Author: Samuel, OKG Research
According to OKG Research, Telegram currently has more than 900 million monthly active users, ranking fourth among the world's instant messaging software (as of April 2024). When these hundreds of millions of user windows are fully opened to the encryption field, it will undoubtedly be extremely attractive.
The research institute mentioned in its previous article that stablecoins, as a barometer of demand in the crypto market, have seen an overall market value increase of $30 billion since the beginning of 2024, a significant decline from the previous cycle of 2021H2 to 2022H1. With the extrusion of bubbles in the industry's financial attributes, the contradiction between the lack of new users and the game of existing users has put the growth of the entire market in trouble. The problem of liquidity tightening in the crypto market has become more prominent. Is the traffic narrative built around Telegram expected to become a consensus in the global market in this cycle? This remains to be tested by time and the market. But the crypto ecosystem of Telegram has begun to show its edge.
*Charts From Statista
In terms of its own openness and adaptability to the Web3 field, Telegram provides more application composability and interactivity, which can be reflected in the following aspects:
1. Bot brings an automatic embedded interactive experience, where users can trigger the execution of established needs through clicks, conversation texts, etc. Take Trading Bot as an example. With the popularity of memecoin, the Bot interactive new listing method has greatly facilitated the user's trading process. The data of the top trading Bot applications show that the number of new users per day has exceeded 10,000 in the past six months, and the cumulative number of users has exceeded 200,000.
*Source: https://dune.com/whale_hunter/banana-gun-bot
2. Telegram Mini Apps (TMAs) feature aggregation, developers can introduce HTML, CSS and JavaScript front-end editing and presentation formats into TMAs, and also provide development tools to assist in integration.
3. With Telegram's multi-terminal reach capability, users can achieve functional unification across different systems and carriers, and user attempts are fully guaranteed across platforms.
4. Establish a deep cooperation relationship with TON in the blockchain direction. Based on TON's established sharding technology architecture, Telegram is able to carry a huge amount of user interactions on Telegram. Telegram's attempt to deepen its application in the direction of web3 has begun in 23 years to integrate the wallet function previously launched by TON and add it to the main interface of Telegram, realizing the first step of the era of seamless user connection on the chain.
5. Based on the development of TON's underlying infrastructure, the centralized platform traffic is used to acquire customers, and then commercial growth and product iteration are achieved, achieving a closed loop in a certain sense based on the Telegram and TON ecosystem.
Since April this year, a large number of mini-apps have used simple click operations to spread virally. Currently, the top projects have been online for nearly three months, and the DAU on the chain has exceeded 140,000. The number of wallets on the TON chain and the number of wallets holding TON ecological project tokens (Jetton Wallets) also show the same trend, showing a clear upward trend. While participating, users have fully learned the entire process of participating in web3 applications on Telegram. Different from the earlier web-based Dapp form, the binding relationship between payment and communication apps is being built, and a crypto payment relationship similar to WeChat Pay is brewing.
*Source: https://www.tonstat.com
Since Tether announced the issuance of USDT on TON in April this year, the current net circulation is about 680 million US dollars, ranking fifth. The circulation of a large number of stablecoins also means that the demand for crypto business on TON is strong.
*Source：https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=usdt
Web3 developers also need to rethink how to rely on Telegram's traffic to achieve a closed business loop. In the past, the design relied more on channel exposure to acquire users, and more on the financial attributes of the project to achieve user retention. User expectations are for the speculation of the project rather than its practicality. Although this is the fundamental, it cannot be reversed in the short term. In the current cases of Telegram's application of small games in the Web3 field, based on the Telegram payment system, users can spontaneously recharge in the process of discovering the practicality (fun) of the product, maintaining the early operating costs of the project itself. At the same time, a shorter user link path can be obtained through advertising in Telegram, passive push in channels, and forwarding between community users, which can achieve self-circulation within Telegram.
But at the same time, we need to pay attention to the fact that Telegram's more open environment also means more complicated information security issues, especially in the context of Web3, which emphasizes decentralization, various security incidents such as phishing and fraud are more likely to occur. How to prevent and control the criminals hiding in Telegram who endanger the information security of users while embracing web3 will also be an important issue.
OKG Research will continue to pay attention to the development of Telegram's encrypted ecosystem and the new changes it has triggered in the industry. In collaboration with leading institutions in the industry that focus on the TON ecosystem, it will release a research report on Telegram's encrypted ecosystem, always focusing on the web3 innovative technology ecosystem and decoding a new chapter of large-scale application!
