The market is bleak, how can Ton stand out?

The entire market sentiment has been very pessimistic recently, especially the altcoin market. Amid the instability of the entire Bitcoin market, altcoins have plummeted, and projects that have been cut in half are everywhere.

However, under such bleak market conditions, the performance of the Ton ecosystem is very stable. TON has risen by 23% in the past thirty 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, and Projects such as Notcoin in the ecosystem have been soaring in terms of price and user volume. Is the Summer of the Ton ecosystem coming?

New highlights of Ton ecology

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

But all this seems to have fundamentally changed since this year.

From March to now, the Ton ecosystem’s TVL has grown from less than US$23 million to the current US$145 million, 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 has remained very strong. What are the positive drivers behind these?

1) Use TON to settle the Telegram platform advertising system

Unlike social platforms such as Facebook and WeChat, although Telegram has a huge number of users, it has adhered to its commitment 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 thus abandons the mainstream advertising profit model of other social media giants. This has also resulted in Telegram not reaching true breakeven for several years.

It was only in the past two years that Telegram launched an advertising platform that does not rely on an accurate user tagging system, and also launched a paid subscription service, which became Telegram's main profit model.

At the end of February this year, founder Durov stated in his Telegram channel that the Telegram advertising platform (with more than one trillion monthly views) will be officially opened to all advertisers in nearly 100 countries in March, and channel owners will receive all 50% of advertising revenue, all advertising costs are settled in TON.

Translation: Next month, channel owners on Telegram can start receiving monetary rewards for their work. Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views per month. Currently, only 10% of these views are monetized through Telegram Ads, a promotional tool designed with privacy in mind.

In March, the Telegram advertising platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries. Channel owners in these countries will start receiving a 50% share of any revenue Telegram makes from showing ads on their channels.

To ensure ad payments and withdrawals are fast and secure, we will exclusively use the TON blockchain. Similar to how we handle Telegram usernames on Fragments, we will use TON to sell ads and share the revenue with channel owners. This will create a virtuous cycle where content creators will be able to cash out their TONs or reinvest them into promoting and upgrading their channels.

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

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

Using TON as the only settlement asset of the Telegram advertising platform is a big step in empowering Ton. It 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. Suddenly opened the ceiling of Ton ecology and TON price.

At the same time, in order to prevent the Telegram team from getting more and more TON due to this move, which would cause the risk of TON centralization, Durov subsequently stated that in the future, more than 10% of the TON in the team's hands will be sold to long-term holders at a discount. However, these sold TONs have a lock-up period of 1-4 years.

對於 TON 來說，相當於 Telegram 平台利用廣告收入在持續回購 TON，同時尋求其他長期持有的投資人或機構，在避免 TON 過於中心化的同時，透過鎖倉來減少流通量，自然是 1+1>2 的大利好。

2) Go online 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 in Ton space, users keep their own private keys, which is no different from ordinary encryption wallets.

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

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

Of course, it is also a big move for the Ton ecosystem. After all, no public chain is backed by Telegram, a large user pool like Ton.

3) The platform mainly 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 mini programs.

For example, Notcoin, which has been very popular recently, is a small program embedded in the platform. Users can directly participate in activities such as click to earn tokens (Click to Earn) in Telegram. The built-in Web3 wallet greatly lowers the threshold for users to participate. With the official traffic support of Telegram, the total number of users exceeded 40 million in just a few months after it was launched.

At present, with the support of official traffic, a large number of Web3 mini-program applications similar to Notcoin have emerged on the Telegram platform. Compared with the previous GameFi craze promoted by gold-making studios, participating in playing and earning games through the Telegram platform seems to save the need for gold-making studios. One link, Telegram directly drives a large number of users to participate.

In addition, there are a series of other actions in the in-depth cooperation between Telegram and Ton ecology. It seems that starting from the second half of 2023, Telegram will truly determine its strategy of entering Web3 and launch in-depth binding cooperation with Ton.

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

Clearly, this is a win-win situation.

Ton ecological project inventory

In Ton.app, there are currently 874 projects. Although this data is not eye-catching compared to public chain ecosystems such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon, 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 dozens of times, which indeed demonstrates the strong growth trend of the Ton ecosystem.

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

Notcoin

In the first quarter of this year, the Telegram developer community and the Ton Foundation jointly released a report on Telegram ecological Apps, in which Notcoin was presented as a key showcase case.

As a click-to-earn game, Notcoin is the most popular Web3 application in Telegram Apps Center and the most well-known project in the Ton ecosystem. The number of users has exceeded 40 million in just a few months. Although its Token NOT is in the game ecosystem It did not form a closed loop of application and was criticized as Memecoin, but it did not hinder the surge after the listing of BN.

Catizen

Catizen is the largest game application platform in the Telegram ecosystem. Its current total user base 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 to earn money by playing, because Airdrop is expected to be very popular recently. According to official data, its active users have exceeded 150 million, an increase of 50% from last week, and it currently ranks third in the popularity of Telegram Apps Center.

Gatto|Game

Gatto is a pet-raising game and an ecological project highlighted by the Ton Foundation in the first quarter report of 2024. According to the report, as of January 2024, Gatto DAU has reached 30,000, and more than 1 million pets have been created. Monthly income $35,000.

Gamee

Gamee is a social game platform owned by Animoca Brands, and it is also one of the most popular game ecosystems on Telegram. Although the token price plummeted due to hacking attacks in early 2024, Gamee is still very popular in the Telegram ecosystem.

PocketFi

PocketFi is a Telegram trading robot that supports cross-chain transactions. It 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 in just three months after its launch. On Telegram Apps The heat in the medium is also very good.

Blum

Blum is a DEX in the Telegram ecosystem. It provides spot and simple derivatives transactions. However, the relevant functions are not yet online. Points can only be earned through mini-game mining. Currently, the number of users has exceeded 10 million.

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

Yescoin

It is not difficult to tell from the name that it is a copycat of Notcoin. It is currently very popular. Its number of users has exceeded 18 million. The number of subscribers to the official Telegram channel has exceeded 6 million, and the growth rate is also quite alarming.

DeDust、Ston.fi

DeDust and Ston.fi are both DEXs in the Telegram ecosystem. They are currently among the most popular apps outside of click-to-earn games in the Apps Center rankings.

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

Currently, Ston.fi’s official Telegram channel has 680,000 followers, which is even more popular than DeDust.

Uxlink

Uxlink is the largest social infrastructure project in the Telegram ecosystem. Based on acquaintance socialization, it quickly split in Telegram. The current published registration data has exceeded 10 million, becoming the social infrastructure for over 10 million users on the SocialFi track.

Uxlink has currently received investment from ZhenFund, Sequoia Capital, GGV and other institutions. Although it has not yet been launched on major platforms, the future development of SocialFi projects of this magnitude is worth looking forward to.

summary

Judging from the TON price, TVL growth and ecological project prosperity, the TON ecosystem is indeed a unique existence in the current relatively bleak market. However, there are also some problems that cannot be ignored under the appearance of prosperity.

For example, from the perspective 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 figures are 436 respectively. and 1615, also much higher than Ton ecology.

In addition, the Telegram platform has frequent account theft problems. Account theft and phishing links have become more rampant after the built-in Web3 wallet. This is undoubtedly one of the problems that urgently needs to be solved in the Telegram Web3 process. For Web3 newcomers with weak security awareness Especially so. 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 will be a major test in the future development process.

Of course, both developers and security issues can be gradually iterated and optimized in the future ecological development process. After all, the same is true for the development of the entire Web3 industry, which is a process of repair and maintenance.

This article is reproduced in cooperation with: Shenchao

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