Ton Ecosystem is still relatively early. Ton has a good chance, but Ton Ecosystem’s projects may not have a chance for large funds.
After Ton started doing ecology in the second half of last year, we saw the first wave of Ton Ecosystem’s explosion this year. Overall, Ton Foundation's execution is very good, and it took less than a year to take shape.
Ton Foundation is very clear about what should be done decentralized and what should be done centrally. For example, wallets and payments are centralized. This was one of WeChat's core competitiveness at the time, and Ton also knew it very well. Only after solving the problem of fund custody security (everyone will trust TG's technology and wallets will not be lost), simple payment of funds (no need to pay with cumbersome bank cards, all chains use Ton's U), and simplicity and ease of use ( There is no need to go to MetaMask or OKX Wallet, or the 78 jumps to buy things on Taobao in the early years) to truly achieve the Web3 version of WeChat payment. Other ecologies adopt the Crypto Native approach, outsourcing everything and motivating the community to do it.
The profit model of ecological projects no longer needs to be like a simple Web2/3 project, and the profit model begins to be diversified. The Web2 model allows Web2 to collect advertising fees, sell users to exchanges, sell value-added services in games, charge subscription fees, and not issue coins. The Web3 model can charge DeFi and other financial protocol fees, sell NFTs, and issue coins.
The characteristic of TG is that it has basic traffic and solves the problem of payment. These users have certain knowledge of Crypto, but the users are scattered in low-value areas, and the unit value of most users is not high. Does this mean that Ton should not build Web3 financial tools, but should focus more on Web2 traffic management?
Ton Ecosystem itself is an HTML5 Web2 company, but it adds blockchain at the payment and settlement levels. Likewise, why must Ton be added to these projects? Theoretically, you can fully utilize the traffic of TG, and then use Polygon, Solana, or other Layer 2. Returning to the essence, TG has traffic, and Ton provides settlement. Other ecological projects do not have to start from scratch, just add Ton (just like Travala for booking flights and hotels, Oobit crypto payment, Ton is a good embellishment, not the core)
On-chain TVL is growing rapidly, but is limited by the fact that the market value of $TON is not large, so the ceiling will be relatively small. DeFi should still be done on Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, $TON is different from Bitcoin and Ethereum. The chips of $TON are relatively concentrated. Do the core interest holders of $TON have financial needs? I personally am conservative about asset-side innovations other than Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is no longer the era of DeFi and finance.
TG is a completely unregulated environment. This means that those engaged in traffic and casino business are completely exempt from legal supervision.
At present, it seems that doing business on the project may make more sense than investing. There are already a large number of projects that have generated considerable revenue. For example, Catizen’s revenue exceeds 10 million U.S. dollars, and Hamster’s daily revenue is one million U.S. dollars. But as an investor, when investing, the profit-loss ratio is not high.
The life cycle of projects here may be shorter. For example, most users of Catizen and Hamster are hair-raising parties. Once the tokens are issued and the hair-raising parties smash the market, 50% of the project will be basically over. Is it possible to evolve into an ultimate ROI business?
Crowd sourcing projects may be naturally suitable to take root on TG. Precisely because TG has gathered a large number of non-high-value people (the user profile may be somewhat similar to YGG), is it suitable to do crowdsourcing projects with positive cash flow on TG? For example, data annotation, autonomous driving data collection, and takeout delivery.
TG is currently the fifth largest social platform and was founded in 2013 by the Durov brothers. Ton was established as a project in 2017 and will be launched on the mainnet in the second half of 2021. It will only start to officially promote and operate in 2023. The comparable objects of Ton are Solana and Base. This is because Solana and Base are both high-performance public chains and have obvious ToC attributes. Solana was previously backed by FTX, Base was backed by Coinbase, and Ton was backed by TG, all of which had certain traffic carriers. Judging from the current Weekly active wallet, Ton has grown beyond Base and is currently close to half of Solana. At present, Ton's playing style is completely copied from WeChat mini programs, and he has started his own unique Web3 path.
In 2013, the two Durov brothers founded TG; in 2018, Pavel Durov launched TON and raised US$1.7 billion in ICO; in 2020, due to the entanglement of the SEC, TG gave up the leading development of Ton; at the same time, the TON community established the Ton Foundation to Continue to lead the development of Ton; launch the mainnet concurrent currency in September 2021; between 2021 and early 2022, the Ton Foundation and miners have accumulated 80%+ $TON chips; in September 2023, TG announced an exclusive cooperation with Ton, an ecological approach Copy and paste the WeChat applet in full; in February 2024, Pantera invested US$300 million in Ton; in April 2024, Tether began to deploy $USDT on Ton, and users can start transfers through TG; in June 2024, Notcoin, Hamster , Catizen, etc. began to explode on TG.
