Original author: Joyce
The entire market sentiment has been very pessimistic recently, especially the altcoin market. Under the circumstance of the instability of the entire Bitcoin market, altcoins have plummeted all the way, and there are many projects that have been cut in half.
However, in this bleak market situation, the performance of the Ton ecosystem is very stable. TON has risen by 23% in the past thirty days. The TVL of the entire Ton ecosystem has taken off since March this year, increasing by more than 6 times in just four months. In addition, projects such as Notcoin in the ecosystem have soared in both price and user volume. Is the summer of the Ton ecosystem coming?
New highlights of Ton Ecosystem
The biggest feature of the Ton ecosystem is that it has 900 million active users on Telegram. However, it has always been criticized that there is not a close connection between Ton and Telegram, and the entire Telegram platform system does not empower Ton too much, and Ton is still air.
However, all this seems to have changed fundamentally since this year.
From March to now, the TVL of the Ton ecosystem has increased from less than 23 million US dollars to the current 145 million US dollars, an increase of more than 6 times. At the same time, the price of TON has also increased by about 3 times during this period, and the bear market in the past month is still very strong. What are the positive factors behind this?
Data source: DefiLlama
1) Using TON to settle Telegram platform advertising system
Unlike social platforms such as Facebook and WeChat, although Telegram has a huge number of users, it has been committed to user privacy since its inception and does not rely on user data to push targeted advertisements.
Therefore, Telegram does not have an accurate user advertising platform, and has abandoned the mainstream advertising profit model of other social media giants. This has also led to Telegram not being able to achieve a true break-even for many years.
It was not until the last two years that Telegram launched an advertising platform that does not rely on a precise user tagging system, and at the same time launched a paid subscription service, which became Telegrams main profit model.
At the end of February this year, founder Durov stated in his Telegram channel that the Telegram advertising platform (with more than one trillion views per month) will be officially open to all advertisers in nearly 100 countries in March. Channel owners will receive 50% of all advertising revenue, and all advertising costs will be settled in TON.
Next month, channel owners on Telegram can start getting monetary rewards for their work. Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views per month. Currently, only 10% of these views are monetized through Telegram Ads, a promotional tool designed with a focus on privacy.
In March, the Telegram ad platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly 100 new countries. Channel owners in these countries will begin receiving a 50% share of any revenue Telegram earns from displaying ads in their channels.
To ensure that ad payments and withdrawals are fast and secure, we will use the TON blockchain exclusively. Similar to how we handle Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads with TON and share the revenue with channel owners. This will form a virtuous circle where content creators will be able to cash out their TON or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels.
For TON, it has to be said that this is a big leap from air to value.
Before this, TON was only used for smart contract transaction processing, staking, cross-chain transactions, and other service fees on the chain, which was not much different from other general public chains. In fact, because the number of developers and users of the TON public chain is far less than that of other popular public chains, the consumption of TON is very insignificant. Although it can be used to purchase virtual goods such as anonymous accounts on Telegram, the total transaction volume does not have much room for imagination.
Using TON as the only settlement asset for the Telegram advertising platform is a big move for the empowerment of TON. It is equivalent to directly empowering Telegrams 900 million users to TON, truly realizing the deep binding of the TON ecosystem and the Telegram platform, and suddenly opening the ceiling of the TON ecosystem and TON prices.
At the same time, in order to prevent the Telegram team from getting more and more TON due to this move, which would cause the risk of TON centralization, Durov later stated that in the future, more than 10% of the TON in the hands of the team will be sold to long-term holders at a discount price, and these sold TONs will have a lock-up period of 1-4 years.
For TON, it is equivalent to the Telegram platform using advertising revenue to continuously repurchase TON, while seeking other long-term investors or institutions. While avoiding TON from being too centralized, it reduces the circulation by locking up positions. Naturally, it is a great benefit of 1+1>2.
2) Launch Ton space
Ton space was launched in September 2023. Before that, the built-in wallet Wallet in Telegram was KYC and could only be used for payment. However, Ton space is a user-controlled private key, which is no different from a general crypto wallet.
After using Ton space, users can seamlessly connect with the App in the Ton ecosystem through their Telegram account, log in to the application in the Ton ecosystem directly from their Telegram account, and participate in various DeFi, GameFi, NFT and other services.
Imagine that in WeChat you can go directly to Pinduoduo or JD.com to shop in the mini-program. Similarly, for Telegram’s 900 million active users, they can directly buy and sell Tokens/NFTs, borrow or participate in the GameFi project in Telegram. For them, the threshold for participating in Web3 is indeed much lower.
Of course, it is also a big move for the Ton ecosystem. After all, no public chain is backed by the large user pool of Telegram like Ton.
3) The platform mainly promotes mini applications
After the payment channel was opened, Telegram began to promote mini applications, which are based on the Telegram platform and can be used without installation, similar to WeChat applets.
For example, Notcoin, which has been very popular recently, is a small program embedded in the platform. Users can directly participate in activities such as Click to Earn in Telegram. The built-in Web3 wallet greatly reduces the users participation threshold. With the official traffic support of Telegram, the total number of users exceeded 40 million in just a few months after its launch.
Currently, with the official traffic support, a large number of Web3 mini-program applications similar to Notcoin have emerged on the Telegram platform. Compared with the GameFi craze previously driven by gold farming studios, participating in games for money through the Telegram platform seems to be able to save the gold farming studio link, and Telegram can directly drive massive user participation.
