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Crypto Industry’s Favorite Messaging App Telegram Surpasses 500 Million Active Users

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Crypto Industry's Favorite Messaging App Telegram Surpasses 500 Million Active Users

Telegram, a popular messaging app within the cryptocurrency space, surpassed 500 million monthly active users during the first week of January, according to Telegram chief executive officer Pavel Durov.

In the last 72 hours, said Durov, the app has seen a massive surge in new users, with an additional 25 million people signing up to use the platform. These new users are coming from all around the world, with the majority – 38% – drawn from Asia.

Some 27% are coming from Europe, 21% from Latin America, and 8% from the Middle East and North Africa (Mena region). Around 200 million people used Telegram in 2018, meaning user growth has exceeded 150% over two years.

Telegram may have benefited from changes to the privacy policy at rival Whatsapp. Recent updates to Whatsapp’s privacy policy require that users share their personal information with parent firm Facebook or stop using the service altogether.

These changes are believed to have prompted users uncomfortable with sharing more of their personal data with Facebook to leave Whatsapp, and join privacy-centric competitors such as Telegram or Signal.

Unlike other competing messaging apps, Telegram does not share personal data and offers encrypted chats.

Posting on his personal Telegram channel on Jan. 12, Durov said:

People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users.

The Telegram CEO added that “with half a billion active users and accelerating growth, Telegram has become the largest refuge for those seeking a communication platform committed to privacy and security.”

In 2020, Telegram reported new user sign-ups of 1.5 million each day, a far cry from the current influx of people joining the platform. “We’ve had surges of downloads before, throughout our 7-year history of protecting user privacy. But this time is different,” noted Durov.

Until now, all services on Telegram have remained free. However, Durov announced in December that some services may now be monetized. He said additional functions will appear for “business teams and users with advanced needs” and those features will be paid because they are “resource-intensive”. Ordinary users will continue to use Telegram for free, he emphasized.

Telegram attempted to launch its own cryptocurrency called Gram, through the TON blockchain platform, but was blocked by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That left Pavel Durov, who had raised $1.7 billion from select investors for the project, saddled with a debt of $1.2 billion and $18.5 million in penalties.

Now some investors in TON are preparing a lawsuit against Durov to try and force the businessman “to sell part of Telegram or the entire company and pay off the investors, because he spent money on Telegram,” according to a Forbes report. Durov allegedly spent $500 million of the TON money to upgrade Telegram, something investors claim was not part of the original deal.

What do you think about the influx of new users at Telegram? Let us know in the comments section below.

Bitcoin.com Wallet Adds Shareable Payment Link Feature – Send Bitcoin Cash to Anyone via Text, Email, and Social Media

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At Bitcoin.com, our team is all about spreading the benefits of peer-to-peer electronic cash and our flagship wallet is a testament to our team’s passion. Bitcoin.com’s noncustodial crypto wallet recently upgraded and now offers a new payment link feature that allows anyone to send bitcoin cash by email, and even social apps like Whatsapp, Facebook, Slack, Telegram, and Instagram.

Just recently the Bitcoin.com Wallet added a number of new features in the latest 6.10.3 version release. The Bitcoin.com Wallet is a noncustodial bitcoin cash (BCH) and bitcoin (BTC) client that also allows users to store SLP-based tether USDT stablecoins, and Simple Ledger Protocol tokens as well.

In the latest edition of the Bitcoin.com Wallet, our software development team has made it much easier to send transactions in a few different ways. On November 24, the BCH proponent David Bond (@hellodavidbond) tweeted about the Bitcoin.com Wallet’s new “Send Anywhere” feature.

“The Bitcoin.com Wallet now allows you to send [bitcoin cash] the same way you’d share a link, or meme. This is awesome,” Bond tweeted.

Bitcoin.com Wallet Adds Shareable Payment Link Feature - Send Bitcoin Cash to Anyone via Text, Email, and Social Media
After depositing $2 worth of bitcoin cash into the wallet, I simply pressed send and the client allows you to choose the “shareable link” feature.

With the new Send Anywhere feature from the Bitcoin.com Wallet, sending BCH gifts during Christmas or during the Chinese New Year has never been easier. In order to leverage the new Send Anywhere feature, Bitcoin.com Wallet users need to upgrade to the latest 6.10.3 client version.

After depositing some funds into the BCH wallet, simply press “send” to create and send a shareable link. In addition to sending to any BCH wallet by scanning a QR code or sending to one of your own BCH wallets, the client offers a choice called: “shareable link.”

