TON Foundation brings crypto checkout to Telegram Mini Apps

TON Pay is positioned as a wallet-agnostic integration that developers can plug into Telegram Mini Apps without building and maintaining separate wallet infrastructure, settlement logic, and checkout tooling. The Foundation said the SDK is meant to reduce friction that has historically made crypto payments harder to use in consumer settings, including multi-step checkout flows, the need to prepay gas, and limited merchant tooling.

Nikola Plecas, the TON Foundation’s vice president of payments, said the SDK lets merchants “accept payments seamlessly and natively on TON through a simple SDK integration,” and that it works across multiple wallets and tokens, including Toncoin (TON) and Tether’s USDt (USDT). Plecas said the product was built with scale in mind and framed the addressable audience as Telegram’s “over 1.1 billion monthly active users.”

The initial rollout is scoped to Telegram Mini Apps, with plans to expand to web environments and other platforms later. Plecas said the Foundation is prioritizing the in-app experience first, describing Telegram-based onchain commerce as a large opportunity.

The Foundation outlined a feature roadmap that includes subscriptions, gasless transactions, and region-specific off-ramps. It also said it plans to work with local third-party providers for custody, compliance, and fiat conversion services as the product expands beyond Telegram, while developing optional merchant tools such as analytics and multiparty-computation wallets.

Сompliance and distribution structure is expected to vary depending on where the SDK is used. Plecas said merchants using TON Pay must comply with Telegram’s platform-specific terms and policies, with additional requirements applying as TON Pay expands outside the app. The Foundation described the project as an attempt to address crypto-payments pain points while remaining competitive with fiat payment systems.

TON Pay’s launch builds on existing payment and commerce mechanics already present in Telegram’s ecosystem, where developers can sell goods and services via bots and integrate payment flows. Telegram’s Bot Payments API describes a framework for sellers to accept payments from Telegram users, while TON’s own developer documentation includes guidance for building Telegram storefront and payments flows on TON.

The release also lands amid a wider push by large consumer platforms to integrate messaging, identity, and payments into a single interface. The TON Pay announcement pointed to payments ambitions elsewhere, including Elon Musk’s X and its stated plans for “X Money,” and it also referenced Coinbase’s effort to expand its wallet product into a broader “everything app” that combines wallet functions with payments, trading, and mini apps on Base.

At the same time, TON’s deep linkage to Telegram remains a recurring point of debate in the crypto industry. The release acknowledged long-running skepticism tied to the network’s tight integration with Telegram, including criticism around decentralization, governance questions, and scams linked to unofficial projects. The Foundation maintained that TON is an open, permissionless network where developers can build freely.

For merchants and Mini App builders, the near-term question is whether TON Pay can simplify the hardest parts of crypto checkout without forcing users to think about wallet choice, network steps, or payment attribution. TON’s payments documentation describes common patterns for handling onchain payments for business applications, including invoice-style processing that relies on transaction identifiers and monitoring, which often requires off-chain logic to reconcile deposits, confirmations, and user balances. TON Pay is pitched as a higher-level layer over those building blocks, so developers can focus on the storefront and user experience rather than stitching together wallets, monitoring, and settlement on their own.

The Foundation did not publish detailed commercial terms in the release for merchants beyond the targeted network-level economics it highlighted, including sub-second transaction times and average fees below one cent, and it framed early distribution through Telegram Mini Apps before broader platform expansion.