Another TOKEN 2049 came to an end in the flood in Dubai, when the secondary market was in a correction phase. Therefore, as a practitioner, apart from the blessing of prosperity when encountering water, it seems that no certain content that quickly swept the screen was produced during the entire summit. I still remember the headlines and words that occupied the headlines of various industry media after Hayes speech at the Singapore Summit in September 2023.
But if we were to find someone as influential as Hayes at the Dubai summit, it would undoubtedly be Telegram CEO and TON founder Pavel Durov.
The reason is that TON is probably the most popular project during the Dubai conference. First of all, thanks to the fact that in the past few months, TON tokens have continuously broken new highs, with the highest increase of about 475%, and ecological tokens have also increased sharply, such as UP, which has increased by more than 400%, and Meme tokens such as Fish have increased by dozens of times, which is the period of the highest market attention.
At the summit, Durov, top foreign aid Tether, and a number of TON ecosystem stars also revealed a lot of news, which made us look forward to the future.
So after this summit, what news should we pay attention to? Which projects in the ecosystem should we pay more attention to? In this article, we will try to summarize it in detail.
TON’s key news in TOKEN 2049
At the main venue of TOKEN 2049, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov delivered a speech and announced three main pieces of news:
Durov is second from the left
1. Reiterated Telegrams ecological concept and announced more application promotion work. Durov said that we love blockchain technology because we care about freedom, and hope that there will be fewer crypto fraud projects and people can freely build their own tools, applications and businesses. On Telegram, third-party developers will be allowed more freedom than other communication applications, and more applications and chat rooms will be promoted later this year.
2. Provides maximum income support for creators. Durov said that in the next few weeks, an introduction for creators will be issued, creators will receive 70% of the income, and a few weeks later, in-app purchases of physical and digital goods will be allowed. At the same time, Telegram channel owners will be able to withdraw 50% of advertising revenue for the first time.
3. Finally, regarding Meme, Durov said that we are organizing the promotion of Telegram Stickers, and Stickers and Emoji may also become Memecoin.
(Previously, in order to promote Meme, TON launched the Meme development community Memelandia.)
In addition to the announcements from Durov’s speech, there are three other recent progress announcements from TON:
1. First, let’s talk about the USDT issued by Tether on TON. TON will provide 11 million TON tokens as incentives for early adopters of USDT on the chain. 5 million of them will be used to reward USDT holders, another 5 million will provide liquidity support for Ston.fi and DeDust, and the last 1.2 million will be used for fee-free withdrawals from exchanges.
2. The second piece of news is still an incentive for the use of USDT. TON Wallet has partnered with the TON Foundation to distribute $30 million worth of TON tokens to USDT holders. Participants can also earn 50% annualized on their balances. Currently, TON Wallet users can now transfer USDT to contacts for free, or withdraw to external TON wallets until the end of June.
3. The last piece of news is about the ecological funding plan. TON has launched the Open League DeFi funding plan, which aims to provide support to Web3 builders in DeFi and dApp. Currently, TON will provide four levels of support based on the project’s current TVL on other chains, team experience and other indicators, with a maximum amount of US$520,000.
What methods are ecological promoters using?
The TON ecosystem has grown, but the 600-odd projects in the ecosystem are not enough to support the huge market value. The TON ecosystem now has a huge market but few ecological projects.
Telegrams 1 billion users worldwide, built-in wallet functions, and functions such as TON Space and bot all indicate a huge market space. At this time, the TON ecosystem is like a blue ocean, waiting for other applications to enter.
Referring to the development experience of other ecosystems, we can find that currently, the powerful teams and projects basically adopt the one subject radiating to support multiple approach to promote application development in the ecosystem, which can not only generate revenue through diversified businesses, but also maintain the market value of each project.
For example, the well-known Consensys is the creator and promoter of many products such as MetaMask, Infura, Linea, Besu, Teku, etc. The founder of ConsenSys is also closely involved in the Ethereum ecosystem, but from the overall product attributes, it is still more inclined to the infrastructure level. Another team with the same construction idea is Offchain labs.
We can also see some similar team business construction at the application layer. For example, AAVE, we all know that AAVE is a large-scale Defi on Ethereum and other L2 and multiple L1. Now in the development of multiple cycles, we can see that AAVE has also promoted the construction of other applications, such as Lens, an earlier conceptual application project of Socialfi, GHO, a stablecoin project released in 2023, and Ehtena, whose supporters have recently become famous, including the founders of AAVE, Curve, and Synthetix.
We may see more examples in other ecosystems. For example, Jupiter in the Solana ecosystem created the Meme project WEN, and Avalanche promoted the DEX Pangolin. Under the education of the market, project owners are well aware that it is far better to set up or incubate projects themselves than to wait for external application partners.