Bitcoin.com Wallet Adds Shareable Payment Link Feature - Send Bitcoin Cash to Anyone via Text, Email, and Social Media
After selecting the shareable link feature, I simply pressed send all and continue and the wallet creates the URL link which can be shared with anyone and anywhere.

Following pressing the “shareable link” tab, the wallet directs you to the page where you enter the amount of bitcoin cash you want to send. With my test wallet containing $2 in bitcoin cash (BCH), I simply pressed “send all,” and pressed “continue” to finalize the transaction. After pressing “continue,” the Bitcoin.com Wallet will create a URL link with the bitcoin cash that can be sent using nearly any application on the web.

You can send the shareable link via text message, email, Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Slack, Telegram, and basically anywhere you can share a link. Now, remember, you probably want to send the link privately, rather than sharing it in public, as anyone with access to the link can scan the funds.

Bitcoin.com Wallet Adds Shareable Payment Link Feature - Send Bitcoin Cash to Anyone via Text, Email, and Social Media
The wallet allows you to interact with the various methods of sending whether it be on Telegram, email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SMS text, and other online web portals and messaging apps.

After the creation of my $2 BCH payment link, the Bitcoin.com Wallet gave me a choice to send it via a myriad of applications on my device. Since this was only a test, I sent the bitcoin cash to myself via SMS text message, and instantly received the shareable link.

Bitcoin.com Wallet Adds Shareable Payment Link Feature - Send Bitcoin Cash to Anyone via Text, Email, and Social Media
This is an example of the payment link that I sent to myself as an experiment via text message. In order for someone to access the funds, they simply need to scan the QR code using their Bitcoin.com Wallet. Of course, the link shown in this screenshot has been used when I finished this test.

Opening up my Bitcoin.com Wallet version 6.10.3, I selected the little scan QR icon on the top right-hand side of the application, which is located next to the notifications bell icon. I simply scanned the payment link’s QR code, and my $2 worth of bitcoin cash (BCH) was instantly added to my wallet.

Another cool thing about the Bitcoin.com Wallet’s Send Anywhere feature is that if the recipient does not deposit the funds, the user can simply reclaim the bitcoin cash any time they want.

The latest wallet version still gives users the ability to safely store multiple crypto assets including BCH and BTC, offers a portfolio breakdown, the ability to hold stablecoins, and the capacity to purchase and swap coins in a matter of minutes as well. With our secure and super fast Bitcoin.com Wallet, the latest Send Anywhere feature makes sending cryptocurrency to anyone worldwide extremely easy.

What do you think about the latest Bitcoin.com Wallet feature? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

The post Bitcoin.com Wallet Adds Shareable Payment Link Feature – Send Bitcoin Cash to Anyone via Text, Email, and Social Media appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Free TON, From an Abandoned Project to the Frontier of PoS Networks

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Free TON, From an Abandoned Project to the Frontier of PoS Networks

The Durov brothers fought a long and exhaustive battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the Telegram Open Network (TON)’s acceptance in the United States, which ended with an official announcement that the further development of the project was abandoned. However, the TON project was fully open-source. Using the TON repositories a group of independent enthusiasts came together, forked the best that has been built by the original Telegram team and ventured into a long journey of building Free TON.

The Free TON Community

Similar to many other PoS networks aiming at decentralized governance, there is a declaration underpinning the philosophical foundations of Free TON as a community and as a decentralized network. As the Declaration of Decentralization, a founding document behind Free TON, was being drafted a growing number of contributors have been joining the project – both on the technology and community development side, forming the Free TON community, by now forming one of the largest independent networks on the digital assert landscape.

How it all started? Well, there were people who were involved and interested in TON from the start. They became excited about launching the project as a community — spreading the word to their own networks. Eventually, it grew quickly from there as a community-driven project. Today, Free TON is a vivid community of 30k+ people all over the world, contributing daily to the ever growing codebase of the network. The Free TON contributors are much more community-centric. A wide range of technical developments have been made such as highly improved tooling and a multitude of protocol changes.

Key differences between the original vision of TON and the Free TON as it stands today can be summarized in three key statements:

(a) No corporate entity behind – Telegram as a messaging platform and as a business has publicly abstained from being involved further. In the words of one of the most active Free TON community members, Mitja Goroshevsky, “… when so many people spent so much of their time and effort on the project, just to have it suddenly yanked from their hands on the basis that money was raised in a way someone didn’t like, that’s devastating.” Today, the community is both the founding fathers and the key asset of the Free TON as an ecosystem.

(b) The protocol is built upon the ideals of decentralization upon both, the network and the governance layer. The original design was technology oriented and had little thought given to the game-theoretical aspects of the governance layer. Validators would vote to approve protocol changes… That’s about as far as the design went. Durov’s team was focusing on the tech and cost-load efficiency, not the tokenomics. There was simply no vision about how to involve the community in the platform’s governance.

