As the official public chain supported by Telegram, TON has created a unique narrative in various aspects such as payments, social networking, and mini programs, leveraging Telegram’s massive user base of 900 million monthly active users. With the existing social network of Telegram, TON can reconstruct the business model of Web2 in a Web3 way.
Despite being an important base for cryptocurrency users, the adoption of TON chain among these users is still relatively low. Many Alpha Telegram groups require NFTs as tickets, but these NFTs are not based on TON’s Jetton. While trading bots like Unibot and Banana Gun have deepened the application of Telegram among cryptocurrency users, a large volume of transactions still occur on Base or Solana rather than TON.
The TON team and TON Foundation are actively working to break down existing barriers and unleash the full potential of TON. By allowing a large number of real users to directly own cryptocurrency wallets and enabling easy encrypted transfers similar to sending WeChat red packets, coupled with mini apps similar to WeChat, TON has the potential to bring true mass adoption to the cryptocurrency industry.
According to Defillama data, TON’s TVL (Total Value Locked) is currently $310 million, ranking 25th among all public chains. Due to the collaborative efforts of the TON Foundation, Telegram, and their partners, the ecosystem’s activity has exploded in the past two months.
The TON Foundation announced the distribution of 30 million TON tokens as liquidity incentives within a month at the end of March. In April, Tether announced the integration of USDT directly into TON, allowing minting and redemption. These consecutive stimuli have rapidly increased TON’s TVL from $22 million in early March to the current $300 million in less than three months, achieving nearly 15 times growth, with momentum for further growth.
As a result, blockchain activities have seen significant growth in various indicators:
– Daily trading volume increased by over 50 times, from 100,000 transactions per day to 4-9 million transactions per day since March 2024.
– Daily active wallets increased by 8 times, from 60,000 in March 2024 to nearly 500,000.
– Enabled wallets on the chain increased by 4 times, from 1.5 million addresses to 6.2 million.
– TON incurs an average daily fee of $100,000, with half of it being burned.
According to ton.apps data, the TON ecosystem currently has 787 apps, including development tools, games, NFTs, social, launchpads, groups, and more.
In terms of interaction within the TON ecosystem, there are two main directions:
1. Established DeFi projects that can receive additional rewards from the foundation’s liquidity incentives.
2. Games and meme projects with strong virality, such as Notcoin-like mini games, which can easily attract a large number of real users through Telegram.
The first step to participating in the TON ecosystem is to use wallets. Currently, there are a total of 43 wallets that support the TON chain. Wallet is a centralized custodial wallet native to Telegram, similar to WeChat Pay within WeChat. Users can directly use Wallet for token exchange in the settings. Wallet supports user deposits via P2P or bank cards.
TON Space is a self-custodial wallet based on Telegram, launched by the TON Foundation. It is embedded within Telegram and can be accessed through Ton Space in the Wallet. Users can connect to TON Space directly from TON-based dApps. TON Space provides a similar experience to other non-custodial EVM wallets, allowing users to import existing accounts from wallets like Tonkeeper. The wallet recovery process includes mnemonic phrases, private keys, as well as email and Telegram account recovery options.
While TON’s TVL has experienced explosive growth in the past two months, the asynchronous call design of the TON chain, although improving performance and scalability, has also increased the difficulty of development and maintenance for developers. Therefore, TON has not seen large-scale migration of leading projects like Ethereum Layer 2 in the DeFi ecosystem. There is still significant room for diversification in the DeFi ecosystem.
TonUP is a TON-based launchpad that helps promising projects on TON issue and finance assets, driving the development of the TON ecosystem. Early supported projects like Tap Fantasy game have already gained over 730,000 users. TonUP has received official support from the TON Foundation and TONCoin.Fund, as well as funding from well-known investment institutions like Foresight X.
STON.fi is the largest DEX on TON, providing almost zero-cost and low-slippage trading services, directly integrated with TON wallets. According to Defillama data, excluding LSD projects not included in public chain TVL, STON.fi ranks first in the TON ecosystem with a TVL of $222 million, accounting for 71.4% of the total TVL. It is the biggest beneficiary of TON’s liquidity incentives, with a 20-fold increase in TVL within two months.
STON.fi offers a wide range of trading pairs and allows users to earn additional rewards by trading or providing liquidity in designated pools until the end of June, with APY exceeding 200%. STON.fi also provides 10,000 STON tokens, and users can receive a maximum airdrop of 10% of their deposited amount.
