It is really challenging for Maldivian artists, developers, and e-commerce businesses to sell their products to the global mass audience. I Personally believe Telegram stars are going to be a real help for these challanges. You should not to overlook telegram stars as something similiar to tiktok stars. Unlike TikTok stars Telegram stars payout via TON, a blockchain network (The Open Network).
Maldives and crypto
Despite MMA reminding everyone that cryptocurrencies are not legal tender, nothing prevents people from adopting it if there are buyers and sellers. Due to Bank of Maldives blocking trading websites the entire trading community is now forced to use cryptocurrencies. This means that every deposit traders make go out as crypto and everything they recieve come in the form of crypto as well, creating such a market. Based on the scam statistics alone see that people invested millions into trading, and while this is sad for them this is evidence that a healthy crypto market exists in Maldives, enough for people to exchange it between Maldivian Rufiyaa.
Many businesses are adopting crypto due to its efficiency. Recently a guest house started accepting crypto payments. We heard that several resourts do accept crypto. A Defi project, Paradise Wave ($PRDS) is ongoing, building a hotel on Faresmaathoda . Besides exchanges such as Dhiwallet have existed since a long time ago for exchanging digital money into Maldivian Rufiyaa.
For recieving international payments, crypto is so, advantageous compared to bank transactions. For example, wire transfers incur about $50 in fees and banks use an unfavorable exchange rate of $15 for incoming USD. And that is after a 3-5 working days period and after hassling customers for documentations, invoices and asking to explain the source of the funds. Not a very ideal situation in my opinion.
Crypto comes with gas fees, but they are minimal when using networks such as TRON and TON, has no 3-5 business day waiting period, and has a better exchange rate. The crypto p2p market inside Maldives, operates as part of the Dollar Black Market, you would actually earn a bit of extra money when converting your crypto to Maldivian Rufiyaa.
Telegram payouts
Telegram stars, introduced under Apple’s pressure, involve a 21-day payout period, likely to accommodate refund requests. These stars convert to TON, which can be likely withdrawn to a Telegram wallet or TON space. Telegram’s CEO suggests developers reinvest in these payouts on ads, and this is good advice considering telegram ads reach the right audience directly as advertisers dont bid on keywords, or interests but directly on the members of a specefic channel that we define. and then those channel owners also get a 50% payout from the ad revenue making sure they are sustainable in nurturing the audience even more.

Its like the perfect ecosystem for businesses and content creators.
Despite a 30% fee on each sale due to Apple and Googles, policies, this is still better than the difficulties of global sales through traditional methods, I feel like it is time to build platforms that use telegram stars as the main currency redirecting users to a telegram bot for the purchase of the platforms own credit system perheps. To experiment with this, I have created Quizpal that uses telegram stars and provides an infinite quiz on any topic, integrated with research papers and more.
Waiting for things to finalize
Stars will finalize by late july according to the blog posts. We can already see the code on telegram scrapers related to these star payments along with the beta version even displaying the amount of stars the bot has. Lets wait and find out.