Why Telegram Mini Apps Are Becoming the New App Store — and Why Stars Are the Currency
MyStars.tg7 min read·Just now--
A view from inside a Telegram marketplace that’s been processing Stars and Premium for the past year.
When Pavel Durov walked on stage at TOKEN2049 and said Telegram had crossed a billion monthly active users, it didn’t really land for most people. A billion is too big to feel. What hit harder, at least for us, was a quieter number that came out around the same time: more than 400 million Telegram users open a bot or a Mini App every month.¹
That’s roughly the population of the United States and the EU combined — opening apps that don’t exist in the App Store, don’t exist in Google Play, and don’t ask permission from either.
We’ve been watching this from a strange seat: we run MyStars.tg, a marketplace where people buy Telegram Stars and Telegram Premium with crypto when their cards or regions get blocked. Most of our customers used to be gift-givers and creators. Over the last six months, a different group started showing up — people topping up Stars to spend inside Mini Apps. Games. AI bots. Tipping. Marketplaces. Tools.
That shift made one thing obvious to us: Mini Apps aren’t a feature anymore. They’re an app store. And Stars are quickly becoming its only currency.
Here’s why we think that, and what it means.
What’s actually happening on the platform
The numbers are a moving target, but the direction isn’t ambiguous.
Telegram’s H1 2025 financials show $870M in revenue, up 65% year-over-year, with $223M of that coming from Premium subscriptions alone.² Premium itself crossed 15 million paid subscribers by May 2025, up from 4M in late 2023.³ At the going rate of roughly $4.99/month in the US (less in most other countries), Premium is suddenly a real consumer subscription business.
Underneath all that sits the Mini Apps layer — built on TON, the blockchain Telegram spun off years ago and now leans on heavily. By mid-2025, TON’s ecosystem had over 650 dApps, 200+ tokens, and DeFi TVL crossed $150M.⁴ A handful of Mini App games — Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, Catizen — each crossed tens of millions of users at peak.⁵
But the most interesting thing isn’t the games. It’s the payment rail underneath them.
The 30% problem, solved with one weird trick
Anyone who has ever tried to sell digital goods inside an iOS or Android app knows the math. Apple and Google take 30% on digital purchases (15% if you’re under ~$1M/year in revenue).⁶ If you sell a $5 in-game item, you keep $3.50.
This is the rule that has shaped the consumer internet for fifteen years. It is also the rule Telegram has, very quietly, found a way around — without violating it.
Telegram Stars launched on June 6, 2024.⁷ On the surface, Stars are just an in-app currency: users buy them through the official iOS/Android billing (where Apple/Google still get their cut), and then spend them inside bots and Mini Apps. So far, so normal.
The trick is what happens on the developer side:
- A developer earns Stars from users inside their Mini App.
- They can withdraw those Stars to TON via Fragment, at a fixed rate of 200 Stars = 1 TON.⁸ Minimum withdrawal: 1,000 Stars. 21-day holding period.
- Or, they can re-spend those Stars on Telegram Ads — and Telegram will subsidize the original 30% Apple/Google cut.⁹
Read that third one again. If a developer takes their earned Stars and recycles them into ads on Telegram, the effective platform commission goes toward zero. The 30% doesn’t disappear — Apple and Google still take it on the way in — but Telegram absorbs it on the way out, as long as the money keeps moving inside Telegram.
It’s a closed loop. And closed loops are how app stores get built.
What this looks like for a developer
We’ve talked to a few teams shipping Mini Apps over the past year. The pitch lands like this, in order:
- Distribution is free. A Mini App is a URL. You don’t need an app store listing, a review, a screenshot pack, a privacy nutrition label, or a 14-day approval cycle.
- A billion users are one tap away. No download, no install, no friction. The user clicks a button in a chat and your app opens.
- Payments are solved on day one. Stars are the only allowed currency for digital goods inside Mini Apps,¹⁰ which sounds like a constraint and is actually a gift: you don’t have to integrate Stripe, hold a payment processor relationship, manage chargebacks, or build a wallet.
- Crypto on-ramp is built-in. Withdraw to TON, swap to USDT, off-ramp through any major exchange. For a small team in a country where Stripe doesn’t operate, this is a different planet.
The web equivalent would be: a Shopify, an Auth0, an App Store, and a Stripe — all bundled into the chat app your users already have open.
Why we think Stars become the default
Three reasons, ranked by how confident we are:
1. Telegram has no alternative. Stars are the only allowed payment method for digital goods in Mini Apps under the current Apple/Google compliance setup. Developers don’t get to choose. Users don’t get to choose. There’s no Stripe checkout option. There’s no PayPal flow. The currency is the path of least resistance because it’s the only path.
