How to move a community off Telegram to Cherry

Moving a community off Telegram means rebuilding three things: the room, the membership, and the rule that decides who gets in. This is the runbook for how to move a community off Telegram or Discord to Cherry, the wallet-to-wallet messenger and community app for crypto, where people sign in with a wallet and the room checks holdings on-chain itself. Budget an afternoon of setup and two to three weeks with both rooms live. You end with a gated room, a storefront page anyone can open, an announcements channel, and a campaign link that shows the conversation before any wallet prompt.

Before you start

• The wallet you will own the room with. Sign-in is a wallet signature, with no phone number, email, or KYC. Cherry’s wallet-age gate blocks brand-new wallets from posting in public groups, so own the room with a wallet that has on-chain history.
• The gating decision. Which token, NFT collection, or name do the people in your Telegram group already hold? That answer becomes the room’s rule.
• Member wallet addresses, if you have them. Telegram gives you usernames, so a holder snapshot is the only list you can invite from. The rest arrive by link.

Step 1: Pick what the gate checks

Cherry verifies holdings at join time and re-checks members of gated public rooms in the background, so there is no verification bot. A room combines up to five rules and requires all of them or any one: a token balance, NFT ownership, a Metaplex Core collection, a domain such as .sol or .skr, a wallet balance or trading-volume rule, the wallet app used to sign in, and payment. The token-gated chat page covers what each one checks.

Pick the narrowest rule that already describes your Telegram group. SNS Club gates on a .sol name and had 1,455 members on 11 September 2026.

You know you picked right when you can name the exact mint, collection, or TLD your regulars hold.

Step 2: Create the room and set the rule

In the web app’s sidebar, “Public community” opens the Create group screen with the public preset (“Gated channel” starts a broadcast room instead). Set Visibility to Public and name the room. A group with a handle also has the storefront address chat.cherry.fun/@<handle>. Open Access Requirements and add a “Token requirement”, “NFT requirement”, or “Domain requirement”; the editor resolves the mint or collection and flags a TLD that is not registered on-chain.

Set entry pricing here too if you charge: a one-time SOL fee or a recurring USDC membership. The split is 70% to the owner and 30% to Cherry as of 10 September 2026. A paid room is always public, since the storefront is what sells it. See paid communities and channels .

You know it worked when group settings show the room under “Link” with the requirement you set.

Step 3: Fill in the storefront

The storefront replaces the pinned description, and search engines can index it. Fill in the cover, the description, the “What you get” benefits (up to six, 80 characters each), and the community rules (up to 2,000 characters). The page carries live member and message counts, an avatar stack of up to five members, and a requirement list headed “To join you need” (“Meet any one to join” when the rules use any logic).

You know it worked when the logged-out storefront shows your benefits and rules.

Step 4: Add an announcements channel

A channel is broadcast-only: the owner and admins post, everyone else reads. Create one from the sidebar’s “Gated channel” entry and keep it apart from the chat room, so a release note is not buried under price talk. Each room pins up to 20 messages, so the essentials stay at the top.

Cherry Announcements (@cherry), the channel every signed-in wallet belongs to, had 77,420 members on 10 September 2026. Mango Inner Circle runs the same shape for one community, with 1,671 members on 11 September 2026.

You know it worked when a member account sees your post and gets no composer.

More on the format in channels .

Step 5: Move the members

Only the owner, admins, and moderators can invite.

• In the app you invite one wallet at a time, by address or name. A “Silent invite” is free and lands in the recipient’s hidden requests folder with no push. “Invite & notify” is the paid path, at the flat fee that also prices paid DMs (0.01 SOL as of 10 September 2026).
• For a holder snapshot, a developer on your team can invite members in bulk through the Cherry API .
• Everyone else arrives by link: pin the storefront URL in the Telegram group.

An invite counts as a vouch, so invited members skip holdings checks, though not payment. In a paid room an owner or admin invite is a lifetime comp; a moderator’s invite is not.

You know it worked when the new wallets appear as pending invites.

Step 6: Run a preview-link campaign

The storefront link doubles as the campaign link. A logged-out visitor gets a “Preview the chat before joining” button that opens the conversation itself: real messages and a real composer. Pressing send or reacting is what asks for a wallet. What they type is held as a draft and shown as unsent until they sign in.

