It should be noted that the topic of ENS domains remains popular even now. In particular, the ENS domain 000.eth was sold at the beginning of July 2022: the transaction amounted to 300 ether, which is the equivalent of 328 thousand dollars. It is noteworthy that this transaction turned out to be the second largest in the history of this asset.

Information about the domain name 000.eth on the Etherium network

Two weeks later, the ENS domain called amazon.eth received an offer of one million USDC, i.e. one million dollars. At the same time, the owner of the domain name purchased it for 33 ETH, or the equivalent of several tens of thousands of dollars. Accordingly, if sold, the owner’s profit was more than decent.

Offer to buy the domain name amazon.eth on the Etherium network

Last night, the topic of such names was raised by the creator of Telegram, Pavel Durov. Apparently, an auction of signatures within the messenger will be launched after all.

Will NFTs appear in Telegram

Durov published an entry in his own channel, and it was a response to an auction from the TON community, which was held at the beginning of August. The event resulted in more than 2,000 .ton domain addresses gaining new owners.


It should be noted that Toncoin is the result of the TON project, which was once abandoned by Telegram due to regulatory pressure. As Durov noted in December 2021, Toncoin is independent of Telegram and is promoted solely by third-party developers, which used the source code from Telegram representatives.

Control of The Open Network was handed over to the community in June 2020. By doing so, Telegram avoided serious problems with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused the developers of unregistered sales of securities worth the equivalent of $1.7 billion in GRAM tokens.


More specifically, 7957 public auctions were launched in the first week of trading, during which 2,184 domains ended up being sold in exchange for 2.39 million Toncoin.

The most expensive of these was wallet.ton, for which they gave 215,250 coins, or the equivalent of $260,000. The leaders were also casino.ton and bank.ton, bought for 200 and 157.5 thousand toncoins respectively.

Pavel Durov and the GRAM token

In the end, the idea of trading similar names suited Durov. Here’s a relevant quote.

If TON was able to achieve such results, imagine what success Telegram would have with its 700 million active users if we launched an auction for reserved links with @ users, groups or channels’ signatures. In addition to millions of memorable t.me addresses like @storm or @royal, all four-letter user names like @bank, @club, @game, @gift, and so on could also be up for sale.

Durov suggests that blockchain would come in handy for such schemes. Here’s a continuation of his quote.

This would create a new platform in which holders of user names could send them to interested parties in secure transactions – with ownership guaranteed in the blockchain through NFT-token-like smart contracts. Other parts of the Telegram ecosystem, such as channels, stickers or emoji, could also become part of this market in the future.

Pavel does not appear to have any plans to use popular OpenSea-like platforms, where ENS are also traded, available as NFT tokens, for transactions.

Transactions with the domain name 000.eth on the OpenSea platform

Entrepreneur continues.

When it comes to scalability and speed, TON is by far the best technology for conducting such decentralised sales. Our team can create bulletproof smart contracts for TON, as we are the ones who created this language for smart contracts. So we are inclined to try out TON as the primary blockchain for our future marketplace.

As a result, Durov suggested we wait and see if they manage to add “a small Web 3.0 component to Telegram” over the coming weeks.


We think the concept will definitely prove to work and the marketplace for selling usernames will be in demand among customers. What we see happening with ENS-domains in other networks is that people and companies are interested in having usable names and are willing to pay a lot of money for them. Therefore, the appearance of such a site would be a logical step in the development of this network.