Bridge

Even though modern cryptocurrencies are fast, cheap and distributed (meaning no one except for you owns your funds), there was always a problem with paying in crypto. You don't have your salary in crypto, you can't easily exchange your crypto to various of goods that you can with real money.

What Telegram Stars essentially do is that they introduce this bridge between crypto and fiat money. All Telegram bots now have to work with Telegram Stars (which you can only withdraw to Ton).

However, even though you pay in crypto (actually in something that converts to crypto), you are still able to use all that 'fiat tools' that you are used to. That is what makes Telegram Stars so cool.

From that moment, every bot that sells something, accepts both crypto and fiat money without a need from bot developer to support anything, but Telegram Stars.

And more payment methods may be added soon. If there is one more bridge from X to Stars, every bot developer will profit from that, because this bridge implicitly affects their bots, adding the ability for users to pay in X.

Commission

But you have to pay commission, stars are not as good as you say? – you might wonder.

First, when you withdraw Stars to Ton, there is no commission. There is, actually, a commission when you buy Stars from your card, but that commission is mostly google and apple (30% is taken of any digital goods if you install app from AppStore or PlayStore). Telegram also additionally takes from 5 to 10 % depending on how much Stars you buy:

This is a lot! But you don't have to buy Stars via your card. There is a way to buy them directly with Ton:

As you may see, 2500 Stars cost $37.5. As we may find in Telegram ToS for Bot Developers, one Star cost $0.013. By multiplying this number to 2500 we get $32.5 - the amount that bot developer will receive for 2500 Stars. In total we paid $5 in commission that is only Telegram commission and not a commission from Google and Apple (so it is much smaller).

Now, the choice whether to pay the commission to stores or not is up to the user and not the bot developer. Any user can save up to 30% by using Ton to buy stars. This will make cryptocurrency (specifically Ton) even more popular.

Tax-Free & Anonymous

One important thing for solo developers that is usually complicated - identifying themselves, filling tax reports, working with all that absurdly complicated stuff only because you have some income. Telegram Stars solve this problem, because you don't receive any real money when the user pays, but some sort of digital asset instead.

Of course you will have to pay taxes when you want to go from Ton to fiat. But it gives you opportunity reinvest your money directly in Ton/Stars without having tax loss and without having to identify yourself. Unless you stay in Ton, no taxes applied and you are fully anonymous.

Stability

You also might be interested - then why not to use Ton itself? The answer is simple. If you are bot developer and know that your subscription costs $100, you want it to cost $100 no matter what is the current price of Ton. Telegram Stars are calibrated and they are like stable coin which is linked to the $ price.

While crypto is booming and becoming more and more popular, all prices are changing, this small bridge can help to stabilize prices for the first time. Maybe later crypto will become more stable and we will use it instead of Stars. But for now, it seems that Telegram Stars