Author: Blockworks Research

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

 

Recently, the narrative about TON and Telegram has been very popular, and many people believe that TON will be the next SOL or ETH. Blockworks Research published an article to interpret it, believing that TON's subsequent growth is weak and may not live up to expectations.

Telegram user stickiness is not high

Telegram has a global presence and a significant number of daily active users (DAU) that can divert users to TON. By this measure, Telegram is one of the most used applications in the world.

According to data provided by Telegram, Telegram is one of the most popular applications in the world, with a total of 900 million users, ranking 8th among global applications.

However, measured by DAU, Telegram's user stickiness is overestimated.

The DAU/MAU ratio of various social applications in the figure below shows that although Telegram has a high MAU (monthly active users), its DAU is relatively low (around 55 million to 200 million, which is very low compared to competing applications), and the DAU/MAU ratio is only 15%.

In comparison, Facebook's ratio is 69%, WeChat is about 67%, Instagram is 60%, TikTok (US market only) is 49%, and Twitter (X) is 45%. This shows that Telegram's market penetration is low and its profitable user base is lower than the market expected.

Note: The DAU/MAU ratio can measure the stickiness of network or application users.

Incompatible with EVM, few programming languages ​​used

The TON ecosystem team will face challenges with the lack of EVM compatibility and FunC (the blockchain’s native programming language).

The TON Virtual Machine (TVM) is not compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) because TON uses a completely different architecture (TON is asynchronous, while Ethereum is synchronous). Therefore, the TON ecosystem does not support development in Ethereum's Solidity programming language.

According to a 2023 developer survey report (with more than 90,000 developers participating), Rust is the most popular language, with more than 80% of developers hoping to use it again next year. 46.4% of developers expect to use Solidity.

There are three programming languages ​​available on TON: Fift, FunC, and Tact. Currently, the most used language among the three is FunC. Although FunC looks a lot like C, it is generally not well known or respected.

Terminal market coverage is limited

A big part of the TON narrative that grew was that Telegram would be the next WeChat. But WeChat is blocked from the US market and only serves the Chinese market.

In stark contrast, today’s app market is dominated by deep-pocketed tech giants with well-established network effects, while Telegram’s largest markets are scattered across the Asia-Pacific region (outside of China and Eastern Europe), adding a layer of complexity for startups leveraging Telegram for distribution.

The following is the distribution of Telegram downloads throughout 2022:

  • India: 104 million downloads.

  • Russia: 34 million downloads.

  • Indonesia: 27 million downloads

  • United States: 26 million downloads.

  • Brazil: 21.94 million downloads.

  • Egypt: 14.85 million downloads.

  • Vietnam: 11.84 million downloads.

  • Mexico: 11.61 million downloads.

  • Ukraine: 10.76 million downloads.

  • Türkiye: 9.79 million downloads.

FDV is overvalued

Despite these realities, TON still has huge growth potential and little margin of safety for new investors.

The figure below shows that among all public chains, TON's FDV is 8.6 times its network's annualized DEX transaction volume, ranking first and at the highest level.

In addition, FDV is 927 times the annualized cost of its network, ranking high among all public chains.