gained as much as 200%, and it is possible that its rise is not yet over. 

To tell the truth, after the highs of mid-June, it recorded a correction, but the current values are in line with the peaks of April and May. 

TON is used a lot within telegram, for example as a means of payment to remunerate the owners of the channels. 

On the other hand, the entire Telegram crypto ecosystem is based on TON, and therefore on its cryptocurrency Toncoin, and this suggests that in the future its market value could rise further. 

The integration in mini-apps like Hamster Kombat: the potential of Telegram’s Web3 store 

Even the same mini-apps can use Telegram’s internal services, based on TON, to send and receive cryptocurrencies. 

To understand the scope of this innovation, it is enough to say that in just three months since it landed on TON, the stablecoin USDT has surpassed 730 million dollars. 

As of today, after Tron, Ethereum, Avalanche, and Solana, TON is already the fifth blockchain for USDT issued, ahead of Near, Celo, Omni, Cosmos, EOS, Tezos, Polkadot, and Algorand. 

Being able to use USDT on TON internally, Telegram’s mini-apps have enormous potential, as they can also enable P2P exchanges, although centralized, at very low if not negligible costs. 

With the launch of the mini-app store, Telegram risks competing with Google and Apple, who instead struggle to enable blockchain transactions within their apps.