American rapper Snoop Dogg has sold nearly one million NFT “gifts” on Telegram in just thirty minutes, according to the platform’s founder, Pavel Durov. The NFT drop coincided with the release of Snoop’s new music video and track titled Gifts, which pays homage to Telegram and celebrates the launch of tokenized digital gifts under his brand.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are unique digital assets with blockchain-certified ownership. They became a global craze in 2021–2022, when images, videos, and other collectibles sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and communities such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club turned into full-fledged cult phenomena.
Launched simultaneously with the music release, the collection featured 996,000 NFT gifts. The rarest among them were snapped up within seconds, and the entire drop, Durov reported, sold out in roughly thirty minutes.
According to the Telegram channel Gift New, just 105 of the rarest gifts — featuring a hand gesture called “West Side” — were sold for a total of $33,000, or about $315 each, generating nearly $17,300 in net profit. In total, 12,000 “hands” were sold out in only 30 seconds.
Durov stated that the total revenue from the sales reached approximately $12 million. He added that minting of the NFTs on the blockchain and the launch of a secondary market are scheduled to begin in 21 days. The gifts can be purchased using Toncoin (TON), the native cryptocurrency of the TON blockchain, or “stars,” Telegram’s internal digital currency.
Durov first announced the concept of tokenized gifts and stickers in the spring of 2024, during the TOKEN2049 conference in Dubai. By June, he declared that the TON blockchain had become the second-largest platform in the world for NFT transactions — behind only Ethereum — due to the surging popularity of Telegram’s NFT gifts and stickers. This boom later attracted established NFT collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Azuki to Telegram’s platform.
Snoop Dogg has been involved in promoting crypto projects — especially NFTs — since 2021. Earlier this year, he also launched his own Telegram channel.
The value of Toncoin has shown modest movement, rising 2.7% in the past 24 hours. However, it remains 65% below its June 2024 peak of approximately $8, which was fueled by the clicker-game frenzy on Telegram.
