The post The TON Blockchain Took Everyone by Surprise in 2024 With Huge Ecosystem Growth appeared first on Coinpedia Fintech News
2024 was a transformative year for The Open Network (TON), which reached heights that even its most ardent supporters would have been hard placed to predict back in January. With incredible growth across key metrics like active users, total value locked (TVL), and onchain volume, TON outmuscled every other emerging L1.
Leveraging its unique ties to Telegram and its robust technical framework, TON redefined what a scalable, user-centric blockchain ecosystem can achieve. But its success owes less to its architecture, impressive as this is, and much more to the investors and users who got behind it and elevated it into the preeminent retail chain for NFTs, games, and memecoins galore. As 2025 dawns, TON’s breakout year provides a roadmap for what’s possible when technical innovation meets real-world adoption.
Breaking Records in 2024
TON began 2024 with a modest $15M in TVL and ended the year at an impressive $275M, reflecting an 18x increase over 12 months. This can be seen in the Dune dashboard DWF Ventures shared that charts TON activity. As the leading web3 investor noted in its summary of TON’s growth this year, much of the credit goes to the dapps that gained serious market share, not least Catizen and Hamster Kombat.
What’s significant about these dapps, as well as memecoins such as Notcoin and DOGS, is that they showed what TON projects are capable of when they develop their own distinctive culture. In other words, rather than simply recreating the most popular frogs and dogs on other chains, they went for original content and ideas that were deeply aligned with the spirit of The Open Network.
Daily transaction volumes on TON regularly surpassed 4 million this year, and its DEXs processed over 100,000 trades per day. With around 750,000 active daily users, TON has entered the upper echelons of blockchain networks by user activity.
Stables Show Up
The integration of native USDT in May marked a pivotal moment for TON. Within seven months, the stablecoin’s supply on the network surpassed 1.4 billion, making it a cornerstone of TON’s DeFi actvity. By the year’s end, USDT accounted for over 25% of DEX trading volumes, deepening liquidity and user engagement.
At the same time, TON’s token price pulled a respectable 1.5x. This combination of technical milestones and financial performance demonstrated TON’s ability to deliver real-world utility while rewarding its stakeholders.
Technical Advancements Catalyze Growth
TON’s layered architecture, which includes shard chains and TON DNS, proved instrumental in driving its scalability and enhancing usability. TON maintained low transaction costs and rapid confirmation times throughout the year, with minimal outages, making it a reliable chain to build and trade on.
The integration of TON DNS, enabling human-readable wallet addresses, simplified onboarding for new users. Meanwhile, tools like Tonkeeper, the leading non-custodial wallet for TON, provided seamless access to the network’s growing ecosystem, setting the stage for broader adoption. Tonkeeper kept releasing new features all year, from fiat-onramps to support for gasless transactions.
Telegram’s native integration of TON wallets was a game-changer, lowering barriers to entry for its 800 million users. Telegram-based trading bots, both for TON and for Solana and EVM chains, was a dominant theme. By mid-2024, TON wallet downloads had surpassed 50 million, underscoring the symbiotic relationship between the blockchain and its parent platform.
DeFi Did Numbers
TON’s DeFi ecosystem came of age in 2024, with protocols like STON.fi and bemo leading the charge. The inclusion of USDT fueled trading activity, while TON’s interoperability allowed developers to create applications that interacted seamlessly with other blockchains. These developments laid the groundwork for more advanced DeFi protocols including lending platforms, liquidity pools, and synthetic assets.
Beyond DeFi, TON saw significant growth in gaming and SoFi applications. Developers leveraged Telegram’s integration to launch entertainment-focused decentralized applications. Memecoin launchpads proliferated in particular.
TON Soaks Up VC Bucks
TON’s prolific year was helped by the significant amount of capital that flowed into its ecosystem all year. DWF Ventures was predictably one of the first VCs to spot the network’s potential, investing $10M in late 2022. Then, in September 2024, cryptocurrency exchange Bitget and Foresight Ventures jointly invested $30 million in TON. This strategic investment was directed towards the development of Telegram-based projects, particularly focusing on tap-to-earn games like Hamster Kombat and Notcoin.
TON Ventures then launched with an inaugural fund of $40 million in August 2024. The firm focuses on investing in early-stage startups building on the TON blockchain, targeting sectors such as decentralized finance, gaming, and the creator economy. Then in December, OKX Ventures, the investment arm of crypto exchange OKX, announced a $5 million investment in TON Ventures to establish a network of experienced builders to develop best practices for TON applications, complementing OKX Ventures’ previous $10 million Telegram Growth Hub.
Other major investments include Pantera Capital, managing over $5 billion in assets, which made a notable investment in TON back in May. Two months earlier, Yolo Investments announced an $8 million pledge into TON startups to support the ecosystem’s growth and development. These substantial investments reflect a strong vote of confidence in TON’s potential to drive mainstream adoption of blockchain technologies, particularly through its integration with Telegram’s extensive user base.
Why 2025 Looks Even Brighter
With a strong foundation in place, TON is poised for even greater achievements in 2025. Its unique alignment with Telegram remains a powerful differentiator, offering unparalleled access to a global user base. The network’s focus on low fees and user-friendly design, meanwhile, leaves it primely positioned to onboard millions more users in the coming year.
As TON continues to refine its ecosystem and expand its offerings, it has the potential to become the leading retail chain, particularly for consumer-facing verticals such as gaming and NFTs. Whether it’s dominating the DeFi space or pioneering social finance through Telegram mini-apps, TON has all the ingredients to make 2025 its best year yet.
