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TON ecosystem explosion: From Telegram background to DeFi leader analyzing development potential
Exploring the Development Context and Future Potential of the TON Ecosystem
Since 2024, the TON chain ecosystem has shown explosive growth trends. From May 25 to June 17, Toncoin had a maximum increase of 79.7%, Notcoin had a maximum increase of 700%, and Fishcoin had a maximum increase of 400%. The TON ecosystem demonstrates a powerful wealth creation effect, attracting a large influx of funds. This article will conduct an in-depth analysis from the aspects of TON's background, core logic, and ecological development.
1. Project Background
Basic Information
Name: TON( The Open Network )
Founders: Pavel Durov, Nikolai Durov
Operation Team: TON Foundation
TON is a decentralized first-layer blockchain designed for billions of users, featuring scalability and sharding capabilities, aimed at addressing issues such as high transaction costs, slow transaction speeds, inter-chain communication, and scalability in the blockchain space. Currently, the main operating team of TON is the TON Foundation, a non-profit organization with the goal of enabling 500 million users to have their digital identities, data, and assets by 2028, with the TON chain backed by Telegram being an important means to achieve this goal. Although TON's development is currently flourishing, its development history has been quite tumultuous.
Development History
In 2017, the project was launched: The founder of Telegram began developing a blockchain project named Telegram Open Network (TON), and planned to launch its native cryptocurrency, Gram.
In 2018, the Initial Coin Offering (ICO): Telegram raised approximately $1.7 billion through its ICO, becoming one of the largest token offerings at that time.
In 2019, development progress: The TON blockchain introduced sharding technology to improve scalability and processing speed.
In 2020, regulatory issues and project turning points: Telegram announced its withdrawal from the TON project, transferring development work to an independent open-source developer community. The project was renamed "The Open Network" and the token name was changed to Toncoin.
In 2021, community takeover and development: The TON Foundation, founded by Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelianenko, took over the project and continued to promote the development and promotion of TON.
In 2023, returning to Telegram: Telegram officially announced that the TON blockchain will be its preferred Web3 infrastructure and plans to integrate it into the user interface of the Telegram app.
In 2024, the expansion of the ecosystem: The application ecosystem of the TON blockchain continues to expand, covering multiple fields such as finance, storage, payment, and domain names, while projects like PunkCity, PUNK, and HyperGPT within the TON ecosystem are starting to gain widespread market attention.
User-centric core narrative
In the development of TON, the shadow of Telegram has always been present. While most public chains promote their innovative technologies, the TON chain leverages Telegram's 900 million monthly active users, emphasizing user needs and convenience.
At the same time, Telegram is no longer satisfied with merely being a social communication platform. By continuously enriching its product line and integrating payment with daily life, providing enormous potential through Bots, Telegram is attempting to transform into a comprehensive platform. This strategic shift not only showcases Telegram's ambitions but also hints at the infinite possibilities of the TON public blockchain in the future.
Telegram currently has over 1.3 billion registered users and 900 million monthly active users. Freedom of speech and privacy protection have been the mission of Telegram since its inception, and all of this has made Telegram a hub for cryptocurrencies—almost all Web3 projects have Telegram communities for project promotion, message announcements, and interaction with the community. The Web3 environment of Telegram provides enormous support for the TON chain ecosystem, offering a community foundation for projects within its ecosystem from incubation to ICO.
Increasing market recognition
As of the time of writing, the market capitalization of the TON chain has reached 18.759 billion USD, making it the ninth largest cryptocurrency. At the same time, the TVL of the TON chain has grown rapidly since April, currently reaching 605.72m USDT, ranking 15th among public chains. It is clear that although the TVL growth rate of the TON chain is fast, it has not yet kept pace with its market capitalization, and there is still significant room for improvement.
2. Financing Information
In 2018, the first ICO raised 1.7 billion USD, and part of the funds were returned due to a lawsuit by the SEC.
In April 2022, Huobi Incubator, KuCoin Ventures, and MEXC Pioneer Fund jointly invested $250 million to establish the TON Foundation, focusing on supporting DEX and NFT projects on the TON chain.
In October 2023, MEXC Ventures provided tens of millions of dollars in investment aimed at promoting the adoption of the Web3 ecosystem in Telegram.
In November 2023, Animoca Brands invested in a funding, research, and analysis platform to support third-party mini-programs and gaming projects within the TON ecosystem, while Animoca Brands became the largest validator.
Telegram initially focused on protecting user privacy and did not have obvious revenue channels, raising hundreds of millions of dollars through bond issuance to maintain daily operations. Starting in 2022, Telegram began exploring revenue models and recently announced it is close to achieving profitability. In 2023, Telegram founder Pavel Durov proposed a plan for an initial public offering (IPO) within the next two years, with the company's valuation now exceeding $30 billion, and it may choose to go public in the United States.
Whether it's TON or Telegram, both are currently in a phase of vigorous development. Investing in the TON ecosystem is akin to believing in the immense potential of the Web2 social platform Telegram transforming into a comprehensive Web3 platform.