In addition, there are a series of other actions for the in-depth cooperation between Telegram and Ton ecology. It seems that starting from the second half of 2023, Telegram began to truly determine the strategy of entering Web3 and started in-depth binding cooperation with Ton.
With this series of actions, both TON price and TVL have shown breakthrough growth. For the Telegram platform, it has also realized a profit model with a very high ceiling in addition to advertising and paid subscriptions.
Obviously, this is a win-win situation.
Inventory of Ton Ecosystem Projects
There are currently 874 projects in Ton.app. Although this number is not impressive compared to public chain ecosystems such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon, and only Notcoin is currently listed on the top platform. However, in the past eight months, the number of Ton ecosystem projects has increased by nearly 60%, and the TVL of the entire ecosystem has increased by dozens of times, which indeed shows the strong growth trend of the Ton ecosystem.
Regarding the popular projects in the Ton ecosystem, let’s take a brief look at them:
Notcoin
In the first quarter of this year, the Telegram developer community and Ton Foundation jointly released a report on Telegram ecosystem apps, in which Notcoin was presented as a key case study.
As a click-to-earn game, Notcoin is the most popular Web3 application in Telegram Apps Center and the most well-known project in the Ton ecosystem. In just a few months, the number of users has exceeded 40 million. Although its Token NOT has not formed an application closed loop in the game ecosystem and has been criticized as Memecoin, it does not prevent the surge after the BN wash.
Catizen
Catizen is the largest gaming application platform in the Telegram ecosystem. It currently has more than 20 million total users, more than 500,000 paying users, more than 1.25 million on-chain users, and has ranked first in the Ton Open League for several consecutive seasons.
Hamster Kombat
Hamster Kombat is also a play-to-earn game. It has been very popular recently due to the expected Airdrop. According to official data, it currently has more than 150 million active users, a 50% increase from last week. It is currently ranked third in popularity in the Telegram Apps Center.
Gatto|Game
Gatto is a pet-raising game and an ecological project highlighted by Ton Foundation in its first quarter report of 2024. According to the report data, as of January 2024, Gattos DAU has reached 30,000, with more than 1 million pets created and a monthly income of US$35,000.
Gamee
Gamee is a social gaming platform under Animoca Brands and one of the most popular gaming ecosystems on Telegram. Although the token price plummeted due to a hacker attack in early 2024, Gamee is still very popular in the Telegram ecosystem.
PocketFi
PocketFi is a Telegram trading robot that supports cross-chain transactions. It currently uses a click-to-earn approach to attract users. Due to its simple operation and strong instant feedback, the number of users exceeded 1.4 million just three months after its launch, and it is also very popular in Telegram Apps.
Blum
Blum is a DEX in the Telegram ecosystem, providing spot and simple derivative transactions. However, the relevant functions are not yet online, and points can only be earned through mining in small games. The current number of users has exceeded 10 million.
It is worth noting that Blum was founded by former BN executives and has been selected for the Binance Labs accelerator.
Yescoin
As the name suggests, it is a copycat of Notcoin. It is currently very popular, with the number of users exceeding 18 million and the number of subscribers to its official Telegram channel exceeding 6 million. The growth rate is also quite amazing.
DeDust, Ston.fi
DeDust and Ston.fi are both DEXs in the Telegram ecosystem. Currently, they are among the most popular apps in the Apps Center rankings outside of click-to-earn games.
In DeFiLlama, the TVLs ranked first and second with 320 million and 260 million US dollars respectively. They can be said to be the flagship projects of the entire Ton ecosystem with a TVL of 634 million.
Currently, the official Ston.fi Telegram channel has 680,000 followers, which is more popular than DeDust.
Uxlink
Uxlink is the largest social infrastructure project in the Telegram ecosystem. Based on the rapid fission of acquaintance social networking in Telegram, the currently published registration data has exceeded 10 million, becoming the social infrastructure for more than 10 million users in the SocialFi track.
Uxlink has currently received investment from ZhenFund, Sequoia Capital, GGV and other institutions. Although it has not yet been launched on major platforms, the future development of a SocialFi project of this scale is worth looking forward to.
summary
Judging from the TON price, TVL growth, and the prosperity of ecological projects, the Ton ecosystem is indeed a unique presence in the current bleak market. However, beneath the surface of prosperity there are some problems that cannot be ignored.
For example, in terms of the number of developers, the Ton ecosystem has only 39 full-time developers (Developer report data), and the total number of developers is 175, which is far less than Ethereums 2,392 and 7,864. The figures for Solana are 436 and 1,615 respectively, which are also much higher than the Ton ecosystem.
In addition, the frequent account thefts on the Telegram platform, and the hacking and phishing links are even more rampant after the built-in Web3 wallet, are undoubtedly one of the problems that need to be solved in the Telegram Web3 process, especially for Web3 newcomers with weak security awareness. In addition, the Ton public chain has not been online for a long time and has not experienced too many security incidents. The security of the entire ecosystem is a major test for the future development process.
Of course, whether it is developers or security issues, they can be gradually iterated and optimized in the future development of the ecosystem. After all, the development of the entire Web3 industry is the same, and it is a process of maintenance on the fly.