2. The numbers favor the platform. Stars are pegged to TON at 200:1.⁸ Today, that puts 1 Star somewhere around $0.013–$0.016 USD depending on TON’s price.¹¹ When TON moves, Stars move with it — but for users buying small in-app items, the price feels stable enough. And for developers, withdrawing to TON gives them a real, liquid asset they can swap into stablecoins.
3. The friction outside Telegram is getting worse, not better. Apple keeps tightening external-purchase rules. Google’s Play Billing enforcement is stricter every quarter. Regional payment friction (the thing our company exists because of) is increasing, not decreasing. Telegram offering a single, in-app, crypto-convertible currency is a real escape hatch.
What this means for users (and where we come in)
Most of this article has been about builders. But there’s a user-side consequence we keep running into: Stars are not equally available everywhere.
If you’re in Germany, Iran, parts of LATAM, China, or several other regions, the Stars top-up flow inside Telegram either doesn’t work or shows you a price that doesn’t make sense for your local currency.¹² Apple and Google IAP enforce regional billing, so a user in a blocked country can’t simply “buy 1,000 Stars” the same way a US user can.
This is the gap our company sits in. We sell Stars (and Premium) directly via crypto — TON, USDT — to users who can’t get them through the official path. It’s a marketplace, not a bypass: the Stars themselves are real, official Telegram Stars, sent to your Telegram account. We just handle the payment leg.
We didn’t plan for the Mini App use case, but it’s becoming the fastest-growing slice of our orders. People want to play, tip, subscribe, buy AI credits — and they don’t want to hit a wall because their card is from the wrong country.
If you want the practical version of this — how to buy Stars, how to use them in Mini Apps, what to do when the in-app top-up is blocked — we wrote a step-by-step guide on our blog: How to Pay for Telegram Mini Apps with Stars (2026 Guide).
What we’ll be watching
The interesting next 12 months, from where we sit:
- Mini App subscriptions. Right now most Stars spend is one-shot. The first Mini App that nails recurring subscription revenue inside Telegram changes the playbook for everyone.
- Developer migration. We expect to see indie SaaS founders ship “Telegram-first” versions of their products, the way 2010 indies shipped iOS-first.
- Stars liquidity. Right now 200:1 to TON is fixed by Telegram. Whether that stays fixed, becomes market-driven, or gets a new asset paired against it (USDT? a new stablecoin?) will define how serious the rail is.
- Regional access. This one’s selfish — it’s our business — but if Telegram opens Stars top-ups to more payment methods (especially crypto-native ones natively in the app), the marketplace layer changes shape fast.
A billion users, a native currency, a payment loop that quietly routes around Apple’s tax. Whatever you want to call this, “messaging app” is no longer the right label.
It’s an app store. And Stars are the currency.
MyStars.tg is a marketplace for buying Telegram Stars and Telegram Premium with crypto, designed for users in regions where official top-ups don’t work. We’ve shipped the first-months retrospective, the Premium expansion, and a cross-border gifting guide on Medium. More on our blog.
Sources
Footnotes
- Pavel Durov / Telegram, reported via Business of Apps, “Telegram Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026)” — 400M+ users engage with Telegram bots and Mini Apps monthly out of ~900M MAU at the time of the announcement. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/telegram-statistics/
- Business of Apps, Telegram H1 2025 financials: $870M revenue (+65% YoY), $223M from Premium. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/telegram-statistics/
- DemandSage, “Telegram Users Statistics 2026”: 15M Premium subscribers as of May 2025, growing from 4M in late 2023. https://www.demandsage.com/telegram-statistics/
- BingX Learn, “Top 7 Telegram Mini-Apps in the TON Ecosystem (2026)” — TON ecosystem stats mid-2025. https://bingx.com/en/learn/article/top-telegram-mini-apps-on-ton-network-ecosystem
- KuCoin Learn / CoinSwitch, on Notcoin (35M+ players), Hamster Kombat, Catizen (34M+ users, 7M DAU). https://www.kucoin.com/learn/crypto/top-telegram-tap-to-earn-crypto-games
- Apple App Store Small Business Program (15% under $1M/year, 30% above). https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/
- Telegram Blog, “Telegram Stars: Pay for Digital Goods and More” (June 6, 2024). https://telegram.org/blog/telegram-stars
- Telegram Core API, Stars documentation — fixed conversion of 200 Stars = 1 TON, 1,000 Stars minimum withdrawal, 21-day holding period. https://core.telegram.org/api/stars
- Telegram Stars Terms of Service / Telegram official blog — ad reinvestment subsidy mechanism. https://telegram.org/blog/telegram-stars
- Telegram Bot Payments API — digital goods must be settled in Stars. https://core.telegram.org/bots/payments-stars
- StarsEarn / Hub Aggregator, current Star/USD ranges based on TON price. https://starsearn.com/guides/telegram-stars-price-calculator
- MyStars.tg blog — country-by-country guide to where Stars and Premium are blocked. https://mystars.tg/blog
