Why is Ton a standout in a bleak market?

Author: Joyce, Plain Language Blockchain

Recently, the entire market sentiment is very pessimistic, especially the altcoin market.Under the unstable situation of the entire Bitcoin market, altcoins have plummeted all the way, and there are many projects that have been cut in half.

However, in this bleak market, the performance of the Ton ecosystem is very stable.TON has risen by 23% in the past 30 days. The TVL of the entire Ton ecosystem has also taken off since March this year, rising more than 6 times in just four months. In addition, projects such as Notcoin in the ecosystem have soared in both price and user volume.Is the Summer of the Ton ecosystem coming?

01  New highlights of the Ton ecosystem

Backed by Telegram's 900 million active users, it is the biggest feature of the Ton ecosystem. However, it has been criticized that there is not a close connection between Ton and Telegram. The entire platform system of Telegram does not empower Ton too much, and Ton is still "air".

However, all this seems to have changed fundamentally since this year.

From March to now, the TVL of the Ton ecosystem has increased from less than 23 million US dollars to the current 145 million US dollars, an increase of more than 6 times. At the same time, the price of TON has also increased by about 3 times during this period, and the bear market in the past month is still very strong. What are the positive factors behind this?

Data source: DefiLlama

1) Using TON to settle Telegram platform advertising system

Unlike social platforms such as Facebook and WeChat, although Telegram has a large number of users, it has been committed to user privacy since its establishment and does not rely on user data to push targeted advertisements.

Therefore, Telegram does not have a precise user advertising platform, and has abandoned the mainstream advertising profit model of other social media giants. This has also led to Telegram not achieving a true break-even in the past few years.

It was not until the last two years that Telegram launched an advertising platform that does not rely on a precise user tag system, and at the same time launched a paid subscription service, which became Telegram's main profit model.

At the end of February this year, founder Durov said in his Telegram channel that the Telegram advertising platform (with more than one trillion views per month) will be officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred countries in March, and channel owners will receive 50% of all advertising revenue, all advertising costs will be settled in TON.

Translation: Next month, channel owners on Telegram can start to get monetary rewards for their work. Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views per month. Currently, only 10% of these views are commercialized through Telegram ads, a promotion tool designed with privacy as the focus.

In March, the Telegram advertising platform will be officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries. Channel owners in these countries will begin to receive a 50% share of any revenue Telegram earns from displaying ads in their channels.

To ensure fast and secure advertising payments and withdrawals, we will use the TON blockchain exclusively. Similar to how we handle Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will use TON to sell ads and share revenue with channel owners. This will form a virtuous circle, and content creators will be able to cash out their TONs or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels.

For TON, it has to be said that this is a big leap from "air" to "value".

Before this, TON was only used for smart contract transaction processing, staking, cross-chain transactions, and other service fees on the chain, which was not much different from other general public chains. In fact, because the number of developers and users of the Ton public chain is far less than that of other popular public chains, the consumption of TON is very insignificant. Although it can be used to purchase virtual goods such as anonymous accounts on Telegram, the total transaction volume does not have much room for imagination.

Using TON as the only settlement asset for Telegram's advertising platform is a big move for TON's empowerment, which is equivalent to directly empowering Telegram's 900 million users to TON, truly realizing the deep binding of the TON ecosystem and the Telegram platform, and suddenly opening the ceiling of the TON ecosystem and TON's price.

At the same time, in order to avoid the Telegram team getting more and more TON because of this move, causing the risk of TON centralization, Durov subsequently stated that in the future, more than 10% of the TON in the hands of the team will be sold to long-term holders at a discount price, and these sold TONs will have a lock-up period of 1-4 years.

For TON, it is equivalent to the Telegram platform using advertising revenue to continuously repurchase TON, while seeking other long-term investors or institutions, while avoiding TON from being too centralized, and reducing the circulation through lock-ups, which is naturally a big benefit of 1+1>2.

2) Launch Ton space

Ton space will be launched in September 2023. Before that, the built-in wallet Wallet in Telegram was KYC and could only be used for payment. But Ton space is a user who keeps the private key himself, which is no different from a general crypto wallet.

After using Ton space, users can seamlessly connect with the App in the Ton ecosystem through their Telegram account, log in to the application in the Ton ecosystem directly from the Telegram account, and participate in various DeFi, GameFi, NFT and other services.

Imagine that in WeChat, you can go directly to Pinduoduo or JD.com in the mini program to buy and buy. Similarly, for Telegram's 900 million active users, they can directly buy and sell Token/NFT, borrow or participate in GameFi projects in Telegram. For them, the threshold for participating in Web3 is indeed much lower.

Of course, for the Ton ecosystem, this is also a big move. After all, no public chain has the big user pool of Telegram like Ton.

3) The platform promotes mini applications

After the payment channel was opened, Telegram began to promote mini applications, which are based on the Telegram platform and can be used without installation, similar to WeChat applets.

For example, Notcoin, which has been very popular recently, is a platform-embedded app. Users can directly participate in activities such as Click to Earn in Telegram. The built-in Web3 wallet greatly reduces the user's participation threshold. With the official traffic support of Telegram, the total number of users exceeded 40 million in just a few months after going online.

Currently, with the official traffic support, a large number of Web3 mini-programs similar to Notcoin have emerged on the Telegram platform.Compared to the GameFi craze driven by the gold-making studio, participating in the game through the Telegram platform seems to save the gold-making studio, and Telegram directly promotes the participation of massive users.

