Telegram users can now send crypto payments to each other

• The TON Foundation has added a crypto payments feature to Telegram, similar to Twitter’s Bitcoin payments feature.
• Telegram uses the Toncoin cryptocurrency instead of Bitcoin.
• The TON Foundation had been abandoned by Telegram back in 2020.

The TON Foundation, a decentralized layer-1 blockchain designed by Telegram, has added a new crypto payments feature to the messaging app, the organization announced on April 26. The feature allows users to send Toncoin, the organization’s cryptocurrency, to other Telegram users without any transaction fees.

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“With this service, you’ll no longer need to enter long wallet addresses and wait for confirmations,” the Foundation said in a tweet announcing the feature. The feature is similar to the Bitcoin payments function that Elon Musk’s Twitter has been offering through its Tip Jar feature since September last year. Twitter, however, uses the Stripe platform for such payments.

“We anticipate that this functionality will extend into the consumer to business payments so that people can easily acquire goods and services by sending toncoin via bots in the Telegram app,” the TON Foundation said.

Toncoin platform boasts over 52 million transactions so far, with over 486,000 wallets, according to the TON Foundation’s
website. The Toncoin token was issued in 2019-20 when the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
blocked Telegram’s $1.7 billion token issuances for an initial coin offering (ICO).

“Our emergency action today is intended to prevent Telegram from flooding the US markets with digital tokens that we allege were unlawfully sold,” said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, at the time. “We allege that the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding