The growth of TON price coincided with the public expansion of the messenger. Our experts assessed the prospects for a cryptocurrency ecosystem with its support

The cryptocurrency Toncoin (TON) has secured its place in the top ten largest crypto assets by capitalization. And at the same time taking the ninth line of the CoinMarketCap rating between Dogecoin and Cardano. The price of the coin has grown two and a half times in the past month. The growth of its rate was greatly accelerated after the release of an interview of the founder and owner of Telegram Pavel Durov to the Financial Times. And in which he said that the messenger received a preliminary valuation of $ 30 billion before a possible IPO.

In the sensational interview with Tucker Carlson, Durov mentioned that he had “several hundred million in dollars and bitcoins” 10 years ago. And he “didn’t do anything with them” because Telegram was “never about money” for him. Earlier, Durov said that of all cryptocurrencies he only holds Bitcoin and Toncoin.

Cryptocurrencies in Telegram

Formally, Telegram has nothing to do with projects in the TON ecosystem. And for which Toncoin serves as the main currency. But the messenger team is obviously supporting the developers. The messenger interface includes a cryptocurrency wallet that supports only bitcoin, USDT stablecoin and Toncoin itself. In it, you can also activate an additional Ton Space wallet. And which serves to interact with online projects operating on the TON blockchain. And tokens and NFTs issued on this blockchain.

On April 19, Durov is scheduled to make an announcement at the Token2049 cryptocurrency conference in Dubai together with Paolo Ardoino, the head of Tether, a USDT steiblcoin issuing company. Officially, the topic of the speech was not advertised. But in thematic Telegram channels and chats, the probable launch of USDT in the TON network is widely discussed.

Possible difficulties for the growth of the Ton ecosystem

The main difficulty that awaits TON is related to the market’s transition into the inevitable phase of correction. The bulk of the audience today are “newcomers looking for an easy profit”. And the cryptozyme crisis will hit such people the hardest, our experts believe. Indirectly, there are also risks from the U.S. Department of Justice, which may provoke new proceedings against Telegram. Especially since the precedent already exists in the legal field of the country and transferring it to a new token will be easier from the point of view of the law.

Possible difficulties may be related to excessive attention of regulators, primarily the US and the EU. Formally, Toncoin may fit the definition of an investment contract. And be considered as a security by the US SEC. In Europe, MiCA legislation comes into full force this year, and how European regulators will classify Toncoin is still unclear.

Another potential problem is abuse by criminal elements. This point will be especially relevant if the TON blockchain is used to issue stablecoins. For example, the Tron network (the most popular of those on which USDT operates) has already been accused of aiding and abetting terrorists. According to the U.S. authorities, Tron is used by them even more than bitcoin – it is the stablecoins that are used first and foremost.

Crypto-Upvotes experts conducted their analysis and told about prospects of NFT segment

Throughout 2022, application solutions with NFT have been actively developed in a variety of projects. The audience of the technology continues to grow at a tremendous rate due to the introduction of the technology by social media. This year, some tools related to NFT were implemented by Twitter (audience of about 400 million users), Reddit (audience of about 430 million users), Onlyfans (audience of about 175 million users).Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Youtube also announced their plans to implement NFT.

Based on these data, we can consider a long-term investment portfolio, taking into account the prospects for the development of NFT

We would suggest dividing the investment portfolio into two parts. The first would be a liquid backbone, the tokens of projects that provide infrastructure for NFT. Polygon blockchain turned out to be the most popular for application solutions. Therefore, as the audience grows, the entire ecosystem could get developed, so the demand for native blockchain tokens would grow accordingly.

Other top blockchains – Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain – may also get a comparable effect from the development of NFT.

Another interesting application of NFT is the Fragment platform from Telegram. It is likely that in the future the supply will expand and the demand for TON will increase.

We suggest forming the second part of the portfolio from specific tokens of various promising NFT tokens. In a growing market, which by all projections should occur in the second half of 2023 and all of 2024. Therefore, collections with high social capital could go up in price several times over.

When to buy ?

Today, terrific conditions for opening long-term positions for at least 1-2 years, better from 3 years or more. The ongoing scandals around centralized exchanges are constantly weighing on the value of the Binance exchange’s native token. And rumors around the potential centralization of Ethereum due to the move to PoS, with validators predominantly in the same jurisdiction, are also negatively affecting the price of ETH in the medium term.

The market as a whole continues to be in a global bearish trend, which opens up the possibility of buying any tokens at undervalued prices.

