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Telegram is primarily known as a messenger. But the integrated wallet has now become the company’s most important financial pillar. Has the messenger now become a bank and stock exchange?
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Basically, Telegram is not a messenger at all, but a crypto exchange. At least that is what the now-revealed sources of income of the former Russian company show.
Die Financial Times hat insight in a previously private balance sheet for the years 2022 and 2023. This shows a total loss of 108 million dollars on revenues of 342.5 million. Among the revenues there are several items related to crypto.
The smallest of these is a “profit on the revaluation of digital assets”, which, however, only amounts to $500,000. The sale of “collectibles”, i.e. NFTs, brought in a lot more, at $17.8 million. By far the largest item, however, is the “integrated wallet”, which brought in $130 million. Altogether, crypto accounts for more than 40 percent of Telegram’s revenue.
The wallet became Telegram’s main source of income in 2023, ahead of premium subscriptions and advertising. It went live in April 2022, but only for TON and collectibles, and generated rather bad mood. Telegram will not officially make the wallet available to all users until September 2023 placedin April 2024 it has Tether Dollar (USDT) integrated.
You can activate the wallet via the search field by entering “wallet” and then opening the @wallet channel. As I see it, the wallet consists of two parts: the normal wallet and TON Space.
The normal wallet allows you to trade TON, Bitcoin and USDT, but requires verification to deposit money. It is presumably escrowed and allows you to buy the coins by bank card or P2P. TON Space, on the other hand, is not escrowed and requires verification, but only supports TON, USDT and NFTs on the TON blockchain. You cannot buy coins, but you can exchange them via swap. With “Wallet Earn” you can also earn plenty of interest on your dollar deposits.
Die Telegram-Wallet
The option to buy or exchange coins has likely opened up strong sources of revenue for Telegram. Since it introduced USDT, it has quietly become a dollar bank – initially only running on the TON blockchain. But this has not affected its revenue in 2023.
Collectibles, on the other hand, were less lucrative. While they brought in almost $92 million in 2022, revenues fell to less than $18 million. NFTs are a powerful tool for raising a lot of money at the right moment – but they are apparently too volatile for long-term financing.
The TON blockchain forms the backbone of the wallet. It was originally developed at Telegram, but was outsourced after regulatory problems. It is not clear to what extent Telegram itself holds TON coins. However, “digital assets” now make up the largest share of the company’s capital reserves. While cash reserves – i.e. fiat money in bank accounts – only amounted to $170.9 million, the company held “digital assets” worth almost $400 million at the end of 2023 – even before real estate, factories, data centers and other equipment. The digital assets can mean cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or TON, but also dollar tokens such as USDT.
For Telegram, revenue from cryptocurrencies is now more important than ever. The company had actually hoped to cover the immense expenses through an IPO over the next two years. In March, founder Pavel Durov told the Financial Times saidthat he already has commitments from potential investors for a valuation of more than 30 billion dollars. After his arrest in France, however, these plans are likely to be on hold for the time being; the bonds that Telegram has issued have collapsed considerably.
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