Tegro: How TON Became ‘A Better Option’
TON becomes more attractive platform to focus your business at. Companies who have been successful in web2 area start switching over to web3, and some of them jump straight into TON space — bringing networks, teams, investments with them.
Lets dive into the history of Tegro Money — a popular payments gateway service among eastern European merchants. Co-founded by S. Gusev, a quick-witted startuper, Tegro soon became a shiny B2B company with a focus on next gen payments.
As TON gained in popularity late 2021, Tegro started switching over to web3 kinds of things. Over the past 4 months, team’s interest in TON escalated: from simply supporting Toncoin on their payments service, to developing a stack of products — seeking dominance across multiple disciplines on TON.
Some outstanding contributions to the TON ecosystem by Tegro are…
TON Hold
There are quite a few wallets with exact focus on Toncoin. When NFTs and Jettons start their journy in full scale, the wallet monopoly (or duopoly) might block growth and fair development of TON. Therefore having another high quality wallet developed by a pro team is a big advantage.
TON Hold is not yet ready, but you can touch the frontend of its web app. More to that, Tegro devs are developing versions for Android and iOS, making it a cross platform gem that could wrestle Tonkeeper some time soon.
Youton
Exploring TON transactions isn’t a popular thing to do (unless you’re a TON10.CC editor), still, explorers play a key role in making blockchains usable.
Whether you’re transferring Toncoin to an exchange, sending link of your transaction to someone, or simply don’t like one explorers’ interface and seek an alternative — more explorers equals more freedom. And youton.org is now one of them.
TegroMoneyBot
Unlike @wallet, Tegro’s crypto wallet enables you to issue checks, keep a track of transactions (a la mini blockchain explorer), and store 8 currenciesbesides TON — 4 of which are fiat ones like EUR and RUB. But also view NFT items of 5 supported collections at the same spot.
Tegro Money
A payment gateway service that enables you to accept Toncoin as a payment method anywhere on the internet, then withdraw funds automatically.
Unlike cases when payments are accepted in fiat, accepting $TON will cost a way less in fees — up to 1% when reaching $15K revenue. The API docs are here to help devs integrate the Tegro’s service with no headaches (almost).
We chatted with co-founder of Tegro to talk about their expansion to the TON market, products, and the future of ecosystem. Here’s the full Q&A:
Tegro’s payment gateway first came to the market in December last year — what did you achieve so far on this front?
The service is quite young but it’s already processing over 38K payments monthly — from over 16K unique payers. And the numbers keep growing very fast.
Why did you decide to switch over to crypto, TON in particular?
It’s mostly geopolitical reasons. Basic banking is getting harder to deal with. Most of our clients started experiencing issues with online wallets and bank cards. Our main goal — as developers — is to solve issues and help people recover their financial abilities. So here we are.
You’re developing an extensive stack of products on TON and seems quite large already. Is it your final field of interests or just a beginning?
We’ll announce Tegro’s main goals in the end of the year on our Telegram channel. We’ve an internal roadmap and devs follow it step by step. For now, Tegro.Money — the payment system & CRM — remains the key product.
What does Tegro want?
Definitely become the largest player on the market. I’m pretty sure it’ll happen if the TON community supports us. We see our mission as something bigger. No interest in being number two or doing classic commercial stuff — we wish to go down in history by building top notch products of quality.
What is TON Hold development status? Any plans for mobile apps?
The development status is at around 20%. Mobile apps are developed by two devs from our core team lead by Alex who is based in Ukraine. We were not so lucky in the first months of development and Tegro still faces scaling issues — the reason is a part of our team is located in the middle of warzone.
Your NFT collections turned out to be quite successful. What’s the idea and numbers behind it?
It’s over $50K in revenue. We don’t focus on it as profit wasn’t the goal. We decided to issue 2 collections because we though it would be interesting to integrate our own NFTs into existing Tegro products. It’s also more than just pics. For example, Tegro Dogs represent digital resistance as I believe in absolute freedom of speech.
Did you think of something like TegroCoin yet?
Yep, it’s on our roadmap.
We’ll keep the track of projects that contribute to TON — all while observing the rise of teams who’ll be bringing big things to life in the near future.
