After TON landed on Binance, how to find potential projects in the TON ecosystem?

TON has finally landed on Binance. Since then, the TON ecosystem has also begun to have the largest liquidity pool in the market as the value support of the ecosystem.

However, if we look at the overall situation of the TON ecosystem, it is still an ecosystem with high external popularity but in its early stages. It is difficult to find potential project targets in such an ecosystem, and it is impossible to "carve a boat to find a sword" or follow a map. Abandoning the complex method, if we follow the simplest selection logic of "attention economy", in this article, we will try to find potential projects through the "open league" of the TON ecosystem, or find the growth inertia of this early ecosystem.

Basic background of TON

The TON ecosystem started to grow at full speed after the Dubai Summit.

First, the price of TON tokens stabilized at around $7 after a correction. Subsequently, Notcoin attracted millions of users, successfully listed and landed on all centralized exchanges at the same time, triggering a new round of "Click Summer", creating a development benchmark for TON's ecological landscape. Under the call of practitioners, in June, the price of TON surged to a maximum of $8.2, which made everyone have higher expectations for the development of TON ecology in the future.

Notcoin has a viral fan-attracting ability and has successfully spawned a niche track of Clickcoin, but this track seems to only exist on Telegram and TON, and is very dependent on Telegram's interaction. Therefore, Notcoin's phenomenal performance also fully reflects TON's influence on the entire cryptocurrency industry.

For this reason, almost all centralized exchanges are listing Notcoin tokens at the same time to compete for precious new user resources. The listing results are also obvious. The transaction volume of NOT tokens ranked first in the currency arrangement in the pull-up stage, and it also ranked among the top in the daily stage. The excellence of the tokens traced the "value" back to the price and ecology of TON, and achieved a new high of TON.

Before TON tokens were listed on Binance, the locked-in amount in the ecology had exceeded 700 million US dollars, and the token market value ranking was firmly in the top ten. In this cycle, the concept of "full circulation" prevailed. The more competitive data is that TON's circulation volume is much higher than that of other public chains, and the circulation rate accounts for nearly half of the total. A small change in the token price can drive a large change in the overall market value, and also let some users have expectations for TON's future ranking (currently 8th).

In the past two years, TON has also laid the foundation for ecological development under high circulation and relatively precise market value management, so these achievements today can be said to be the result of TON's long-term operation and precise control of the rhythm, which also proves the long-termism of the public chain ecological growth and some key factors necessary for ecological growth.

For example, at the beginning of the article, we mentioned that TON began to accelerate its growth after the Dubai Summit, which is inseparable from the pace of the TON Foundation's promotion of the TON League competition.

In early March 2024, TON began to open the league to promote ecological growth, but first conducted a test season lasting about one month, and then another one-month official season. The results are remarkable, the project participation has skyrocketed, and almost most of the important basic projects and active tokens in the ecosystem have been included.

From May 1 to May 15, the second season was held. Although the season prize money has decreased, it still maintains excellent data, daily active wallets (DAW): 311,900 (+725%); weekly active wallets: 999,600 (+540%); monthly active wallets: 1,700,000 (+325%).

It can be said that TON has almost revitalized the entire ecosystem through two competitions.

On May 15, the third season started. In this competition, some detailed adjustments were made. First, there was a bias towards supporting DEX tokens and Meme tokens, and second, the competition rules were changed. According to the ranking list, there are more than 60 participating tokens, including projects that use their own tokens as activity incentives and ordinary application projects. Both types of projects can participate in the A-level and B-level leagues, and the final list is also classified into App, token, etc. according to growth data and interactive data.

From the entire open league, it can be clearly seen that the TON team has made major progress and refined adjustments to the ecosystem. Today, when the development and efforts of the industry are not clear, rapid response and continuous efforts are the basis of the ecosystem. Not only does it require huge investments, but it also requires guiding the heat of the ecosystem to concentrate efforts and have centripetal force. It may eventually form an "attention economy" that is effective for investors.

