The initiative really began with a direct initial coin offering (ICO) of Telegram Messenger a few years ago, which was eventually halted by the SEC.

Nevertheless, Telegram did not stop there. It went on to develop The Open Network, a decentralised cryptocurrency project, from its centralised predecessor.

Though theoretically Telegram does not now own TONNE, the firm behind its cryptocurrency initiative is still in charge of the second-largest messaging service globally.

In fact, the programme itself has long included a TON-based cryptocurrency wallet that supports both Bitcoin and, more recently, USDT.

It's crucial to keep in mind that Telegram is the most popular messaging service in the cryptocurrency industry, with 900 million monthly active users.

Additionally, beginning with April 2024, it launched a major communication and marketing campaign to promote TON and its integrated crypto wallet.

USDT and TON

USDT is the world’s leading stablecoin, and is composed of tokens issued on different blockchains.

With a current market capitalization of over 110 billion dollars, 57 billion USDT are on the Tron blockchain, and 50 billion on the Ethereum blockchain.

Excluding smaller blockchains with a very limited number of USDT, after Tron and Ethereum there are almost 1.9 billion USDT on Solana, and more than 1.3 billion on Avalanche.

All the other 12 blockchains on which Tether tokens are present have less than one billion USDT each.

Among these rooms in eighth place is TON, which with its 130 million USDT has easily surpassed EOS, Liquid, Algorand, Polkadot and four other blockchains.

Moreover, there are 141 million on Tezos and 160 million on Cosmos, so it is absolutely possible that TON ends up surpassing them and positioning itself in sixth place behind Omni.

Furthermore Omni, a sidechain of Bitcoin, is becoming less and less used, even though it was the first blockchain on which USDT was launched about ten years ago.

Therefore, the growth of TON among the blockchains supported by USDT is definitely important, and in the future it could become one of the most widely used chains from this point of view.

It should not be forgotten that TON is a very fast and economical blockchain, supporting a very high number of transactions per second at very low costs. From this point of view, it is probably the best among those supported by USDT.

The role of the Bitfinex exchange

Currently, there are not many exchanges that support TON.

In addition to Bitfinex, there are OKX, Bybit, HTX, Gate.io, and KuCoin among the main exchanges.

Furthermore, there are even fewer that support USDT on TON.

Bitfinex is a historic crypto exchange that belongs to the same group as Tether, and is in fact the primary market for USDT, along with Tether itself.

However, Tether only handles transactions over $100,000, while Bitfinex allows the buying and selling of USDT even for much lower amounts.

It is therefore more than obvious that Bitfinex has decided to integrate USDT on TON as well, after listing the cryptocurrency Toncoin in April 2021.

The relationship between Tether and Telegram is now even closer, thanks to the fact that USDT can now be deposited or purchased on TON’s exchange, which belongs to the same corporate group.

The goal of Bitfinex is to simplify the activation of destination addresses seamlessly, eliminating any additional steps. In fact, to start transferring USDT to TON, users will only need to specify their public addresses on that network.

According to CoinGecko, USDt, created by Tether, has a market valuation of more than 109 billion dollars, making it the first and most popular stablecoin available.

Henry Child, the token manager at Bitfinex, said:

The blockchain community is buzzing with excitement over the open network, and its recent announcement that it is now offering USDT on its own blockchain promises that the buzz about this innovative project will continue.

WE ARE GLAD THAT CUSTOMERS OF BITFINEX WILL BE ABLE TO

TRANSFER USDT VIA THIS GROWING NETWORK WITH EASE."