How is Telegram losing in the attention economy?

Telegram has a recurring pattern: once the team picks up a new narrative, it spends some time shaping development around it. That was the case with Fragment, Mini Apps, Telegram Gifts, and now AI agents and TON.

Telegram rarely creates a new narrative from scratch. More often, the market brings it one that is already almost fully formed. Gifts unexpectedly took off, clicker apps powered the Mini Apps wave, and AI agents simply fit well into the existing bot platform. Telegram is usually quick to catch these waves, but once the interest fades, previous directions start living on residual attention.

The most recent example is Telegram Gifts. While the market was actively reacting to new collections, Telegram kept giving it reasons to talk. But once the interest cooled down, new collectible gifts stopped coming out, and some older collections have still not received upgrades for 15 months.

The situation with Mini Apps is similar, although slightly more predictable. As long as the market was driven by clickers and expectations of major airdrops, Telegram was actively improving the platform. Once the hype ended, attention shifted elsewhere. For Telegram, this is a normal response to demand. But for developers, that logic is painful: they build projects for longer than a narrative stays alive.

The story with AI agents follows the same pattern. Telegram happened to be in the right place at the right time: it already had a bot platform, while AI services needed a convenient interface for interacting with their products. No wonder the latest messenger updates increasingly look like improvements tailored to this scenario. The same Markdown formatting support expected in the next update fits neatly into that logic.

But this, in our view, is where the risk for TON begins. Telegram now has two major narratives competing for attention. AI agents are moving fast: new features are being rolled out for them, while Telegram is actively shitposting on X to attract a Western audience. Meanwhile, the next MTONGA step has already missed the initially announced timeline.

Telegram is good at catching new waves. But TON is not Gifts and not clickers. It cannot be developed through short bursts of attention: it requires long-term focus. Otherwise, MTONGA risks becoming yet another narrative that started brightly, but quickly moved into the background.

@thedailyton