Notcoin created a legend of 35 million registrations and won the favor of OKX JumpStar and Binance Launchpad; Catizen registered nearly 20 million in just 2 months. It subverted the Web3 field in one fell swoop, and a project has an inherent image of a scale of thousands to tens of thousands of people. At the same time, with the continued popularity of the Ton ecosystem, more and more projects and funds are migrating to Ton. As a new traffic depression in the Web3 field, TrendX will bring you an interpretation of the Ton ecosystem.
What is Ton Ecosystem?
Before understanding TON, you must first understand Telegram.
Telegram is an encrypted communication application that supports end-to-end encryption and does not censor content. In order to avoid the influence of a single government, its servers are distributed in many countries around the world. Telegram currently has more than 900 million monthly active users worldwide and advertising revenue of approximately US$4.56 billion. Telegram is another social application giant besides WeChat, Facebook, and Whatsapp.
In 2019, Telegram tried to launch the TON public chain. However, during the ICO stage, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intervened, and after a series of legal disputes, the project was canceled in 2020. The TON project was originally planned to be promoted by Telegram. After reaching a settlement with the SEC, Telegram announced that it would no longer participate in the TON project. However, the community and other developer teams decided to continue the project, and TON was born. Although TON has no direct relationship with Telegram, Telegram officials and founder Pavel Durov have supported the project many times in recent years and emphasized the business relevance of Telegram and TON.
TON currently consists of four main components: TON Blockchain, TON Payments, TON Proxy and TON Storage (decentralized storage).
The TON Blockchain is a general-purpose blockchain that includes a standard execution layer that allows permissionless transactions;
TON Payments is a low-fee micropayments platform that allows instant and fast payments between users. It is currently accessible via the Walletbot on Telegram, benefiting from in-app convenience;
TON Storage allows for the storage and distribution of files on TON, similar to a decentralized Dropbox;
TON Proxy ensures censorship resistance by allowing users to run .ton websites independent of fixed IP/centralized domains;
The Ton blockchain is the most popular blockchain in the industry, and there are already dozens of projects such as Notcoin, and many development teams are committed to deploying new projects on TON. Previously, TrendX sorted out the representative projects on TON in "One article to understand the hot traffic games jointly created by Telegram xTON | TrendX Research Institute".
The impact of Ton ecosystem on Web3
TON’s vision is to build a TON-based Web3 mini-program ecosystem within Telegram.
Through Telegram's Bot technology (robot, equivalent to WeChat mini-programs), decentralized applications built on the TON public chain can be implemented in the form of Bots and organically integrated with the Telegram ecosystem. Most decentralized applications now exist in the form of web-based web versions. The biggest problem with this form is that the user experience is poor and it is not smooth enough to use.
Telegram's Bot is an application form with a very good user experience. It can be used directly in Telegram, and the experience is consistent with the APP, allowing Telegram users to easily transition to the world of Web3. In other words, TON relies on its huge user base to provide Web3 developers with sufficient public domain traffic, similar to TikTok. Whoever can capture the attention and comments of TG users in the future will be successful.
In general, the TON public chain has the following advantages to ensure the prosperity of the ecosystem:
Huge traffic convergence: TG has 800 million monthly active users, more than 1.3 billion registered users, and more than one million new users register every day. This data is 1.4 times that of Twitter, 61% of WeChat, and 86% of Facebook. The TON public chain and Telegram have an inseparable strategic relationship.
TON ecosystem users have a strong willingness to pay: If Notcoin’s success proves that users of traditional social media channels can become registered users of Web3, then Catizen’s success verifies the logic of Web3 users’ paying for krypton gold behavior;
Perfect infrastructure: Based on the Telegram social product with 1.3 billion users, with built-in native wallet and DEX trading market, a closed-loop encryption ecosystem can be completed directly in the TG community. Coupled with the public chain's efficient sharding technology, flexible smart contract platform, powerful cross-chain interoperability, and rich development tools and application ecosystem.
Rapidly growing TVL data: TON's total on-chain locked value (TVL) is more than 370 million US dollars. The monthly growth rate is 85%. The public chain ranking will soon be among the top 20. Inventory of TON public chain ecological sub-tracks: In the TON public chain ecology, there are 13 staking projects, 43 wallets, 8 cross-chain bridges, 114 tools and bots, 98 NFTs, 21 social, 53 gambling, 16 DEX, 97 games, 10 developer tools, 12 e-commerce, and 10 Launchpads. Looking closely at these sub-sectors, we can see that the TON public chain already has a relatively rich ecological foundation.
TON Foundation provides strong support: TON Foundation has allocated 150 million US dollars as an incentive plan to vigorously support high-quality start-up projects.
Easier to gain favor from institutions and exchanges: Thanks to TON, it is easy for projects to build up user data and TVL. Products with strong data presentation can easily obtain financing from institutions, and products that can complete the conversion of new registered users are also popular with exchanges.
Taking Notcoin as an example, with 35 million registrations and assuming a 1% conversion rate, it means that Notcoin can bring 350,000 new users to the exchange. The many advantages of the TON ecosystem form a natural contrast with the classic Web3 ecosystem: most non-TON ecosystem projects or public chains currently have only a few thousand active users per day.
Take STRK as an example. It was once a star second-layer public chain, which was born with the golden key of luxurious capital and awesome project team. After the coin issuance, the daily active users on the chain plummeted to only a few thousand. Based on the premise of low number of users, coupled with various low circulation, high FDV, and the value-blowing behavior of Restake, it is easy to cover up the actual risks.
TON Ecosystem Development Future
Since most TON ecological projects are presented in the form of TG BOT, which is similar to WeChat mini-programs, we can actually make a simple guess about the future development direction of the Ton ecosystem: what WeChat mini-programs are currently doing will also become the main form of TG BOT in the future.
At present, the Ton ecosystem is mainly based on games. This is mainly because the development cost of small games is low and backed by the Telegram traffic pool, and the user fission speed is faster. So we can see the current Notcoin and Catizen and similar imitations appearing. But after that, it is very likely that TG BOT will become one of the social media matrices of different projects, or even the entry channel and carrier of the official website and function list.
In general, whether it is the project party, VC institution, exchange, or retail investor, capturing traffic is the key. The current TON ecological narrative has just begun. In the foreseeable future, while the TON ecosystem is not yet fully saturated, there will definitely be more wealth effects and opportunities.
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