Telegram has officially launched its own in-app currency called Stars alongside a new update that allows bots and mini apps to sell digital goods and services.

Why Add an In-App Currency?

According to the announcement on their official blog, the reason for adding this new currency is to make payments for digital goods and services from bots and mini apps. While businesses have been able to accept payments and sell physical products on Telegram through the use of bots and mini apps, digital goods were a no go.

Thanks to this month’s update to the Bot Platform however, Telegram can now support payments for digital products too, and to do that, they’ve introduced this new currency, which is said to be compliant with Google’s and Apple’s latest app store policies regarding sales of digital products. Physical products will continue to be sold traditionally as before, while creators of digital goods and services will now be able to possibly earn way more than before thanks to having access to a huge userbase of more than 900 million potential customers.

How to Acquire & Withdraw

Stars can be acquired through in-app purchases on the Play Store and App Store, but you can also buy them through PremiumBot. Once you have them, you can start spending them on various digital products, including items in Telegram games, e-books and more.

This also means that if you’re using the bot and mini app platform to sell various digital products, you will be able to receive the currency as payment. In the future though, there are plans to introduce more features and use cases to the currency, among which will be the ability to gift the currency to content creators as a form of donation to show your support.

The blog post states that developers will soon be able to withdraw Stars earned from bots in Toncoins ($TON) through the Fragment platform. $TON sits in the top 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies by market cap, with the price of one token being around $7.09 at the time of writing.

One of the games part of this growing ecosystem, Hamster Kombat, has recently reportedly reached 100 million players, with plans to launch its own token in July this year.