The risk of highly concentrated chips needs to be considered. There are two types of contract addresses: Small Givers and Large Givers. The latter distributes more tokens each time (100,000 instead of 100 each), but requires more computing power. Telegram launched token mining on July 6, 2020, transferring tokens through system addresses to 20 contracts that distribute tokens.
Mining lasted from July 6, 2020 to June 28, 2022, but almost all token issuance was distributed in the first 51 days: From July 6, 2020 to August 26, 2020, Large Givers 4.8 billion tokens (96%) were distributed, Small Givers distributed 9.9 million tokens (0.2%); From August 27, 2020 to June 28, 2022, Small Givers distributed 117.3 million tokens (2.35%) . It is worth noting that a total of 3,278 unique addresses participated in mining, but only 248 addresses participated in the distribution of Large Givers.
Therefore, we know that 96% of the $TON supply is allocated to 248 addresses. Furthermore, these 248 addresses are closely related: we found that many miner address groups are related to each other and have the same patterns, such as the start and end times of mining or the operations of the mined coins. We also see some retail activity, but the majority of the token supply is mined by a group of interconnected whales.
Judging from the structure of the chain, it seems to be a good technical route in 2021. The chain is directly modularized. Ton's development language is different from the mainstream Web2 and Solidity of Ethereum EVM. Ton has self-developed TVM (Ton virtual machine), which is written in three language programs: Fift, FunC and Tac. These three languages are specialized development languages for Ton. Relatively new. The overall developer ecosystem is relatively early, mainly because the programming language is relatively early.
FunC is a high-level language specially designed for writing smart contract programs on the TON blockchain. It is an industry-specific, C-like, statically typed language. FunC is used to write smart contracts, and then compiled into Fift assembler to write code, and finally generates the Bytecode of the TON Virtual Machine (TVM). Fift is a low-level assembly language, and FunC programs will be compiled into Fift assembler to write code. Fift is closer to the bottom and is usually not used directly to write smart contracts, but as an intermediate representation between FunC and TVM Bytecode. Tac is designed to provide a higher-level abstraction than FunC while maintaining compatibility with the TON virtual machine. FunC is a variant of the C language, somewhat similar to C/C++. Ton originally chose the FunC language because TG was written in C. Ton abandoned the Crypto Native idea of EVM solidity and defined his function as assisting TG in its ecology. This is destined that Ton is not designed for Web3 Geeks, and is more likely to be used by ordinary Web2 users. To put it bluntly, it is a blockchain made for TG users, so it has the shadow of some technologies, such as high concurrency and asynchronous The structure refers to the architecture of Web2. Therefore, from the perspective of the developer ecosystem, the strategy is very Web2+Web3. This can be seen in the subsequent ecological development.
Why Ton Ecosystem is attracting everyone’s attention now
True Web2+Web3. TG dapp (small program) has Web2 main business, and Crypto is just a Value Add. For example, games can create a lot of revenue through Web2 profit models such as advertising, which can avoid the original spending on marketing and data + listing + cutting a wave Just run Crypto mode. In addition, through Crypto Global Payment, cross-border e-commerce/overseas business/aircraft and wine reservations, etc. can have new payment expansion channels.
Development costs are low. Most small programs can be deployed through HTML5, and TON provides a series of technical development documents and templates so that developers can complete deployment without writing code from scratch. According to feedback, project developers with a Web2 background can complete the deployment of a small program within two or three days.
For Web3, Ton Ecosystem has opened up new possibilities for project parties. It is no longer obsessed with Crypto Native tracks such as Infra and DeFi, and supports developers to build products based on social networking, games, e-commerce, cross-border business and other industries. , thus broadening the project party’s choice. Finally, when developers develop in the TON ecosystem, they can complete the interaction and integration of multiple products on one Telegram platform. For users, the mini-program applications in the TON ecosystem have obvious advantages in terms of interaction. Users can complete one-stop interactive operations by clicking on the wallet mini-program without leaving the Telegram platform, and there is no need to switch to external wallets such as MetaMask. . In addition, the wallet on Telegram already supports users to deposit funds using legal currency OTC, that is, users can directly use credit cards to purchase encrypted assets, achieving seamless interaction from fund injection to various applications on the chain.
The following is the Ton Ecosystem. Currently, the most popular areas are games and social networking. The current game ecology is mostly Tapgame, that is, Dot-and-Dian, match-3 and other earthy small games, which mostly use HTML interface + Crypto Native Economy + advertising fees to make money. However, there are so many users that it is currently a hot product. In terms of Ton ecology, games are still in a state of red ocean competition, but Web2-oriented scenarios such as cross-border e-commerce and encrypted payments are relatively blue ocean.
