Every Blockchain Project Will ‘Have a Telegram Complement,’ Animoca CEO Says

By Ryan S. Gladwin

Robby Yung, the CEO of crypto investment firm Animoca Brands, predicts that every Web3 project will soon have a Telegram experience. This is the result of Telegram gaming exploding this year with crypto projects like Hamster Kombat attracting over 300 million users.

Yung believes this represents the start of mass adoption.

“Anybody with a Web3 app will have a Telegram strategy for user onboarding because it represents a distribution, advertising, and marketing vector. It represents the top of the funnel for user acquisition,” Yung told Decrypt at Zebu Live in London. “Everybody from DeFi through to gaming, regardless of where their core experience lies, will have a Telegram complement.”

This could come in many forms, he added. For some, this may be a game that helps engage users in a project before directing them to the core experience. Or it could simply be a chat that helps educate users on how to use the project.

In many ways, this is already happening. PiP World, for example, is an educational gaming ecosystem that created a tap-to-earn Telegram game to attract users they could onboard to its core experience. It’s Telegram announcement channel now has nearly 370,000 monthly users that can be redirected to other products.

“If I'm making a browser based experience, there's no reason why I wouldn't have a Telegram complement,” Yung added, “just in the same way that the banking industry 15 years ago said: Now we should have a mobile app as well as our website for people to do online banking.”

Telegram is a social media messaging app, similar to WhatsApp, that embraced Web3 this year by introducing a native wallet and supporting crypto projects. As a result, the app has 950 million total users. Crypto gaming projects have been flocking to it because it’s helped them amass audiences in the hundreds of millions.

“Telegram is representative of mass adoption,” Yung told Decrypt. “If you look at the numbers that Hamster Kombat and these kinds of things have put up—Notcoin, etc.—that is mass adoption. I mean, you should be happy with [300 million] users, right?”

To put this into perspective, at the start of 2023 there were less than 250 million crypto wallets with a positive balance—this inflated to nearly 400 million by March 2024, according to Chainalysis.

Last week, the total number of holders of The Open Network’s native currency TON, the blockchain used for most Telegram apps, topped 100 million. Yung believes this is emblematic of mass adoption and a result of the social media app being the first notable platform to fully embrace Web3.

“The problem that we've had in Web3 gaming is that all of the traditional distribution platforms have been largely closed to us,” Yung told Decrypt, referencing gaming stores like Steam banning crypto and NFTs. “Telegram is the first platform with substantial global distribution that actually does not place any restrictions or limits on Web3 enabled features.”

Tap-to-earn games displayed the power of using “viral mechanisms” within the Telegram app as they encouraged users to follow, share, and post on social media. This resulted in Hamster Kombat’s YouTube channel hitting 37 million subscribers and Notcoin launching the most successful gaming token of the year, hitting nearly a $3 billion market cap.

Yung believes that it is only logical that other projects will use these marketing strategies to bolster their non-Telegram offerings.

Editor's note: This story was updated for clarity.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

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