This works for public rooms with no gating rule and no mini app. Cherry shows messages to logged-out visitors only while the room stays public and ungated. Nomadz qualifies: public, ungated, 525 members and 605 messages on 11 September 2026.

You know it worked when you preview your storefront in a private browser window before sharing it, and the button opens the chat with no wallet prompt.

Step 7: Switch the gate on for everyone already inside

A new rule applies to joiners at once, and existing members are re-checked in the background whether you force it or not. In the room’s gating settings, “Apply to existing members now” runs that check on everyone already inside, right away: members who no longer hold are paywalled, and invited members are skipped as vouched. Run it after the migration window closes.

You know it worked when the roster settles at the holders and every invited wallet is still inside.

Moving off Discord instead

Discord’s unit is the role; Cherry’s is the room. One gated channel becomes one room with its own rule set, and the announcement channel becomes a broadcast channel. Moderation carries over as a word blacklist, mute, ban, shadow bans, and reports; see anti-spam .

The part you delete is the verification bot. As of 11 September 2026, Collab.Land advertises “40+ chains, 30+ wallets” and “regular re-verifications”. Cherry runs that check inside the app, so nobody gets a DM asking them to connect a wallet on a website.

What you lose

• Reach. Telegram is installed and searchable already. Cherry asks for a wallet, which filters out the part of your audience without one.
• The bot marketplace. Cherry’s automation is its own: bots that developers build on Cherry, moderation tools, the call bot, and mini apps in chats.
• History. As of 11 September 2026 Cherry cannot import a Telegram chat history, so the archive stays on Telegram. Keep the old group readable and repost what matters.
• Group chats on Cherry are not end-to-end encrypted, by design, so moderation and bots can work. DMs between members are.

How to move a community off Telegram: checklist

1. Create the room and set the gating rule.
2. Fill in the storefront: cover, description, benefits, rules.
3. Create the announcements channel and pin the essentials.
4. Invite the wallets you know, one by one or in bulk.
5. Pin the storefront link in Telegram and post it on X.
6. Run the preview link while both rooms are live.
7. Apply the gate to existing members.
8. Switch Telegram to read-only with the new link pinned.

Start the room at https://chat.cherry.fun and keep the old group open until the new one is busier.

Troubleshooting

Your first message in the public room is rejected. The wallet is too new: the wallet-age gate blocks posting in public groups, not creating them. Post from your main wallet.

Invites arrive without a notification. A “Silent invite” is silent by design, so use the paid invite or point people at their requests folder.

The storefront shows no preview button. The room is gated, private, or a mini-app room, or you are signed in: the button is for logged-out visitors, and a signed-in visitor goes straight into the app.

Members lost access after the gate was applied. Their wallet no longer holds what the rule checks; invited members are skipped by that pass.

Related guides

• Create a token-gated group chat : the same setup for a single room.
• Message requests and paid DM : how cold DMs reach your members.

FAQ

How do I move a community off Telegram without losing members? Run both rooms in parallel for two to three weeks: create the gated room, fill in the storefront, pin its link in Telegram, invite the wallets you know, then switch Telegram to read-only once the member count settles.

How do I move a community off Discord to Cherry? One room per rule set, where Discord gives you one server with roles. Recreate each gated channel as a room with a token, NFT, or domain requirement, recreate the announcement channel as a broadcast channel, and drop the verification bot: Cherry checks the chain itself.

Can my Telegram members read the Cherry room before they connect a wallet? Yes, for a public room with no gating rule. The storefront’s “Preview the chat before joining” button opens the conversation itself, and the visitor is asked to connect only when they press send.

Is Cherry a Telegram alternative for memecoin communities? It covers the same job with wallet-verified membership: gated rooms for holders, in-chat token cards and swaps on Solana, paid entry, and an indexable storefront page. It does not carry Telegram’s reach or its bot marketplace.

Sources

• SNS Club on Cherry
• Mango Inner Circle on Cherry
• Nomadz on Cherry
• Cherry Announcements on Cherry
• Collab.Land home page