Author: Jessy, Golden Finance

When it comes to the TON ecosystem, the “tap-tap” mini-game seems to have become its byword. Thousands of games that are simple to play and can go viral through friend invitations are released on the TON chain and thrive based on Telegram’s traffic pool.

Such games can quickly accumulate traffic, but there are also prominent problems: user retention is worrying and the life cycle is short. Because of the massive number of users, TG games have also become a means of attracting traffic for project parties and exchanges. The game itself is no longer the goal, but to use the game to gather users is the goal, which has also caused the deformed development of such game projects: born for traffic, and gradually died due to the dissipation and transfer of traffic.

If the small games that gather traffic are the first step in the development of the ecosystem on TON, then now, the focus of the ecosystem on the TON chain is actually shifting. First of all, at the game level, simple click-click games have evolved into a more playable game mode. Not only games, but more complex applications are also born on TON, and TON's ambition is not just to build a blockchain with various WeChat "applets" and not just to put various "web games" on the chain, but to deepen Defi, so that the TON chain will be more "crypto-native" in addition to traffic.

This can also be seen from the official actions of TON. First, the native USDT is issued on TON. In terms of quantity, it has now risen to fifth place. The TON Foundation also stated that this year it will launch a trustless cross-chain bridge called TON Teleport BTC, which aims to securely realize cross-chain transfers between Bitcoin and TON.

Defi has become the focus of the future development of the TON ecosystem. How will TON realize its ambitions?

Game development will focus more on playability and innovation

Telegram and blockchain are strongly linked through two sub-products. One is Telegram Bot, which is a bit like WeChat’s service account. You send it a message and it sends you a message back. The other is Mini App, which is equivalent to the mini-programs in WeChat. It has a built-in TON wallet and supports TON tokens, BTC, and USDT (TRC-20).

According to TON APP data, there are currently 1,034 applications in the TON ecosystem. TON officials have divided these applications into 19 categories, including CEX, DEX, staking, wallets, utilities, bridges, NFT, social, shopping, Launchpad, development tools, etc.

The development of the TON ecosystem is very rapid. When Golden Finance counted the number of Dapps in TON in early May this year, it was only more than 700. In the past three months, it has grown to more than 1,000.

These projects built on TON have one thing in common: they rely on the huge traffic pool of Telegram's 900 million users, and are also very adaptable to its lower-income user groups and massive traffic patterns.

The most typical track is small games. It is not difficult for games within TON to accumulate tens of millions of users in a short period of time. Games such as Notcoin, Hamster Fight, and Catizen have already accumulated tens of millions of users.

Darrel, the person in charge of public link access of OKX Web3 wallet, said in an interview with Golden Finance that these popular mini-games on TON generally have one thing in common, or the rules they follow. One is that they are simple enough, and do not need to use very complicated designs to raise the user's playing threshold. The second is that they must have social fission attributes and corresponding task systems. Mini-games on the TON chain rely on the huge traffic pool within TG, so there must be certain measures in the community channels to attract traffic. Many games will cooperate with communities within TG to carry out community fission.

At present, the games in TG have developed from simply generating traffic to the next stage, which is to use their own traffic to help other Web3 projects to acquire customers and develop. NOTCOIN has developed to this stage, and it has also started to incubate. Use the small games in TG as an entrance, and then guide traffic to other projects. In particular, it has become an important channel for centralized exchanges in the industry to acquire new customers.

OKX has launched a small game on TG called OKX Racer, which currently has over 5 million users. The gameplay is simple, but also has unique innovations - players guess the rise and fall of BTC prices, and if they guess correctly, they will be rewarded with points, which can be exchanged for corresponding surprise rewards on the OKX exchange in the future.

OKX launched this game as one of its means to enter the TON ecosystem, and it can also help OKX expand its user base on TON and Telegram.

Take the OKX game as an example. Its gameplay settings are actually very close to encryption, which can educate users about encryption. In the future, when points are exchanged for surprise rewards on the exchange, many new customers will be introduced to the OKX exchange. At present, the game is also connected to OKX's Web3 wallet, and users can become Web3 wallet users directly through the game. The above design can well achieve the purpose of converting TG users into exchange users.

Darrel, the person in charge of public link access for OKX Web3 wallet, believes that there are many blockchain games on TG, but most of them are simple nesting dolls, and the life cycle of such games is very short. For a simple game, a unique gameplay is the key to the success of a game. Users can feel the novelty of the game, and the interactive method is obviously different from other games, so users will be willing to try it.

The current development of games in TG has undoubtedly passed the stage of the simple click-click mode of the first generation. In this stage, the playability of the game has undoubtedly increased, and the game production is more sophisticated. In this stage, the originality of the game and the presence of a sufficiently excellent community have become the key to its standing out. The development of the game at this stage is actually to continuously introduce new gameplay and reward mechanisms to keep the game fresh and extend the life cycle of the mini-game.

With the development of the TON ecosystem, especially its proximity to users, it has become an important partner that cannot be ignored by various project parties.