In addition, the in-depth cooperation between Telegram and the Ton ecosystem has a series of other actions. It seems that starting from the second half of 2023, Telegram has truly determined the strategy of entering Web3, and has started in-depth binding cooperation with Ton.

Under this series of actions, both the TON price and TVL have shown breakthrough growth. For the Telegram platform, it has also realized a set of profit models with a high ceiling in addition to advertising and paid subscriptions.

Obviously, this is a win-win situation.

02 Ton Ecosystem Project Inventory

There are currently 874 projects in Ton.app. Although compared with public chain ecosystems such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon, this data is not impressive, and only Notcoin is currently on the top platform. However, in the past eight months, the number of Ton ecological projects has increased by nearly 60%, and the TVL of the entire ecosystem has increased by dozens of times, which does show the strong growth trend of Ton ecology.

Regarding the projects with high popularity in Ton ecology, let's take a brief inventory:

• Notcoin

In the first quarter of this year, the Telegram Developer Community and Ton Foundation jointly released a report on Telegram Ecosystem Apps, in which Notcoin was presented as a key case.

Notcoin, as a click-to-earn game, is the most popular Web3 application in Telegram Apps Center and the most well-known project in the Ton ecosystem. In just a few months, the number of users has exceeded 40 million. Although its Token NOT has not formed an application closed loop in the game ecosystem and has been criticized as Memecoin, it has not prevented the surge after the BN wash.

• Catizen

Catizen is the largest game application platform in the Telegram ecosystem. The total number of users has exceeded 20 million, with more than 500,000 paying users and more than 1.25 million on-chain users. It has ranked first in the Ton Open League for several consecutive seasons.

• Hamster Kombat

Hamster Kombat is also a game that can be played and earned. It has been very popular recently due to the Airdrop expectations.According to official data, its active users have exceeded 150 million, an increase of 50% over last week, and it is currently ranked third in the popularity of Telegram Apps Center.

• Gatto|Game

Gatto is a pet training game and an ecological project highlighted by Ton Foundation in its first quarter report of 2024. According to the report data, as of January 2024, Gatto DAU has reached 30,000, with more than 1 million pets created and a monthly income of US$35,000.

• Gamee

Gamee is a social gaming platform under Animoca Brands and one of the most popular gaming ecosystems on Telegram. Although the token price plummeted due to a hacker attack in early 2024, Gamee is still very popular in the Telegram ecosystem.

• PocketFi

PocketFi is a Telegram trading robot that supports cross-chain transactions and currently uses a click-to-earn method to attract users. Due to its simple operation and strong instant feedback, the number of users exceeded 1.4 million just three months after its launch, and it is also very popular in Telegram Apps.

• Blum

Blum is a DEX in the Telegram ecosystem, providing spot and simple derivatives trading, but the relevant functions are not yet online, and points can only be earned through mining in small games. The current number of users has exceeded 10 million.

It is worth noting that Blum was founded by former BN executives and has been selected for the Binance Labs accelerator.

• Yescoin

As the name suggests, it is a copycat of Notcoin, and it is currently very popular. Its number of users has exceeded 18 million, and the number of subscribers to its official Telegram channel has exceeded 6 million, and the growth rate is also quite amazing.

• DeDust, Ston.fi

DeDust and Ston.fi are both DEXs in the Telegram ecosystem. Currently, in the Apps Center rankings, they are one of the most popular apps outside of click-to-earn games.

In DeFiLlama, TVL ranked first and second with 320 million and 260 million US dollars respectively, which can be said to be the leading sub-projects of the entire Ton ecosystem of 634 million TVL.

Currently, the official Telegram channel of Ston.fi has 680,000 followers, which is more popular than DeDust.

• Uxlink

Uxlink is the largest social infrastructure project in the Telegram ecosystem. Based on the rapid fission of acquaintance social networking in Telegram, the currently published registration data has exceeded 10 million, becoming the social infrastructure for more than 10 million users in the SocialFi track.

Uxlink has currently received investment favors from institutions such as Zhen Fund, Sequoia Capital, and GGV. Although it has not yet been launched on major platforms, the future development of this scale of SocialFi projects is worth looking forward to.

03 Summary

From the perspective of TON price, TVL growth, and the prosperity of ecological projects, the Ton ecosystem is indeed a unique existence in the current bleak market, but there are also some problems that cannot be ignored under the prosperous appearance.

For example, in terms of the number of developers, there are only 39 full-time developers in the Ton ecosystem (Developer report data), and the total number of developers is 175, which is far less than Ethereum's 2392 and 7864, while Solana's data are 436 and 1615 respectively, which is also much higher than the Ton ecosystem.

In addition, the frequent account theft on the Telegram platform, after the built-in Web3 wallet, account theft and phishing links are more rampant, which is undoubtedly one of the problems that need to be solved in the Telegram Web3 process, especially for Web3 newcomers with weak security awareness. In addition, the Ton public chain has not been online for a long time and has not experienced too many security incidents. The security of the entire ecosystem is a major test for the future development process.

Of course, whether it is developers or security issues, they can be gradually iterated and optimized in the future development of the ecosystem. After all, the development of the entire Web3 industry is also the same, which is a process of repair while flying.