NymVPN Telegram Bot — Prototype, Concept & Feasibility Research
Contributor: Uncle Lem (with @bumpmeup on engineering) and huge advisor help from @sudonym
What we did
We designed and built a working Telegram bot that runs the full NymVPN onboarding loop in-chat, aimed at Russian-speaking / CIS audiences, and produced the research and pitch materials to evaluate it as a distribution channel.
The prototype was a live, deployed bot (TypeScript, grammY, Turso) — not a mockup. It covered a 9-screen flow matching the Nym brand spec (onboarding, Get NymVPN, Support, Download, Privacy Modes, etc.), shipped bilingual EN + RU, and tagged every outbound link with Matomo parameters so all bot-driven traffic would be attributable in Nym’s analytics. Privacy was treated as a hard constraint throughout: redacted logs, no custody of funds or secrets, rate limiting, and a clear rule that seed phrases must never pass through Telegram.
Alongside the build we did the feasibility groundwork: reverse-engineered the nym.com account, checkout, and referral flows to define what a real partner integration would need, specified the activation API and a list of open technical questions, and researched Telegram-native payment rails (Wallet Pay, Stars) and how subscription revenue would route to Nym’s multisig. We also put together a distribution deck and supporting documentation, and — as a side find while studying the localized site — flagged 16 genuinely broken localized URLs in the sitemap with proposed fixes.
Outcome
Nym decided to build the production bot in-house, since it sits close to payments, account creation, and other internal plumbing. That’s the right call for something this tightly integrated.
More than the artifacts themselves, the value of this work was in the process: by actually building a prototype, testing it, and iterating through the rough edges, we helped the team get concrete about what they want the end product to look like. A lot of that clarity is hard to reach on paper — it came out of trial and error, and that groundwork now feeds directly into the in-house build.