🍌 Is Telegram preparing to launch NFT stickers?

⚫️ Hard to believe, but it has already been more than two years since Telegram first teased NFT stickers and emoji. Back in spring 2024, Pavel Durov said at TOKEN2049 that Telegram planned to tokenize stickers and emoji, with their creators receiving 95% of the sales revenue.

⚫️ Durov used the famous “Haha, classic” duck as an example. The sticker had already spread far beyond Telegram and become a popular internet meme. According to him, had someone owned the rights to it from day one, the NFT could have rivaled Anonymous Numbers in terms of price appreciation.

⚫️ Telegram has not publicly returned to the idea in the two years since. Meanwhile, the ecosystem has already seen third-party NFT sticker marketplaces launch, shut down, and trigger a sizeable wave of community backlash. Pretty much everything has happened except the promised rollout.

⚫️ Now there is a reason to revisit the idea. Community researchers spotted a major update to tlottie, the library Telegram uses to render animated stickers and emoji. According to their findings, it received its first major overhaul in years: frame rendering is now two to three times faster, with the biggest gains coming from small 64×64 animations—the exact size used in the sticker picker and emoji keyboard. The updated library is already being integrated into Telegram Web and Telegram Android.

⚫️ Does this prove that NFT stickers are launching soon? Of course not. Telegram may simply be cleaning up some old code. But if MTONGA is meant to integrate Gram more deeply into Telegram, stickers and emoji fit that strategy too well for the timing to feel like pure coincidence—especially when we have already been waiting more than two years for tokenized collections.

@thedailyton