TON is a POS (Proof of Stake) blockchain, and Tonstakers is the first LSD (Liquid Staking Derivative) platform in the TON ecosystem developed by TOP Labs. Similar to Lido, users can stake TON to earn stTON, which can be redeemed back to TON after the staking period. Currently, over 50,000 users have staked $220 million worth of TON. Although the APY is only 2.76%, it is a good financial option for long-term TON holders.
Compared to the relatively scarce DeFi ecosystem, TON is particularly strong in the game sector. Mini apps on mobile devices naturally facilitate the spread of social games and have a strong viral effect. A recent game on Binance Launchpool, Notcoin, is a TON-based game where players mine Notcoin by clicking on coins in Telegram. With its simple gameplay, team mechanics, and real earnings, it has gained over 35 million users, with a daily active user count reaching 5 million. Notcoin effectively utilizes the massive user base of Telegram’s cryptocurrency users and allows many people to experience digital currency in a simple way, showcasing the application potential of the TON chain.
Catizen, developed by Pluto Studio, is the second Telegram Bot product in the ecosystem. As an early development team and co-builder of the ecosystem, the Pluto team has received multiple supports from the TON Foundation in terms of economy and resources. They launched their first Telegram Bot game, Tap Fantasy, in the TON ecosystem in August 2023, which now has 730,000 global users. Catizen is a cat-themed game that combines GameFi, AI, and the metaverse to provide users with highly immersive interactive experiences. Within two months, Catizen has attracted over 10 million players, bringing 695,000 users to the TON chain.
Players in Catizen can participate in the game by raising cat characters and earn token rewards through in-game activities. The game features a mining mechanism, allowing players to earn $wCATI tokens presented in the form of cat paws by completing tasks and activities. Catizen also serves as a Launchpool, and in the first round, over 84 million $wCATI tokens were distributed to over 24,000 participants, with a total pledge amount exceeding $39 million.
Hyper is the first metaverse project in the TON ecosystem that simulates real-life character scenes. It is similar to Notcoin but with upgraded gameplay that involves real people in the game instead of just clicking. By clicking on the bot to start the game, players can drag the character to collect coins and purchase boxes for higher scores, replenishing battery power to collect more coins.
Hyper also has a referral strategy for inviting friends to earn coins. With the example of Notcoin, this upgraded version with better graphics and improved gameplay has great potential.
TOL (The Open League) is a competition among TON ecosystem projects and users. Its goal is to increase user participation in the entire ecosystem, help projects expand their user base, and develop more attractive and functional products for the large audience on Telegram. Users will also receive rewards for participating. Therefore, the TOL leaderboard is a good guide when engaging with the TON ecosystem.
In the first season, lasting for a month, over $3 million worth of TON tokens were distributed, with STON.fi and DeDust ranking first and second in the DeFi category. They are now the top two DEXes in terms of TVL on TON. In the second season, Catizen ranked first, followed by the NFT trading platform Getgems. Getgems was the main trading market for pre-marketing Notcoin tokens. The third season is currently underway, with $1 million worth of TON tokens to be distributed. Key interactive projects are in focus.
Apart from Catizen, Yescoin is the fastest-growing game on TON. It is similar to Notcoin, where players collect coins and complete tasks by swiping their phones to earn tokens. These simple and addictive games have a large following due to their high-quality design.
Tonano is a TON20-based project that aims to provide TON with a narrative. During the minting process of the first TON20 narrative, Tonano, the participation of users and triggered network transactions brought significant traffic and transaction load to the TON network, resulting in temporary delays and congestion.
Tonano’s Marketplace has a trading volume of over $1 million, providing necessary liquidity for TON20. Cross-protocol asset bridges can achieve asset interchange between TON20 and other narrative protocols and Jetton tokens, making a broader narrative ecosystem possible.
Fanton is a TON-based football manager game where star player cards are issued as NFTs on the TON chain. It already has over 400,000 registered users and has received investments from TONcoin.Fund, First Stage Labs, and Tonstarter. With the upcoming European Cup, Fanton is likely to become the next hot trend.
Squid is a narrative game built on TON where users can purchase squid eggs containing $TON on the market, hatch squids, produce more squid eggs, and sell them for profit.
TON’s ecosystem is still in its early stages, especially in terms of DeFi projects, but the value of TON cannot be simply measured by TVL. With the natural advantage of relying on Telegram’s user base, which other public chains cannot match, and a focus on mobile mini games, TON has the potential to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3, making it easier for non-cryptocurrency users of Telegram to enter the world of cryptocurrencies. With the stimulation and promotion from the TON Foundation, the ecosystem of TON has shown good development momentum and is worth long-term attention and participation.