Telegram merchants can now accept payments via the TON blockchain-based Wallet in tether, bitcoin, and toncoin, expanding on support for transfers between users
Here's How it Works Helen Partz / Cointelegraph : Telegram Wallet bot enables in-app payments in Bitcoin, USDT and TON James Hunt / The Block : Wallet Pay enables Bitcoin, Tether and Toncoin payments on Telegram Chimamanda U. Martha / Coinspeaker : Telegram's Wallet Rolls Out In-App Crypto Payment Options, Offering New Opportunities for Merchants Aditya Anand / Ethereum World News : Wallet Enables BTC, USDT & TON Payments For Merchants On Telegram Sahana Kiran / Watcher Guru : Bitcoin, Tether Payments Goes Live on Telegram Through Wallet Pay
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2023 move turned Telegram's TON-based Wallet bot from a peer-to-peer transfer tool into a merchant checkout: businesses inside the app could accept bitcoin, USDT and toncoin without leaving the chat. It was the first step in a sequence the related coverage tracks — two months later Telegram added TON Space to the Wallet bot and planned a broad rollout, and in 2024 it formalized the stablecoin leg with a partnership letting ~900M users send USDT to each other on The Open Network.
The merchant-payments layer matters because it completes a loop Telegram spent the following year building: channel owners get ad revenue paid out in toncoin under a 50/50 split, creators earn Stars that convert to TON, and now buyers can pay merchants in the same assets — an in-app economy where earning, spending and settlement all run on one chain.
First-order effects
- Telegram merchants gain native in-app acceptance of BTC, USDT and toncoin via Wallet Pay, so checkout happens inside the chat rather than through a redirected card processor.
- Tether and the TON ecosystem get a direct distribution channel to Telegram's consumer base, moving USDT and toncoin from a transfer feature into a payments rail.
Second-order effects
- The 2024 Tether partnership for ~900M-user P2P USDT transfers is the logical scaling of this rail, and Telegram's 2025 expansion of wallet access to its 87M US users extends the same merchant-payable wallet into a market it had earlier excluded.
- Competing messaging platforms face pressure to offer an equivalent in-chat payment layer, since merchants can now transact where the conversation happens.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Telegram's stack — Wallet, Stars, toncoin-denominated ad payouts, merchant checkout — consolidates into a closed-loop economy where the messaging app functions as both marketplace and financial infrastructure.
- The wallet-as-permission-layer model suggests messaging apps, not banks or standalone crypto apps, become the default on-ramp through which mainstream users hold and spend digital assets, with regulatory exposure concentrated on whoever controls the wallet.
The trend: Messaging platforms are layering full crypto payment rails onto chat, turning the in-app wallet into the primary interface between social reach and digital-asset commerce.