Highlight projects in the open league

According to statistics from the TON official website, the entire ecosystem currently contains more than 1,000 projects, which are divided into centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, Staking, wallets, browsers, bridges, utilities, channels, NFT collections, chats, social networking, games, Jettons, NFT services, VPNs, development tools, Shopping, Launchpads and other categories.

In terms of specific numbers, the number of on-chain applications is about 300, and the application types are mainly games, Bots, and Defi. This does not count the number of pure token projects such as Meme projects, and also represents the growth foundation of the entire public chain ecosystem, because applications are a stable source of token value capture.

With the recent price performance of TON, the performance of these types of applications is highly correlated, such as Dex, Launchpad, Lending, etc. For example, TON tokens soared at the beginning of the year, and TonUP tokens, which are the golden shovel attributes of the ecosystem, also completed a short-term increase of about 500%. During the competition, STON, as the main DEX, rose by about 1000% in 2 months.

Defi token STON price performance

In fact, if we further classify the categories of participating competition projects, they can be divided into Meme, Defi, Gamefi, etc., but if we use a more vague classification, it can almost be divided into Defi and Meme.

The projects that have appeared many times in the previous competitions have achieved some results in line with their own roadmaps during the competition period, or these projects have been discovered by users and investors in the competition and have gained new opportunities for growth. As mentioned above, Defi projects directly capture ecological value, and Meme tokens also directly use the "attention economy" in the short term to assist market value management actions to complete price increases.

For example, in the third quarter, Meme tokens are represented by ARBUZ, KINGY, WEB3, durev, DFC, DYOR and other projects, and Defi tokens are represented by STON, RAFF, SCALE, GRAM, UP.

In the latest fourth and fifth seasons, new projects have emerged, such as NOT for Gamefi, REGI, COFE, TONG, RECA for Meme, and Defi representatives are still STON, SCALE, UP and other tokens.

Price performance of Meme token REGI

Another obvious feature among these projects is that most of them may have cooperative relationships with each other to complete the development of a shared ecosystem. For example, Jetton, Ton Diamonds, Dedust, Tonraffles, Gram, TonUP, etc. all have various cooperative relationships. This is also the characteristic of the TON ecosystem itself: there are many small and medium-sized projects in the ecosystem, and projects that are good at sharing resources with each other to gather attention and potential will proceed more smoothly.

The future of TON belongs to the builders

The TON Foundation is the largest and most powerful promoter and builder in the ecosystem. Unlike traditional public chain teams, TON has obviously completed long-term layout, and it is the long-term construction that enriches and develops the value of TON ecosystem.

TON will be listed in Q2 2022. The ecosystem is very weak in the early stage, but TON has a large circulation, but the trading volume of the exchange is not large. In the early days, there was almost no TON chain and Telegram-related construction.

Today, the TON ecosystem is hot and the token market value is stable, all relying on the steady progress of 2 years.

First is the technical layer of TON, the main network launch and technical stability. The second is ecological construction, which is almost a long-term operation practice. Teams familiar with TON know that TON operates on both developer and ecological enthusiasm. In the past year, the stability of token prices can also show the investment made to stabilize the market value. The final result is that the ecological value has increased by nearly 5 times, and there are higher expectations in the future.

Similarly, in the TON ecosystem, teams that can complete long-term construction have also made great contributions. It is precisely because TON is very different from the "Ethereum system" promoted by the industry in terms of underlying language and development methods, that the overall construction should be considered in the long term.

In the TON ecosystem, there are three types of projects. The first is the main push of the foundation. We can find a lot of this type on the official website. The second is the incubation of large teams, such as the TOPLabs team, which has probably built more than 30 high-quality projects for the ecosystem, or the Asian team Microcosm Labs, which has also built more than 10 projects for the ecosystem. The third is the newly emerged small and medium-sized projects developed using public tools or open source projects in the industry.