3. Technical Features
programming language
TON chain smart contract development does not use popular smart contract languages such as Solidity, Rust, or Vyper, but rather has three programming languages: Fift, FunC, and Tact. Among them, Fift is more focused on low-level development, emphasizing runtime efficiency, and has a high level of difficulty; Tact is a new high-level language introduced by TON, with syntax similar to TypeScript, aimed at reducing development difficulty; FunC is similar to the C language and is currently the first choice for development. Given the efficiency of Tact development, mainstream developers may shift towards using Tact in the future.
Frontier Technology
Asynchronous Calls of Smart Contracts: The smart contract calls in TON use an asynchronous mode, which enhances the scalability of the system. When one smart contract calls a function of another contract, the call is not executed immediately and does not need to complete all transaction processing within a single block. However, this asynchronous calling mechanism also increases the complexity of developing and maintaining applications, posing a higher technical threshold for developers working on the TON chain.
Infinite Sharding: The TON blockchain is designed to consist of three types of chains: the Main Chain (Masterchain), the Work Chain (Workingchains, and the Shard Chain (Shardchains).
The main chain is the core of the entire network, responsible for storing the metadata and consensus mechanism of the whole network. It records the status of all working chains and shard chains, ensuring consistency and security across the network; working chains are independent blockchains that handle specific types of transactions and smart contracts. Each working chain can have its own rules and characteristics to meet different application needs; shard chains are sub-chains of working chains used to further split the load of working chains, enhancing processing power and scalability. Each working chain can contain multiple shard chains, which independently handle part of the transactions, thereby achieving efficient parallel processing.
relative advantage
Although asynchronous calls of smart contracts and sharding technology have been applied in projects such as Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, and NEAR Protocol, TON integrates multiple technologies and surpasses Ethereum and Solana in several metrics, such as transaction confirmation time (Time-to-finality).
4. Market Analysis
Token Economics
Token Functionality: $Toncoin is positioned similarly to the native token on Telegram, which can be used on Telegram to pay for Telegram Premium membership fees and purchase other virtual products at a more favorable discount. On the TON blockchain, $Toncoin can be used for transaction fee payments, staking, cross-chain transactions, decentralized data storage, proxy services, and more.
Token Supply: The maximum supply of $Toncoin is 5 billion coins. As of June 28, 2022, all $Toncoin have been mined, marking the complete transition of TON from a Proof of Work (PoW) model to a Proof of Stake (PoS) model, with an annual token inflation of 0.6% (approximately 3 million coins) allocated to reward validators for maintaining network security.
Token Distribution: Initially, 5 billion $Toncoin tokens were allocated to the team (1.45%), while miners obtained 98.55% through mining. In February 2023, TON initiated a community proposal to freeze 171 inactive early wallets for 48 months, totaling 1.08B $Toncoin (approximately 21% of the total supply). This measure reflects the TON community's unified optimism regarding the development of the TON chain.
Secondary Market Analysis
Market Cap: As of June 3, 2024, the market cap of $Toncoin is $18.759 billion, ranking No. 9, with a fully diluted market cap of $39.382 billion, a circulating supply of 2.432 billion coins, and a total supply of 5.107 billion coins.
Chip distribution: As of June 3, 2024, based on Coinmarketcap data analysis, 85.45% of holders hold 0-$1k $Toncoin, 14.16% of holders hold 1k-100k $Toncoin, and 0.38% of holders hold over 100k $Toncoin.
According to the analysis of whale holdings, whales hold 68.68% $TON, while retail investors hold 31.32% $TON.
According to the holding time analysis, 29.20% of holders have held $Toncoin for more than one year, 16.7% of traders have held $Toncoin for no more than 1 month, and the proportion of diamond hands is relatively high. The public has a very optimistic outlook on the future of TON.
According to Etherscan data, the top 10 addresses hold 29.99% of $Toncoin tokens, with a relatively loose distribution of chips, indicating a good market condition.
5. Ecological Construction
The TON ecosystem currently has over 500 Dapps and a large number of Telegram Bots, covering almost all popular areas including infrastructure, development tools, DeFi, GameFi, NFT, SocialFi, inscriptions, etc. The vertically segmented tracks include Launchpad, wallets, cross-chain bridges, staking and lending, DEX, various blockchain games, collectibles, and more.
Ecological Assistant Telegram Bot
The Telegram Bot is an automated robot that runs on Telegram, which can achieve significant results in various aspects such as community building, asset management, information aggregation, and project promotion.
For regular users, the Telegram Bots provided by Telegram officials and other personnel can provide the latest cryptocurrency news and market updates in real time.
For ordinary Web3 communities, a Telegram Bot can provide automated Q&A, FAQs, manage community activities, competitions, and airdrops, and promote interaction among community members.
For DAO organizations, the Telegram Bot can provide the latest governance proposals and discussion notifications, allowing DAO members to vote and participate in governance decisions through the bot, greatly simplifying the DAO governance process.
For general project teams, the existence of the Telegram Bot undoubtedly improves the efficiency of information transmission within the project community, while an interesting bot can effectively attract users to participate in project development.
For TON ecosystem projects, the Telegram APP and Telegram Bot are essential, as they allow 900 million users to participate in project airdrop activities without barriers, helping to promote the project.
The Telegram Bot is not only versatile but also easy to develop. Telegram provides mature documentation and API technical support for the development of Telegram Bots. After clarifying the functional requirements of the bot, you can easily build your own bot using programming languages such as Python and Node.js, combined with cloud server support. Meanwhile, currently