Telegram added payments via eight providers to its chats and groups
Social media Telegram is “getting” financial opportunities, and it’s a trend. And even two.
The Telegram team has announced a fresh update to the messenger that draws attention to the trend of adding financial features to it. Thus, the option of making payments directly in chats and groups appeared for users from more than 200 countries. To this end, Telegram’s team agreed on cooperation with eight payment providers: Stripe, Yandex.Money, Sberbank, Tranzzo, Payme, CLICK, LiqPay and ECOMMPAY.
It is emphasized that Telegram itself “does not handle customer payments and instead relies on various payment providers around the world.” Meanwhile, the emergence of such new features in Telegram is reminiscent of the messenger team’s earlier development of the TON blockchain project and Gram tokens. Faced with the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rejection of these innovations, Telegram decided to completely remove itself from further work on the project, despite the technological developments already in place.
At present, the Telegram team, on the one hand, is trying to sort out all the issues with those investors who were involved in financially supporting the project TON and Gram, on the other hand, is trying to build a business model that would provide a strategically sustainable development of the messenger. To this end, the option of an IPO with a presumable listing on the stock exchange by the end of 2023 may be considered.
Meanwhile, the development of global finance has led Telegram to the fact that financial functions have already appeared, although not on the basis of TON and Gram. It is worth noting that the social network Twitter is developing a system of financial rewards for users’ favorite tweets. On April 27, the head of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announced the development of similar opportunities.
Recall that financial functions have already been implemented in the popular social communication tool in China – WeChat. The obvious trend towards the inclusion of financial capabilities in social media is accompanied by the fact that some payment providers, such as PayPal, are already actively integrating cryptocurrency solutions into their services. It is easy to assume that in the future the two trends can reinforce each other, especially since, for example, Facebook is not discounting its own digital assets project Diem.