For example, in the TON ecosystem, OKX not only focuses on small games, but also has good cooperation with TON itself, such as helping it to implement some industry standards to assist its development in all aspects. Currently, the OKX Web3 wallet also supports TON. With one-click switch to the TON network, you can explore various DApps in the TON ecosystem...

It is foreseeable that TON has become an important public chain that all parties in the industry cannot ignore. The cooperation among all parties will accelerate the development and iteration of its ecology.

This also allows it to break away from the constraints of traffic business and develop in a more crypto-native direction. Defi is the highlight of its future development.

Defi+payment, the combination of on-chain and off-chain finance

At present, these breakthrough small games are actually laying the foundation for its efforts in Defi in the next stage - allowing users to have their own TON wallets through games, participate in interactions on the TON chain, and cultivate users' on-chain interaction habits.

TON's ambition to develop Defi can also be seen from several major initiatives this year. This year, native USDT was officially launched on the TON chain, and its issuance volume has now jumped to fifth place. This year, TON will also launch a trustless cross-chain bridge called TON Teleport BTC, which aims to safely realize cross-chain transfers between Bitcoin and TON.

Whether it is the native USDT or the high security, low slippage, and low fee references of BTC and ETH, they are paving the way for the explosion of Defi.

The TVL on the TON chain has made a leap forward compared to the past. According to DefiLlama data, its TVL currently ranks tenth, but most of it is contributed by USDT.

Howard, head of developer relations for Asia at the TON Foundation, said that TON's killer application will roughly be a combination of "games + finance", and many DeFi-related applications have appeared in the two recent hackathons held by TON, which is also in line with TON's future development trend.

The current liquidity pledge products, wallets and other infrastructure within TON are actually developing steadily. These are the cornerstones for Defi to achieve a big explosion in the future.

At present, in addition to games, another track worthy of attention in the TON ecosystem is payment. The change in this track comes from the native issuance of USDT on the TON chain, which allows USDT, a token widely used in the Web3 industry and in foreign trade transaction settlement, to be used for payment directly in the chat box in Telegram. Moreover, TON has already connected to multiple third-party payment platforms, allowing merchants to have a variety of choices, which also improves the payment landscape within TON.

The combination of payment and Defi is actually the perfect combination of on-chain finance and off-chain finance. From this point of view, TON has great potential for future development. No matter on which track, TON is building a bridge between Web2 and Web3.

In addition to games, some Dapps worth paying attention to on TON:

Social

In this category, we can see social basic protocols, community management tools, and vertical scenario products such as job recruitment and dating software. Social networking is the background of Telegram, so social products are an important and prosperous category on TON.

MuggleLink: Freelance recruitment platform

TONEX: A social protocol

Beecon: Community management tool that can rank user interactions, etc.

TON Dating: Dating App

Mingle: A dating app. Its advantage is that after a successful match, two people can directly become Telegram friends, and two people can chat on Telegram very conveniently. However, a big bug is that these Dapps do not recommend nearby friends for everyone through positioning. In actual use, people who are thousands of miles apart can only be friends online after being matched.

DeFi

What is worth noting about the development of Defi on TON is that, because its underlying architecture is different from that of Ethereum, we have not yet seen large-scale migration of leading Defi protocols to TON. Currently, TON is still dominated by native Defi protocols:

Tonstakers: Liquidity staking, stake $TON to get $stTON

Bemo: Liquidity Staking

Evaa Protocol: Lending and borrowing protocol

Blum: CeDeFi exchange, one of 13 projects in Binance Labs MVB VII accelerator program

Orbit Bridge: A cross-chain communication protocol developed by Orbit Chain that can currently transfer assets from Klaytn, Polygon, Ethereum, Wemix Mainnet, and Orbit Chain to the TON network

Dex

There are many DEXs that support TON, such as the common Pancake, Uniswap, 1Inch, and Dodo, etc. CEXs are almost all listed on TON, and the NFT ecosystem is relatively mature. If we compare the transaction volume of Stonfi and DeDust, the largest DEXs on TON, with the DEX data on ETH and SOL, there is still a big difference.

Ston.fi: An important project in the TON ecosystem, with core functions including liquidity mining, DEX, lending services, and staking and rewards. Users can earn rewards by providing liquidity, trading tokens, borrowing and lending cryptocurrencies, and staking cryptocurrencies to earn rewards. It has the most complete trading pairs on TON.

DeDust: A DEX with the same functions as Ston.fi

Getgems.io: The most popular NFT trading market on TON, with functions including buying and selling NFTs, minting NFTs and transferring NFTs. It can trade Notcoin NFTs, Telegram virtual accounts, Ton diamond and other NFTs

Anome: NFT asset issuance, trading market and lending protocol

Fragment: The Telegram virtual number trading platform launched by TON in 2021 can trade Telegram IDs and can be traded anonymously

Launchpad

TonUP: Launchpad platform, issued token $UP

Tonstarter: Launchpad platform, DWF Labs, Kingswap and other investors PlatformICO: Simple ICO platform on TON