The popular chat app with 800 million monthly active users, Telegram, is getting a self-custodial crypto wallet. It will help solidify its presence in the vibrant crypto community that has emerged from its chat platform and may well help drive the masses into the crypto space.

Telegram and TON Foundation Wednesday announced the new self-custodial wallet called TON Space at Singapore's Token2049 crypto conference that draws above 10,000. Since the FTX implosion occurred, the crypto community, in general, went for a great reckoning concerning the need to utilize more self-custodial wallets rather than those which allow users no control over the digital assets held by centralization.

Worth noting that the wallet was not developed by Telegram itself, but the fact that it was a joint announcement now draws attention to the history of its rather complicated relationship with blockchain.

In 2020, the messenger abandoned its Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain project following a lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over a massive initial coin offering. A group of open source developers and blockchain enthusiasts then founded The Open Network Foundation (TON Foundation), now supporting the development of The Open Network (TON), the blockchain powering a growing number of applications on Telegram, including the self-custodial wallet.

The wallet is the brainchild of a company called The Open Platform (TOP), which includes a wallet development team and a venture-building division, the TOP Labs, that works closely with the TON ecosystem and has a portfolio of TON-based apps.

Starting in November, TON Space will be available to Telegram’s global users without the need for any wallet registration. The feature is an addition to the custodial variant of the Telegram wallet already built to date, raking three million registered users up until the present. The blockchain-powered wallet is self-custodial by nature and at present barred some jurisdictions, specifically the United States, amid launching serial crackdowns on crypto. For now, some have taken to promoting myriad crypto applications to geofence their customers from the said market.
TON Space is one among a long list of mini apps that third-party apps run inside Telegram. This messenger is turning into some kind of "super app," the term first coined by WeChat. Still, its approach was drastically different from the Chinese app, which builds and controls its own payment solution. To begin with, Telegram opted for decentralized payments. Instead, developers can create crypto-compatible mini apps by integrating with the TON Space wallet, rather than through some centralized solution built by the messenger.

The benefit of having a crypto wallet in Telegram is the potential to introduce a substantial number of users, many of whom are unbanked populations in developing countries, to digital assets.

Having a self-custodial wallet enables developers to manage the flow of digital assets through their projects. Imagine that there is, for example, a private community. And in order to get access to this community, you need to get some kind of NFT-based key, some kind of entry card, and [the user can] receive this in the self-custodial wallet," Andrew Rogozov, CEO of TOP and former CEO of Russian social networking media VK, told TechCrunch in an interview.

There are many crypto wallets competing outside the Telegram environment. According to Rogozov, their disadvantage is that "first of all, you need to create a wallet.". And usually, it's a complex procedure, so the conversion to the installation of these wallets is very low… The second problem is that [website-based] wallets don't have distribution." To help popularize decentralized apps, Telegram is giving priority access for TON projects and partners to its global advertising platform.

The encrypted chat app Signal also has a crypto payments solution developed by a third-party partner, MobileCoin. Although the two solutions might be perceived as competing, Halil Mirakhmed, COO of Wallet, the team behind TON Space, believed they attract quite different users.

"[Signal] doesn't have the platform or the community in order to have a social interaction and social discussion of crypto within its app. Because it's end to end, there's no ability to create a community," he said.