What is the right investment portfolio structure ?

• Polygon (MATIC) — 20%
• Toncoin (TON) — 20%
• Ethereum (ETH) — 10%
• Binance coin (BNB) — 5%

Another 5% can be allocated under ApeCoin (APE) acting as a native token in the company’s developed meta-universe. The company that owns the world’s most popular NFT-collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks and Meebits.

The remaining 40% can be distributed among different NFT-collections.

For example, find interesting offers among applied projects from social media, like collections from Reddit or Twitter.

Risks

The first part of the investment portfolio is quite conservative by the standards of the crypto market. It lists well-established, reliable projects that have many growth and development factors other than the NFT segment. Therefore, the risks in 3/5 of the portfolio do not exceed the overall risks of the market.

However, the rest are extremely risky investments. You have to consider that NFTs have several orders of magnitude less liquidity. And predicting the value of NFTs in the future does not differ in its essence from flipping a coin for luck. But, with all that, the investment can pay off many times over, given a lucky set of circumstances. For example, one appreciated token can potentially outweigh the value of all the others that will fall. But there is absolutely no guarantee that this will happen to you, to your chosen collection, with tokens owned by you.

That’s why it’s worth investing only as much as you’re willing to lose at least half of that amount.

Disclaimer

Crypto-Upvotes experts do not give investment advice, this material is published for introductory purposes only. Cryptocurrency is a volatile asset that can lead to financial losses.

Founder of Telegram announced plans to launch a decentralized platform for trading digital currencies. Our experts told us how successful this project could be. And whether its development will be hindered by regulators

The next step in development of Telegram is the creation of decentralized tools. Including cryptocurrencies, as well as decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, Pavel Durov said on November 30.

“This is how we can correct the mistakes caused by excessive centralization, which has failed hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrency users,” wrote the head of Telegram.

He explained that the blockchain industry was built on the principle of decentralization. But it turned out to be concentrated in the hands of a limited circle of individuals abusing their power.

“As a result, many people lost their money when one of major crypto exchanges FTX went bankrupt,” Durov recalled.

He said the solution to the problem is for blockchain projects to return to decentralization. And users should switch to transactions and wallets that do not depend on any third party.

The founder of Telegram said that he and four other people launched a decentralized domain name auction platform Fragment in five weeks. It is based on the blockchain platform TON, which Durov called fast and efficient enough to host popular apps. At the same time, Durov criticized Ethereum, calling it outdated and expensive, even after the latest global network upgrade.

“Fragment is amazingly successful. In less than a month the platform has sold $50 million worth of user names. This week Fragment will go beyond user names,” Durov said.

How will regulators treat Telegram cryptoexchange?

In terms of resources and the existing experience of Telegram team in developing TON project. Creation of such a project as a decentralized exchange and cryptocurrency wallets seems realistic, our experts believe. However, the current global trend in regulation of cryptoassets turnover is tightening and streamlining of control requirements.

Since details of this project and specifics of functioning of announced project are not disclosed. At the moment, it is difficult for our experts to assess how it will meet the requirements of the legislation of different countries.

What are the future prospects for this Telegram project?

Decentralized crypto exchanges are difficult to regulate because they are essentially not companies. Therefore, it is legally possible to prohibit such exchanges, but it is more difficult to limit their activities. Our expert stressed that liability in case of using such exchanges from the legal point of view does not apply to their creators. It extends more to ordinary users in each specific transaction.

Our experts admit the possibility that the launch of this site may be timed to the lifting of SEC ban. Which is imposed on Durov until July 2023 because of the attempted launch of the TON platform with the participation of investors from USA.

Most likely, the new DEX exchange will not be connected to Telegram in any way. Except for simplified authorization and a number of mechanics. Otherwise, they are definitely two different products.

What risks will ordinary users face when using a new DEX exchange from Telegram?

Most likely, DEX exchange will be created on TON blockchain. The main advantage of a decentralized platform is that it does not store users’ cryptocurrency. The exchange only brings together buyers and sellers of digital financial assets, without intermediaries. And users do not need to open an exchange account for such transactions – transactions are made from investors’ wallets.

That is, there is no risk of losing their funds if the exchange decides to block them. As, for example, happens now with the centralized exchanges, which go bankrupt.

The only risk of participation in transactions on the decentralized exchange is the risk of losses due to delays in price updates. And you will need to pay a commission for transactions on that DEX exchange.