Telegram Opens Its Crypto Wallet to American Users

Telegram users in the U.S. can now trade and manage cryptocurrencies inside the messaging app.

As CNBC reported Tuesday (July 22), the company’s TON Wallet is built into Telegram’s interface and is beginning its American launch this week.

The service, developed by The Open Platform (TOP) and built on the TON blockchain lets users send stablecoins and other digital tokens to their contacts the same way they would send a message.

The company says this marks the first time a self-custodial crypto wallet has been embedded inside a mainstream messaging platform in the U.S.

While more than 100 million international users have activated the wallet, a U.S. launch had been held back due to regulatory uncertainty. TOP CEO Andrew Rogozov told CNBC the climate began to change in the last year.

“We started considering the U.S. as a more interesting opportunity for us,” Rogozov told CNBC, citing a shift in regulatory conditions and Telegram’s user growth.

He added that there are a lot of crypto users on the platform, describing the wallet as “the fundamental part of this infrastructure,” letting users store assets and interact with Telegram’s burgeoning Mini App ecosystem.

PYMNTS took a closer look at the crypto and stablecoin payments space in May in an interview with Mesh CEO and Co-founder Bam Azizi.

“People hold their assets in crypto, but ‘pay with bitcoin’ is so 2019. Merchants don’t want to accept it, they want to accept stablecoins,” Azizi told PYMNTS during an interview at Stablecon.

“The crypto market cap is $3 trillion, and the stablecoin market cap is $250 billion, meaning it’s less than 10%,” he said. “If you want to build a payments network, you need to solve the divide so shoppers can walk in and pay with their assets, while merchants receive the payment as stablecoin.”

Championed for their price stability and rapid transfer capabilities, stablecoins have become fundamental instruments in global trade, remittances and decentralized finance.

But while sending them may seem simple, transactions go through a complex ecosystem of wallet infrastructure, smart contracts, off-chain data integrations, compliance tools and blockchain networks, all presenting possible points of failure or attack.

“The biggest problem in crypto is not adoption, it’s the user experience,” Azizi said. “You need to make payments so simple that even a grandmother will use it one day, maybe without even knowing that the mechanism behind the scenes is a stablecoin … to do that, you need to do a lot of heavy lifting.”