🧵 There has been some big announcements about Telegram supporting Bitcoin in their built-in app wallet recently. I decided to test it out and unfortunately found some major issues that make it a failure and Dead on Arrival.
Discussion
Firstly, they support BTC, but only alongside their own shitcoin token "TON" and USDT. There is no way to disable the display of TON and it always shows up at the top. Telegram is used by hundreds of millions globally and they are using this position to shill a POS shitcoin.
Secondly, I made a test transaction and was surprised to see they were using legacy format P2PKH addresses. This is not unique, coinbase
and others still use legacy addresses formats (which means higher fees for the user).
The real failure though was that though my transaction got confirmed on-chain, it was still listed as "pending" in Telegram. I left it for 12 hours+ and it still had not been added to my balance. I contacted the support bot and this is what they had to say:
1100 sats is high risk? According to who? This is about as loose as it gets. If I cannot deposit Bitcoin to my wallet then how can anyone? There was no ticket number, no support link, just a quick "give us your refund address." Who else has access to my funds?
There is still a way out of this for Telegram though. I see a clear opportunity to build out Bitcoin and Lightning infrastructure and be a first mover here in messaging + payments. Cut TON out and build some real systems.
As it stands, I see a lot more promise from the likes of wallet of satoshi / getalby / breez integrating Nostr private messaging etc than I do from a half-baked Telegram "crypto" wallet that I cannot trust at all and that doesn't even work.