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Social media giant Telegram will auction four, and five-character social media handles, similar to domain names, on a marketplace on the TON blockchain.
Telegram and the TON Foundation will host the social media handle auction on a website called Fragment.com, with the floor price of four-letter names set at 10,000 Toncoin.
What you need for the Telegram auction
Telegram will first offer four, and five-letter Telegram handles to the general public and will also allow users to auction their handles. Auctions will last a week.
“For the first time, social media users will be able to transparently prove that they own their handles thanks to their tokenisation on the TON blockchain,” said Andrew Rogozov of the TON Foundation.
People wishing to participate in the auction can log onto Fragment.com using Telegram or the non-custodial wallet apps tonkeeper and TON wallet. The wallet must contain Toncoin before a user connects it to Fragment. To bid, the user must select one of the auctions, enter an amount, and pay. Whoever’s bid makes it to the blockchain first will win the auction, and you will receive your money back if you don’t win.
The handles may not be available on all Telegram clients. The social media company will soon roll out updates to existing platforms that will offer support.
First TON DNS launched earlier this year
The TON foundation launched its own Web3 domain name system, TON DNS, on June 30, 2022. A Web3 domain name system serves a similar purpose to a Web2 DNS. In Web2, the domain name system matches an Internet Protocol address with a human-readable name. Instead of typing a numerical IP address 172.217.204.10 into your web browser’s search bar, you can type in Google.com.
The Web3 equivalent of an IP address is a crypto wallet address. These typically consist of long strings of letters and numbers that can be shared with any crypto user that wants to send funds to you. Services like the Ethereum Name Service and Unstoppable Domains allow you to instead share human-readable web-like addresses with people sending you money. ENS will enable you to create addresses ending in .eth, while Unstoppable Domains allows you to own an address ending in .crypto, .bitcoin, or one of several other domains.
Domain names
Upon its launch, the TON DNS allowed you to create domain names ending in .ton. Like the new Telegram handles, the domain names were auctioned off, with the first auction on July 30, 2022. Wallet.ton was the most expensive, selling for $260,000, while casino.ton sold for $244,000.
Developers could also bid for their smart contracts to have custom domain names. Ton domain names are NFTs that a user can store, sell, or gift, a blog post notes. NFT owners are responsible for paying a small annual renewal fee to the smart contract of the domain name. Otherwise, the domain will be auctioned again.
In contrast, the new Telegram handles will not need to be renewed. The auction with the highest minimum bid at press time is 63,000 Toncoin.
TON is up 23.49% to $1.61 at press time. It has a market cap of just under $2 billion.