Author: Stacy Muur, Crypto KOL; Translated by: 0xxz@Golden Finance

By 2024, the TON mini program has become a real phenomenon.

The full story of TON's success

From record-breaking ICOs in 2018 to becoming the epicenter of mass adoption by 2024.

TON was originally created by Telegram in 2018 and launched a record-breaking ICO in 2019, raising $1.7 billion. In 2020, the wind changed, and the US SEC lawsuit stopped the process, but for most Web3 products, this may be a disaster, but it made TON stronger.

In 2021, an open source development team (now the TON Foundation) rebuilt the ecosystem and shaped it into its current state. GRAM was renamed TON and issued at $0.7.

In 2023, TON announced plans to onboard 30% of users to its network by 2028, with a goal of reaching 500 million users.

The target number of users in 2024 is approximately 3-4 million.

In fact, the number of wallets activated on the TON chain has exceeded 9 million.

What is the key to TON's explosive growth?

Telegram mini program.

With mini-apps, developers can create flexible interfaces that launch directly within Telegram, potentially replacing any website or web app.

You can see the full list of applets here: https://t.me/tapps_bot

Since its launch, thousands of mini-programs have been created.

Here are a few highlight apps:

  • Notcoin: 35 million users in 3 months

  • Hamster Kombat: 150 million users, 46 million daily active users

  • Catizen: 21 million users, 3 million daily active users

  • TapSwap: 50 million users, 17 million daily active users

  • Yescoin: 20 million users, 5 million daily active users

No wonder the number of TON daily active addresses has surpassed Ethereum.

The Hamster Kombat craze is a phenomenal part of this saga. Many of my Web2 friends who have nothing to do with crypto are now posting their referral links and sharing their stats.

Hamster Kombat is popular on YouTube and Twitter, and also has a large following on Telegram. The game's YouTube channel has 23 million subscribers, while its Twitter account has 8.1 million followers.

As Notcoin and Hamster Kombat popularized the Telegram applet framework, hundreds of developers created their own touchscreen games on TON, creating a snowball effect. Users actively explored the ecosystem, looking for the next promising application.

TON incentives further drive this progress: in 2024, more than $150 million worth of TON will be distributed to communities and projects, and more than 894,000 users have already shared $9 million in rewards.

As a result, Messari data shows that TON’s return on investment remains positive relative to all asset classes, a rare achievement today.

The real impact is TON’s growth, not just a reallocation of interest from Web3-native users, as seen on other chains.

Instead, it attracts non-crypto users and gets them on board on the Web3 journey.