How Tokenized Mini-Apps Are Boosting Telegram’s Ecosystem Growth

Already a hugely popular platform, Telegram is poised to capture a significant section of the fast-growing Web3 market, thanks to the combination of two attractive new features.

Telegram is one of the most widely used social media apps in the world. Its combination of a simple user interface and private messaging has seen its adoption soar to almost a billion users. 

The recent launch of mini-apps – web apps that open directly from inside Telegram chats – has seen the platform evolve far beyond a simple messaging app. Companies and developers can now leverage Telegram’s popularity to create vast and thriving communities around games and other applications.

But it is the integration of another feature, Telegram’s native blockchain platform, TON, that has truly revolutionized the user experience. By deploying crypto tokens with real market value within their mini-apps, developers are creating whole new economies – and with them, new avenues for driving user acquisition, engagement, and retention, not to mention revenue generation.

Key to every tokenized mini-app is the “TGE”: token generation event. This is the moment at which a blockchain token is created and distributed to users, and becomes tradable on the open market. The token economics (or “tokenomics”) of the ecosystem then become critical. Well-designed systems can become self-sustaining and deliver lasting value for everyone, while poorly-designed ones risk sliding rapidly into obscurity. 

The Telegram “Vacuum”

One of the biggest challenges for tokenomics designers is the relatively closed nature of Telegram’s ecosystem. 

Telegram has an enormous user base, and is a powerful platform for engaging communities. There’s a good reason why it’s one of the most widely-used apps in the crypto space, and some of the new tokenized games have achieved dizzyingly fast growth. The top app to date, a game called Hamster Kombat, hit an incredible 300 million users in just five months to August this year. 

However, it’s a somewhat siloed ecosystem, with little crossover from other popular social media apps. Perhaps more importantly in the context of building a sustainable economy, there are rarely links to the real world. That, along with some intense competition from similar apps and regulatory scrutiny, saw Hamster Kombat’s user base crash by over a quarter of a billion in September.

Without this crucial connection to the outside world, with its independent services and revenue streams, the success of any Telegram mini-app – and the value of any token integrated with it – threatens to be short-lived.

Bridging The Gap

In fairness, this crossover appeal is something that few crypto apps have managed to achieve, on or off Telegram. However, the slick user experience and easy integrations offered by Telegram mean that mini-apps can legitimately be described as game-changing. The process of transforming conventional “Web2” apps into their blockchain-powered counterparts – without the friction and UX barriers that typically accompany this process – becomes straightforward.

One model for how this might look in practice is provided by TimeFarm, a popular mini-app launched by Australian blockchain recruitment and HR services company Chrono.Tech. Like so many other mini-apps, TimeFarm rewards regular engagement by distributing tokens (called $SECOND), and has attracted an impressive 10 million users since its launch in June. 

Unlike others, TimeFarm’s tokenomic model taps into a real-world need for certain services, creating meaningful and organic demand for $SECOND. In the so-called Attention Economy, businesses and individuals compete for users’ views and engagement. When someone shares a social media post, that has value. TimeFarm enables anyone to purchase promotion – including likes, reposts, shares, referrals, channel boosts, and more – by rewarding users in $SECOND. 

Each user may have only a tiny impact in terms of visibility, but multiplied across a user base of millions, the aggregate effect can be extremely powerful. That’s an attractive prospect for companies that are desperate for grassroots engagement but have previously had no way to organize their fans and customers at scale due to the inefficiencies of the traditional payments system. This ability to connect buyers with providers of these “microtasks” aligns well with Chrono.Tech’s core business of streamlining global recruitment using blockchain technology. 

The Future Of Mini-Apps

The crypto world is a hotbed of experimentation, with new technologies and economic models being tested in the unforgiving arena of the worldwide blockchain user space. Few last the distance, in part because they fail to resonate with the wider market outside the immediate crypto sphere.

Telegram mini-apps have addressed a series of key barriers to blockchain adoption, offering an easy way for organizations to onboard users in their millions while providing frictionless access to web services powered by crypto tokens. Apps like TimeFarm solve one of the final issues, answering a real-world demand in a way that conventional web applications and the traditional payments system cannot. Together, the right platform and the right model promises to drive a new wave of innovation – with tangible benefits for businesses and users alike.