In an ecosystem like TON that needs to rise quickly, there are many teams that also use one team to promote the construction of a multi-business ecosystem. This is the fastest way at present. One team can use the same type of technology, and the open source field can provide sufficient case guidance for the expansion of various applications. We have also found several teams of the same type in the TON ecosystem.
The main drivers
1. TON Foundation/Telegram
The team and developers behind TON are undoubtedly the biggest and most powerful promoters and builders of the ecosystem. In traditional public chain teams, a completely decentralized design is adopted, so most of them almost only build chains and passively wait for the ecosystem to grow, or only focus on currency prices and the secondary market in the early stage.
The TON Foundation and its related organizations have been playing an active role in the development and application of TON. For example, the applications recommended by TON include TON DNS, Tribute, Fragment, TON Diamonds, and Getgems. After searching for information on platforms such as GitHub, we can find some traces left by TON officials behind the development of these applications.
First of all, there is no need to say much about TON DNS; Getgems github development information can be found to be related to TONs gorpc development; on the other hand, you can also find parts related to Telegram and TON. Fragment is a typical use case. This is a trading platform that supports Telegram usernames and TON wallets to log in. Collectibles can be traded and advertising payments can be completed through TON tokens.
There is no doubt that as the largest stakeholders, TON and Telegram have taken the initiative in the development of the ecosystem and have exerted a huge influence.
2. TOP (The Open Platform)
Another team that played a huge role is TOP, whose founder Andrew is a member of the TON Foundation. At the same time, its platform has established multiple projects and tools within the ecosystem, such as Wallet in Telegram, TonKeeper wallet used on the PC, and Notcoin, which is rumored to have millions of users in recent months.
We found that the projects it established through investment and incubation include NFT, gamefi, development tools and other types. In short, TOP is involved in almost all the core components of the TON ecosystem. From a business perspective, this is understandable, just as Metamask and ConsenSys behind it have made great contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem, but TOPs huge tentacles have also led to voices in the community defining it as a monopoly.
3. Microcosm labs
In addition to the two Russian-led forces mentioned above, we have also seen the development of the Asian ecosystem. Microcosm Labs is a team established in June 2023 that focuses on the construction of the TON ecosystem. With the assistance of the TON Foundation and the TONCoin Foundation, it launched its first Launchpad TonUP in August 2023, and subsequently held multiple IDOs for Defi, Gamefi, etc. in the TON ecosystem. Currently, TonUP has more than 300,000 community users, and the token UP has a trading market value of approximately US$100 million. TonUP has also participated in multiple application grant incentive activities within the ecosystem.
In addition to launchpad, Microcosm Labs is also trying to do more construction, including launching modular DEX PixelSwap, which is the first DEX on TON that supports weighted pools, which also makes LBP issuance on TON a reality. In addition, because DEX adopts a modular design concept, it will be developer-friendly through SDK and API, and promote developers to develop and design more asset issuance and trading businesses.
According to the news released by Microcosm Labs, PixelSwap will be tested on the mainnet in May and will invite the worlds top auditing companies to participate in the audit.
In addition to DEX, Microcosm Labs has also invested in and incubated several products focusing on the TON ecosystem, including games, GameFi, DeFi, etc. The specific portfolios that can be found include: TonUP, PixelSwap, TonTogether, DetectiveTON, Cwallet, CCPayment, etc. Among them, in addition to the launchpad and DEX introduced earlier, TonTogether is a lossless lottery project based on the TON network, and DetectiveTON is a vertical media focusing on the TON ecosystem.
Recently, Microcosm Labs has also launched the Move to TON grant, providing funds of up to US$50,000 to promote more projects to enter the TON platform in the most efficient way. For migrating projects, Microcosm Labs can help complete the guidance, migration, and token listing stages, as well as provide assistance in subsequent marketing, business development, exchange listing or token marking.
At present, Microcosm labs may be a standard template for the development of more builders or users in the future. Among unofficial projects, its depth of ecological immersion and product types are currently leading.
What else does TON need?
TON is developing, but what we see is that TON is different from traditional Web3 or Crypto. It has extremely high value because of Telegram, but it is still constrained by Telegrams development speed, ecological development, product design, or touches the shortcomings of other Web3 developers. Therefore, for the TON ecosystem, perhaps a more thorough transformation of Telegram into a platform suitable for Web3 will achieve the ultimate goal.
Before and after the Dubai Conference, from advertising to tokens, to creators, and now to emoticons, Memecoin, payments, transactions, etc., the only answer can be summarized in one sentence: TON needs time, and needs to go through a cycle of construction and value precipitation. When the price of TON tokens reached a new high, TON had already entered the top ten cryptocurrencies in the world. So after we expand our expectations, what kind of ranking will TON get? Please leave it to time and future practitioners to verify.
