TON, as the only official public chain supported by Telegram, has created a unique narrative in various aspects such as payments, social networking, and mini-programs, relying on Telegram’s massive user base of 900 million monthly active users. By leveraging Telegram’s existing social network, TON can reconstruct the Web2 business model in a Web3 manner.
Despite being an important base for crypto users, TON’s popularity among these users is still insufficient. Many Alpha Telegram groups require NFTs as tickets, but these NFTs are not based on TON’s Jetton. Trading bots like Unibot and Banana Gun have deepened the application of Telegram among crypto users, but a large volume of transactions still occur on Base or Solana instead of TON.
The TON team and TON Foundation are actively working to overcome these barriers and unleash the full potential of TON. By allowing a large number of real users to have crypto wallets and enabling them to easily make crypto transfers like sending WeChat red envelopes, coupled with mini-apps similar to WeChat, TON has the potential to bring true mass adoption to the crypto industry.
According to Defillama data, TON’s TVL currently ranks 25th among all public chains, with a value of $310 million. Due to the joint efforts of the TON Foundation, Telegram, and its 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 one month at the end of March. In April, Tether announced direct integration with TON, allowing for minting and redemption. These consecutive stimuli have led to a rapid increase in TON’s TVL, which has grown from $22 million to $300 million in less than three months, achieving nearly 15 times growth in TVL and showing a further upward trend.
As a result, blockchain activity has seen significant growth in various indicators. Daily trading volume has increased by over 50 times, from 100,000 to 4-9 million transactions per day since March 2024. Daily active wallets have increased 8 times, from 60,000 to nearly 500,000. The number of activated wallets on the chain has quadrupled, from 1.5 million addresses to 6.2 million. The average daily fee of TON is $100,000, with half of it being burned.
TON’s ecosystem currently has a total of 787 apps, including development tools, games, NFTs, social, launchpads, and groups.
In terms of ecosystem interaction, there are two main directions. The first is DeFi projects that have already achieved scale and can receive additional rewards from the Foundation’s liquidity incentives. The second is games and meme projects with strong virality, such as Notcoin-like games, which can easily attract a large number of real users on Telegram.
The first step to participating in the TON ecosystem is to use a wallet, and currently, there are a total of 43 wallets supporting TON. Wallet is a centralized custodial wallet native to Telegram, similar to WeChat Wallet in WeChat. Users can directly use Wallet for token exchange, and it supports depositing via P2P or bank cards.
TON Space is a self-custodial wallet based on Telegram launched by the TON Foundation. It is embedded in Telegram and can be accessed through TON Space in the Wallet. Users can directly connect to TON-based dApps through TON Space. The experience of using TON Space is similar to other non-custodial EVM wallets. Users can import existing accounts from other non-custodial wallets like Tonkeeper. The difference is that the wallet recovery not only relies on mnemonic private keys but also can be restored through email and Telegram accounts.
While TON’s TVL has experienced explosive growth in the past two months, the asynchronous calling design of TON’s chain, although improving performance and scalability, has increased the difficulty of development and maintenance for developers. Therefore, unlike Ethereum Layer2, TON has not seen large-scale leading projects migrating to its chain. There is still great potential for diversity in the DeFi ecosystem.
TonUP is a launchpad based on TON, helping promising projects on TON issue and finance their assets, promoting the development of the TON ecosystem. Early supported projects like Tap Fantasy 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, offering almost zero fees and low slippage trading services, directly integrated with TON Wallet. According to Defillama, 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 has been the biggest beneficiary of TON’s liquidity incentive program, with TVL growing 20 times in two months.
STON.fi provides a wide range of trading pairs and offers additional rewards for trading or providing liquidity in designated pools until the end of June, with an APY of over 200%. It also offers 10,000 STON tokens, with the highest deposit receiving a 10% airdrop.
TON is a POS blockchain, and Tonstakers is the first LSD-based liquidity staking platform in the TON ecosystem, developed by TOP Labs and built into Tonkeeper. Similar to Lido, users can stake TON to receive stTON and redeem it back to TON after the staking period ends. Currently, over 50,000 users have staked $220 million worth of TON. Despite the low APY of 2.76%, it is a good financial choice for long-term holders who are bullish on TON.
In terms of games, TON is particularly strong in the gaming field. Mini-apps for mobile devices naturally fit with social-oriented casual games. Recently launched Notcoin is a game on TON where players mine Notcoin by clicking coins in Telegram. Its simple gameplay, team mechanism, and real returns have allowed it to gain over 35 million users, with 5 million daily active users.
Catizen, a game developed by Pluto Studio, is the second Telegram Bot product. As early developers and contributors to the ecosystem, the Pluto team has received multiple supports from the TON Foundation in terms of economy and resources. Catizen is a cat-themed game that combines GameFi, AI, and the metaverse to provide users with a highly immersive interactive experience. In just 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 offers a mining mechanism that allows players to earn $wCATI tokens, represented by cat paws, by completing tasks and activities. Catizen has also served as a launchpad, and the recent first round of Launchpool distributed over 840 million $wCATI to more than 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. Similar to Notcoin, but with upgraded gameplay, it requires real people to play the game instead of a simple clicker. By clicking the bot to start the game, players can drag the character to collect coins according to instructions and purchase boxes to earn high scores and recharge the battery for more coins.
TOL is a competition between TON ecosystem projects and users, aimed at increasing user participation in the entire ecosystem, helping projects expand their user base, and developing more attractive and functional products for the vast audience on Telegram. Users are rewarded for their participation. Therefore, the TOL leaderboard is a good guide when participating in TON ecosystem interactions.
In the first season, a total of over $3 million worth of TON was distributed, with STON.fi and DeDust ranking first and second in the DeFi category. They are now the top two DEXs in terms of TVL on TON, with Tonstakers, the top-ranking LSD project, surpassing STON.fi’s TVL. The second season saw Catizen ranking first and the NFT trading platform Getgems ranking second. Getgems provided the pre-market for Notcoin points.
The current third season is ongoing, with a planned distribution of $1 million worth of TON. The top projects in the rankings are key interactive objects.
In addition to the leaderboard, Catizen, which ranked first, and Yescoin, the fastest-growing game on TON, are worth noting. Yescoin is similar to Notcoin, with a simple coin collection and task completion mode where players can earn tokens by swiping the screen on their phones. These simple and addictive games have attracted many followers due to their high-quality replicas.
Tonano is a project on the TON chain for minting inscriptions. During the minting process of the first TON20 inscription, Tonano, the large number of users participating and triggering network transactions brought huge traffic and transaction load to the TON network, leading to temporary delays and congestion.
Tonano’s Marketplace has over a million dollars in trading volume, providing necessary liquidity for TON20. Cross-protocol asset bridges make it possible to exchange assets between TON20 and other inscription protocols and Jetton tokens, enabling a broader inscription ecosystem.
Fanton is a TON-based soccer 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, it is likely to become the next hot topic.
Squid is an inscription game built on TON where users can buy squid eggs containing $TON on the marketplace, 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 TON’s value cannot be simply measured by TVL. With the support of Telegram’s real user base, TON has a natural advantage that other public chains cannot match. Mini-games that focus on mobile devices are particularly easy to spread and create FOMO, as seen in WeChat games.
At the same time, for non-crypto users who use Telegram, TON can significantly reduce the learning curve for users and make it easier to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3. With the stimulation and promotion from the TON Foundation, the ecosystem has shown good development momentum and is worth long-term attention and participation.