DeFi - The performance in TVL is not outstanding. After all, it is not a Crypto Native public chain. Ton's DeFi performance is relatively average. The overall TVL is only 680 million, which is not even comparable to midstream Layer2 such as Linea and Blast, but it still makes sense. Ton has not marketed itself as a Crypto Native public chain from the first day of its development, so DeFi is not the focus of its ecological development.
Stablecoin/payment/wallet - priority strategy, payment ecosystem experienced by Web2. Since 2017, Telegram has actually been exploring its own business model, whether it is payment services, advertising, or ICO financing that has been paused by the US SEC. , but the final result is not ideal. Last year PavelDurov revealed that the annual cost of keeping Telegram up and running was about $630 million. According to the Wall Street Journal, by April 2021, Telegram had accumulated $700 million in debt.
Therefore, since 2021, Telegram has repeatedly publicly issued excess bonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In March this year, it also obtained US$330 million in funds from the sale of bonds. Telegram is often regarded as the Web3 version of WeChat. From the perspective of active users, Telegram and WeChat are not much different. WeChat has about 1.2 billion active users, and Telegram has 900 million and counting. However, in terms of profit methods, But far from it. Payment is the main commercialization path of WeChat. Compared with WeChat, Telegram will also choose payment. However, since Telegram is not regulated and cannot obtain a mainstream financial regulatory license, it only has Web3 payment, and its founder Pavel Durov entered the Crypto industry very early.
Since the beginning of this year, Ton has begun to focus on the stablecoin strategy, introducing $USDT to the Ton chain, and providing subsidies. Users after passing KYC (including mainland Singapore, etc.) can stake $USDT through TG's official wallet Ton Space. Ton officially provides a 50% APY, 3,000 $USDT/two-month limit as a reward for attracting deposits, and the interest is paid in $TON currency. After two months of development, the issuance volume of TON $USDT has rapidly grown from 100 million to 500 million. TON $USDT can be transferred directly to friends through the wallet, just like WeChat transfer to friends. In addition, the money can be withdrawn, which is completely different from traditional on-chain payments.
The Staking Ratio of a normal non-Ethereum public chain will usually reach more than 50%, and there will be a higher APY to attract miners. However, $TON’s Staking Ratio and Reward Ratio are both relatively low, presumably because:
Most of the chips are still in the hands of Ton Foundation/early miners;
There are very few chips circulating in the market, and the small number of chips and the number of people pledging them requires another layer of screening;
Reward Ratio = Inflation + Gas Fee, $TON’s Gas Fee is low (0.005 x 7 = 0.035 $USDT), which only shows that the network activity is actually less than expected (this may be because most popular TON ecological projects currently only have The currency issuance is expected and has not yet been fully launched on the chain), TON's Inflation is only 0.3%-0.6%, which means that most of the revenue from TON Staking comes from TON Gas Fee, which is different from the measures taken by major public chains such as Solana.
Catizen is a project done by the Web2 game team very early on. In 2021, they previously worked on a project called Tap Fantasy, a small idle H5 game on Facebook. Catizen is a game that combines and raises kittens on idle. Two low-level kittens are combined into a high-level kitten. The higher the level, the higher the output of the cat. Users can use additional Crypto Token or $USDT to purchase additional functions to speed up the production of kittens. Catizen has surpassed $10 million in in-game revenue, a figure it reached in about two months after the game launched. In June, the total number of Catizen users exceeded 20 million, DAU was approximately 2 million, on-chain users exceeded 700,000, and there were approximately 500,000 paying users. The on-chain user conversion rate remains at around 10%, and more than 50% of active users are paying users. Based on this, Catizen will gradually launch its own small game platform in the future and build itself into Telegram 4,399/steam.
Hamster Combat is the most popular Tap game on TG. Players earn gold coins by hanging up, clicking on the screen, and completing tasks. They consume gold coins to form a better team to get more gold coins. The overall focus is on hanging up and developing. Hamster is very bad overall - Tap earns one coin at a time, has 1,000 energy, needs to be clicked 1,000 times, needs to wait for automatic recovery before clicking again, and there are 6 opportunities to instantly restore energy every day; fission is also very good; hanging The passive income of the machine is only valid within three hours after exiting the game. After the timeout, you need to re-enter the game. Hamster is very popular in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, which is very similar to the logic of gold mining GameFi. However, it is worth noting that Hamster currently does not issue Tokens, which means that users only receive "points" rather than real Tokens. They are more similar to the Mao Mao Party. Hamster's revenue comes from advertising and importing new customers to the exchange. Daily advertising revenue is rumored to be millions of dollars, and the paying group is the exchange.
The other ecologies are slightly smaller, but if you go back too far, just look at the pictures. On tracks where the official race is held in person, third parties may not have much chance to do it again.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reprinted with permission from: Foresight News
Original author: Zixi.eth
