Webhooks vs Telegram: which crypto alert channel should you use?
When you set up a wallet watch in SCMon, you pick a delivery channel. The two live options — webhook and Telegram — suit different jobs. Here’s how to choose.
Use Telegram when a human needs to see it
Telegram is the no-code option. There’s nothing to build: start the bot, grab your chat id, and alerts arrive as messages.
- Best for: treasury teams, founders, ops — anyone who should notice a move quickly.
- Group-friendly: add the bot to a group and the whole team sees the alert at once.
- Zero infrastructure: no endpoint to host, no code to maintain.
A Telegram alert looks like this:
🔔 SCMon alert — TRON
USDT received: 10000000000 (raw)
from TSender…
tx …Setup details are in the Telegram docs.
Use a webhook when a system needs to act
A webhook delivers a signed JSON payload to your endpoint, so software can react automatically.
- Best for: crediting a deposit, updating an order, triggering on-call, writing to a ledger.
- Reconciliation-ready: the payload includes the raw
amount,from/to, and atx_hash+log_indexyou can use as an idempotency key. - Verifiable: every request is signed with
x-scmon-signature(HMAC-SHA256) so you can trust it’s really from SCMon.
Why not both?
Watches are independent, so a common pattern is to run two watches on the same wallet: a webhook that books the event in your system, and a Telegram alert that gives a human a heads-up. Different rules per watch let you, say, webhook everything but only ping Telegram on large transfers.
Whichever you choose, the quickstart gets the first one running in minutes — and you can change a watch’s channel any time with a PATCH.