Telegram launches sale of anonymous numbers for cryptocurrency

The Telegram messenger, whose team recently launched a blockchain platform for selling username IDs, has added the ability to register accounts without a SIM card using anonymous blockchain-based numbers.

Anonymous numbers can be bought at the Fragment auction for the cryptocurrency Toncoin (TON), the price ranges from 11 TON ($ 20) to 31,500 TON ($ 57,330) per number. The possibility of anonymous registration on Telegram has already been called a «new era of privacy.» «When using the messenger, your phone number will never be visible to strangers: you decide who to show it to and can prohibit your phone number from being found,» Telegram representatives said.

As a reminder, the messenger has a decentralized auction platform called Fragment, created to sell username identifiers based on the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain. «For the first time in the history of social networks, a fair, transparent market for usernames has been created. Finally, people will have ownership of their social media addresses, protected in the immutable Ledger of a decentralized blockchain network,» Pavel Durov wrote in late October.