TON Foundation partners with Tencent Cloud! TechCrunch: Helping Telegram become a super app

The Open Network TON Foundation has reached a partnership agreement with the infrastructure platform Chainbase and Tencent Cloud last week, aiming to simplify blockchain development and promote the widespread adoption of Web3 in the Asia-Pacific region. TechCrunch believes that this collaboration could help Telegram become a super app similar to WeChat, potentially benefiting Tencent as a result.

TON Foundation Collaborates with Chainbase and Tencent Cloud

According to a press release, as part of the collaboration, Tencent Cloud has currently supported TON's validation nodes and plans to expand its services to meet TON's demands for high computational intensity and network bandwidth.

Additionally, Tencent Cloud is committed to supporting Web applications and bots built within Telegram. Therefore, for all projects developed on TON, Tencent Cloud will provide a certain amount of cloud points and product discounts based on approval.

Chainbase, on the other hand, will provide TON with its first data indexing product, allowing developers to use, query, and analyze all TON data for free. They also offer deployment services for enterprise nodes.

Telegram Poised to Become a Super App Similar to WeChat

Mini Apps are micro-applications supported by Telegram, allowing developers to flexibly set interfaces using JavaScript and open them within Telegram to provide special functions.

According to TechCrunch, with the help of the TON Foundation and Tencent, Telegram is expected to decentralize certain parts of its ecosystem and move closer to adopting a "super app" strategy similar to WeChat.

WeChat, as a pioneer of the Mini App ecosystem in China, supports a variety of micro-applications such as payments, deliveries, and ride-hailing. TechCrunch suggests that with a decentralized payment network, Telegram's Mini App ecosystem has the potential to reach a broader user base globally. If successful like WeChat, Tencent stands to gain significantly from this collaboration.

Justin Hyun, Growth Lead at the TON Foundation, expressed to TechCrunch, "Given the similarities between WeChat and Telegram's Mini Apps, we believe developers currently using Tencent Cloud services for Mini App development on WeChat will start developing on TON."

Justin's statement somewhat confirms TechCrunch's views, but due to Telegram's unavailability in China, developers looking to develop on Telegram will need to familiarize themselves with the platform and learn how to write blockchain programming languages.

Nevertheless, we can expect to see more diverse micro-functions in the future on the most commonly used communication software in the crypto community.