Last Updated on December 1, 2022 by Bitfinsider

According to CEO Pavel Durov on Wednesday, messaging app Telegram has sold $50 million in usernames in less than a month via its blockchain-based auction platform, Fragment.

The statistic illustrates how well Telegram did on its second attempt to build its own crypto infrastructure. The Telegram Open Network, a blockchain that Durov initially abandoned in 2020 due to regulatory pressure but returning to after its community kept it alive, serves as the foundation for Fragment.

Durov is putting Telegram on a track for greater crypto buildouts, buoyed by Fragment’s robust sales. A decentralized exchange and non-custodial wallets will be developed by the company, according to him, and they might have millions of users. Many cryptocurrency traders already use Telegram as their preferred messaging platform, providing it a captive audience right now.

The declaration is the first time that Telegram’s involvement in directly integrating TON blockchain into the IM client has been confirmed. Earlier, Durov described the blockchain’s growth as a collaborative endeavor that Telegram was content to merely observe. The system, formerly known as Newton and Toncoin, is one of two competing initiatives that sprang from Telegram’s original TON proposal. Both were created by the Telegram user base, but only one received the company’s official endorsement.

Durov compared Telegram’s endeavor to the “excessive centralization” of the defunct crypto exchange FTX in a statement on his own channel.

He said: “Cryptocurrency users should switch to trustless transactions and self-hosted wallets that don’t rely on any single third party.”

A $126 million “rescue fund” was launched earlier on Wednesday by supporters of the TON network to aid cryptocurrency ventures affected by the collapse of FTX. When this article went to print, the TON coin was up roughly 4%.