(c) Distributional decentralization – the distribution of tokens happens as this is being written on a per-merit basis based on the proposals that are submitted on the Free TON Community Forum and voted for by the community and the validators.

But What Really Sets Free TON Apart?

 

The Technology

In production, the Free TON blockchain achieves transaction speeds of less than 0.2 seconds, throughput of more than 10k TPS, with highly competitive transaction cost (less than 0.001% of transaction amount), and theoretically embeds infinite scalability through multi-threaded sharded architecture.

Distributional Democracy

Community-launched, Free TON has never undergone an ICO of any sort, neither had the tokens been distributed according to monetary contribution of any sort. The challenge was to design game-theoretically coherent distributional mechanics while bound by the rules of PoS.

The design finally assumed is called the Meritocratic Token Distribution model. It starts from the community proposing a contest in which all other members can participate. The contest is debated, and soft majority voting is used to decide whether a proposal should proceed.

Access Democracy

Another major aspect and core principle of Free TON is staying open source, community driven, and governed as much as possible on top of its own blockchain, which will protect against not only from potential hacker and security attacks on the network, but also ensure the stability via truly democractic/meritocratic on-chain approach to the evolution of the Network.

The Internet was born free and decentralized, then big corporations and big states took charge of it, now it’s time to return it to users and its decentralized origins, as Bitcoin once did in the financial industry.

Where Does Free TON Stand Now?

Today on December 8, 2020 initial members of Free TON blockchain announced the launch of more than 400 independent validators on December 22, 2020, making Free TON one the most truly distributed blockchains launched to date.

Free TON has the potential to change the blockchain industry carrying it closed to the frontier of mass adoption of applications like payments systems (think of Visa, Mastercard, Paypal), Messaging (Telegram, Whatsapp, WeChat), social media (Twitter, Facebook) and fulfill one of most prominent dreams of all Internet evangelists – a truly decentralized backbone infrastructure for the Internet itself.

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The post Free TON, From an Abandoned Project to the Frontier of PoS Networks appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Former Microsoft Engineer Says Nigerian Expatriates Are Using Bitcoin to Circumvent Country’s Overvalued Exchange Rate

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A former Microsoft software engineer and co-founder of Buycoins Africa Tomiwa Lasebikan says some Nigerians expatriates are now using bitcoin to circumvent the country’s overvalued exchange rate when sending remittances.

According to Lasebikan, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s fixed exchange rate of $1:380 is robbing recipients 20-30% of their remittance value each time they retrieve funds. At the time of writing, the parallel exchange rate of one dollar to the Naira is 1:480, according to Abokifx.

Similarly, importers that are hamstrung by the country’s rigid foreign exchange regulations, are now resorting to bitcoin when making payments online or across borders. Speaking in an interview, Lasebikan says bitcoin has also given Nigerian residents an opportunity to pay for services or utilities that the CBN usually deems unnecessary. He says:

Another thing would be for people who want to have access to resources outside the country…You want to pay for Nexflix, Apple Music. All of the things the government is aggressively clamping down on.

The software engineer explains that Nigerian authorities had, prior to this year’s events like Endsars protests, “been oblivious to the immense potential of bitcoin.” During the lockdown period, cryptocurrency usage in Nigeria grew and the country is now ranked as one of the top cryptocurrency markets. It is events in the crypto world in the past twelve months that may have helped change the Nigerian government’s perception of cryptocurrencies.

Consequently, as Lasebikan acknowledges, officials might now want to take action to slow down the adoption of digital currencies by Nigerians. According to Lasebikan, one simple way authorities can achieve this is by clamping down on centralized crypto exchanges, enforcing more rigorous KYCs or driving crypto companies out of the traditional banking infrastructure.

Still, as Lasebikan explains, this “will not kill bitcoin or the value of bitcoin” because the “majority of crypto activities happen in informal channels.” He says any clampdown will not result in the dropping of peer to peer trading which is initiated via Whatsapp or Telegram social media chat groups.

Bitcoin trading is censorship-resistant and there is no way for Nigerian authorities to stop or reverse transactions. Awareness of this and other attributes about bitcoin means the CBN and others will not succeed in any effort to control the digital currency. For crypto users, knowing of this is reassuring and it helps to maintain or accelerate the adoption momentum.

Do you agree with Lasebikan about the immense power of bitcoin in Nigeria? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

The post Former Microsoft Engineer Says Nigerian Expatriates Are Using Bitcoin to Circumvent Country’s Overvalued Exchange Rate appeared first on Bitcoin News.