How Telegram Mini-Apps Are Onboarding A New Generation Of Crypto Users

Thanks to recent moves by the social messaging app Telegram, the tipping point for blockchain technology suddenly looks a lot closer than it did at the start of the year.

“Web3” is a notoriously hard-to-define term, but broadly refers to a version of the internet powered by decentralized technologies, primarily blockchain. While our current Web2 is characterized by the influence of large corporations, and the control they exert over major web services and users’ personal data, Web3 promises a more egalitarian, user-owned web that is more akin to the internet’s earliest incarnation.

To date, Web3 has been relatively slow to gain traction. Usability issues are one of the chief reasons why. There’s a learning curve when it comes to working with crypto platforms, and for those used to popular Web2 services, it can be a jarring and difficult change.

Telegram To The Rescue

Help has come in the form of one of Web2’s most popular messaging apps: Telegram. The platform has around 900 million users, putting it in the top 10 of global social media apps. But Telegram’s founders have proven visionary in more than one way. 

Firstly, mini-apps – web-based applications that run directly within Telegram – have enabled developers to build simple and fun games and other services that can be easily accessed by users, without leaving the platform. Secondly, the decision to launch a high-performance blockchain, named TON (The Open Network), and integrate this closely within Telegram’s user experience, makes handling blockchain payments seamless. Crypto tokens that trade on the open market can now easily be included within apps to serve as rewards, facilitate payments, and build complex economies.

Users are now downloading and using these blockchain-powered mini-apps in their tens of millions. Thanks to Telegram, Web3 now starts to look and feel a lot more like Web2.

The Challenge Of Tokenomics

One of the key difficulties for those who design these new crypto-powered games and apps is creating economic models that reward users and other stakeholders, but that are sustainable over the long term. The term tokenomics – “token economics” – refers to the way these in-game economies are designed to balance supply and demand for the token. Get it wrong, and the value of the token crashes as users sell what they earn: a very real illustration of the dangers of inflation.

One of the problems is to reach beyond Telegram’s relatively closed ecosystem to access revenue sources that will feed through to create demand for tokens. While the communities that grow up around mini-apps can number tens or even hundreds of millions of users, they are often quite self-contained. This isolation makes it hard for tokenized mini-apps to succeed; imagine an economy that consisted of exchange of goods and services within a large but closed room full of people, and you’ll get the idea. There’s only so much value they can provide each other without external input.

Breaking out of this closed system is a priority for businesses who want to create robust and sustainable tokenomic models that will underpin healthy in-app activity. Without this, any mini-app is destined to falter after an initial surge of interest, as new apps are released and users leave for better opportunities.

Connecting With The Outside World

In practice, there are many ways of generating revenues from external sources by leveraging a large in-app community. Adverts are one of the most obvious options, and these can easily be integrated, either within an app or in a group Telegram chat itself.

Another approach, pioneered by mini-apps like TimeFarm, is to treat the app’s community as more active participants. TimeFarm, which was launched by blockchain recruitment company Chrono.Tech, combines the social media reach of Telegram’s huge communities with crypto’s efficiencies for micropayments – transactions of a few cents or even less.

TimeFarm has attracted a community of almost 10 million users, who log in regularly to collect rewards – in the form of the $SECOND token – for engaging with the app and carrying out simple tasks. These might be as brief as liking or sharing a social media post, or referring a user to another service. 

Businesses are crying out for this kind of social engagement online. The Web2 model involves a top-down process of buying ads and trying to induce social media users to share and comment on interesting or (increasingly) controversial posts. The Web3 model is more grassroots-based. Social media users can be directly paid in crypto tokens to interact with posts in their thousands and millions. 

Crypto’s Killer Use Case

This is far more effective and financially efficient than existing approaches. In fact, it is impossible to achieve with legacy technology. Businesses have no way of making huge numbers of tiny payments efficiently, especially in real-time and across borders. 

This is one of crypto’s killer use cases – and Telegram, with its massive user base, slick blockchain integrations, and fast-growing mini-app ecosystem, is at the forefront of a new wave of crypto adoption.

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