In the second and third categories of projects, many star projects will be developed, such as the ecological projects established by these two key teams. The STON mentioned above is promoted by TOPLabs and is currently one of the most core DEXs on TON. The Notcoin mentioned above is also an unprecedented phenomenal project, which is also promoted by TOPLabs.

Compared with TOP, Microcosm Labs pays more attention to projects in Asia. Its main projects include TonUP, which is relatively mature and has a certain volume, and PixelSwap, which is supplementing the ecological DEX function.

These projects have a very obvious effect on value capture, because they will actively cooperate with the development progress of the TON ecosystem to design their own routes. For example, starting from the beginning of 2024, during the rising cycle of TON, the TonUP token UP completed an increase of about 500%, and the STON.fi token STON completed an overall increase of 3000%.

The reason why these projects can accurately capture the value of the ecosystem is that, in addition to taking advantage of the attention economy of the ecosystem, the key point is that the projects promoted by these teams are rich in categories, and their functions can not only complement each other, but also be used by ordinary projects in the ecosystem. This is how these projects grasp the overall narrative of TON and how to form a close relationship between the value of the ecosystem and their own projects.

If TonUP is taken as an example, its roadmap is to create a "supply chain" for the issuance and trading of projects based on the "golden shovel" business of Launchpad, and to realize the ecological connection of various businesses.

Another important attempt of Microcosm Labs is the modular DEX PixelSwap, which is the first DEX on TON that supports weighted pools and can complete the LBP issuance on TON.

Currently, TonUP has cooperated with Pixelswap to launch the "Move to TON" funding plan to attract and support high-quality projects and developers. The portfolio now includes SocialFi, GameFi and AI projects.

List of Microcosm Labs' related projects

In addition to DEX, as shown in the figure, Microcosm Labs has also invested in and incubated several products focused on the TON ecosystem, including games, GameFi, DeFi and other types. In addition to TonUP and PixelSwap, the specific portfolios that can be found include: DetectiveTON, Bot Gameyard, Cwallet, CCPayment, etc.

If we look at more project types, like Microcosm Labs, TOPLabs has established a very coherent business line, from the officially recommended applications Getgems and Tribute, to the ecosystem's essential wallet Tonkeeper, Launchpad's TonStarter, decentralized exchange STON, and liquidity supply Tonstakers, it has built a whole business chain in the ecosystem, which is also the most basic tool for the development of the entire ecosystem.

TOP Labs' related project list

However, the maturity of TON's entire ecosystem tools is still a certain distance away from that of projects such as Ethereum or Solana. As far as TOP Labs and Microcosm Labs are concerned, the former's projects are closer to basic functions, while the latter is more focused on complementary function development. In other words, the two target different project users. The former shapes large projects and benchmark projects, while the latter assists small and medium-sized projects to create a small and beautiful ecosystem. For example, TOPLabs' DEX focuses on token acceptance and the establishment of AMM liquidity pools, while Microcosm Labs promotes the construction of Pixelswap, oracle tools, and even the middleware platform LayerPixel.

Therefore, in the subsequent development of the project, Microcosm Labs will also provide marketing, business development, exchange listing, and tokenization support with other partners.

Written at the end

No matter which type of team, the final increase is the richness of the ecosystem and the most stable ecological value support. Just like in early March, there were only about 500 ecological projects, of which less than 30% were actually applied. Now the total number of projects has exceeded 1,000. In just 5 months, the number has doubled, and the number of tokens has increased several times. Games, Gamefi, and Defi projects are all growing steadily.

So, the entire open league is like a hero meeting of the TON ecosystem. With the help of attention, it not only attracts talents from all over the world, but also earns the "attention" of the industry. By observing the price changes of the competition items, you can see the direct "monetization" ability of value. This is the best screening method for practitioners who pay attention to TON, and it can support both short-term and long-term options.

In September, the sixth competition is about to begin. Will there be new opportunities? It is worth waiting and seeing.