Exploration of the Development of the TON Ecosystem: From Historical Evolution to Future Potential

Since 2024, the TON chain ecosystem has shown a trend of vigorous growth. From May 25 to June 17, the maximum increase of Toncoin reached 79.7%, Notcoin saw a maximum increase of 700%, and Fishcoin had a maximum increase of 400%. The TON ecosystem demonstrates a powerful wealth creation effect, attracting a large influx of capital. This article will conduct an in-depth discussion on the development history, core logic, and ecological construction of TON.

1. Project Background

Basic Information

Name: TON ( The Open Network )

Founders: Pavel Durov, Nikolai Durov

Operation Team: TON Foundation

TON is a decentralized first-layer blockchain designed for billions of users, featuring scalability and sharding capabilities, aimed at addressing issues such as high transaction fees, slow transaction speeds, inter-chain communication, and scalability in the blockchain space. Currently, the main operating team of TON is the TON Foundation, a non-profit organization with the goal of enabling 500 million users to have their own digital identities, data, and assets by 2028. Backed by Telegram, the TON chain is a crucial means to achieve this goal. Although the current development of TON is thriving, its development history has been tumultuous.

Twisted development process

● In 2017, the project was launched: Telegram founders Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov began developing a blockchain project called Telegram Open Network (TON), and planned to launch the native cryptocurrency Gram.

● In 2018, the initial coin offering ( ICO ): Telegram raised approximately $1.7 billion through its ICO, becoming one of the largest token offerings at the time. Investors included several major venture capital firms and individual investors, and the ICO also attracted the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ).

● In 2019, development progress: The TON blockchain introduced sharding technology (sharding) to improve scalability and processing speed, and launched a testnet for developers to test at the same time.

● In 2020, regulatory issues and project turning points: Telegram announced its withdrawal from the TON project, and the development work was handed over to an independent open-source developer community. The project was renamed "The Open Network", and the token name was changed to Toncoin. Funds raised from the ICO were refunded.

● In 2021, Community takeover and development: The TON Foundation, founded by Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelianenko, took over the project and continued to promote the development and advancement of TON.

● In 2023, returning to Telegram: The official Telegram announced that the TON blockchain will be its preferred Web3 infrastructure and plans to integrate it into the user interface of the Telegram application; Telegram releases IPO plans.

● In 2024, the expansion of the ecosystem: The application ecosystem of the TON blockchain continues to expand, covering multiple fields such as finance, storage, payments, and domains. Meanwhile, projects like PunkCity, PUNK, and HyperGPT within the TON ecosystem begin to receive widespread market attention. In February of the same year, Telegram announced that it would exclusively use the TON blockchain and Toncoin for all transactions and payment activities with channel owners.

TON has gone through a huge circle from its establishment to its current popularity, but it has steadily improved, showcasing the project's strong vitality from the initial narrative to the concrete implementation of projects.

Core Narrative for Users

In the development of TON, the shadow of Telegram has always been present. While most public chains promote their innovative technologies, the TON chain leverages the 900 million monthly active users of Telegram, playing the card of user demand and convenience.

At the same time, Telegram is no longer satisfied with just being a social communication platform. By continuously enriching its product line, connecting payments and daily life, and providing the potentially huge Bot, Telegram is attempting to transform into a comprehensive platform. This strategic shift not only showcases Telegram's ambitions but also heralds the infinite possibilities of the TON public chain in the future.

Telegram currently has over 1.3 billion registered users and 900 million monthly active users. Freedom of speech and privacy protection have been the mission of Telegram since its inception, and all of this has made Telegram a hub for cryptocurrencies—almost all Web 3.0 projects have Telegram communities for project promotion, message announcements, and community interaction. The Web3 environment of Telegram provides tremendous support for the TON chain ecosystem, laying the community foundation for projects from incubation to ICO.

Increasing market recognition

As of the time of writing, the market value of the TON chain has reached 18.759 billion USD, making it the ninth largest cryptocurrency. At the same time, the TVL of the TON chain has grown rapidly since April, currently reaching 605.72m USDT, ranking 15th among public chains. Clearly, while the growth rate of the TON chain's TVL is fast, it has not yet kept pace with its market value, indicating there is still significant room for improvement.

Financing Information

● In 2018, the first ICO raised 1.7 billion USD, and part of the funds was returned due to a lawsuit by the SEC.

● In April 2022, Huobi Incubator, KuCoin Ventures, and MEXC Pioneer Fund jointly invested $250 million to establish the TON Foundation, focusing on supporting DEX and NFT projects on the TON chain.

● In October 2023, MEXC Ventures provided tens of millions of dollars in investment, aimed at promoting the adoption of the Web3 ecosystem in Telegram.

● In November 2023, Animoca Brands will invest in, research, and analyze platforms to support third-party mini-programs and game projects within the TON ecosystem, while Animoca Brands will become the largest validator.

Telegram initially focused on protecting user privacy, without obvious revenue channels, raising hundreds of millions of dollars through bond issuance to maintain daily operations. Starting in 2022, Telegram began to explore revenue models and recently announced that it is close to achieving profitability. In 2023, Telegram founder Pavel Durov proposed a plan to conduct an initial public offering ( IPO ) within the next two years. The company's valuation has now exceeded $30 billion and it may choose to go public in the United States.

Whether it's TON or Telegram, both are currently in a stage of vigorous development. Investing in the TON ecosystem is equivalent to recognizing the enormous potential of the Web2 social platform Telegram transforming into a comprehensive Web3 platform.

3. Technical Features

Programming Language

TON chain smart contract development does not use popular smart contract languages like Solidity, Rust, or Vyper, but instead has three programming languages: Fift, FunC, and Tact. Fift is geared towards low-level development, focusing on runtime efficiency and is challenging to develop; Tact is a newly launched high-level language of TON, with syntax similar to TypeScript, aimed at reducing development difficulty; FunC is similar to the C language and is currently the preferred choice for development. Given the efficiency of Tact development, mainstream developers may shift towards using Tact in the future.

Cutting-edge technology

● Asynchronous Calls of Smart Contracts: Unlike public chains like Ethereum, the smart contract calls on TON adopt an asynchronous model, which enhances the system's scalability. When one smart contract calls a function of another contract, the call does not execute immediately, and there is no need to complete all transaction processing within a single block. However, this asynchronous calling mechanism also increases the complexity of developing and maintaining applications, making it more challenging for developers to work on the TON blockchain.

● Infinite Sharding: The TON blockchain is designed to be divided into three types of chains: the main chain ( Masterchain ), working chains ( Workingchains, and shard chains ( Shardchains ).

The main chain is the core of the entire network, responsible for storing the metadata and consensus mechanism of the whole network. It records the status of all work chains and shard chains, ensuring consistency and security across the network; work chains are independent blockchains responsible for processing specific types of transactions and smart contracts. Each work chain can have its own rules and characteristics to meet different application needs; shard chains are sub-chains of work chains, used to further divide the workload of the work chains, enhancing processing capacity and scalability. Each work chain can contain multiple shard chains, with shard chains independently processing part of the transactions, thus achieving efficient parallel processing.

● Privacy Protection: The TON chain uses TON Proxy to hide the IP addresses of TON nodes, building a decentralized VPN service that, combined with TON DNS and the TON P2P network, protects user privacy.

Relative Advantage

Although asynchronous calls of smart contracts and sharding technology have been applied in projects like Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, and NEAR Protocol, TON integrates multiple technologies to surpass Ethereum and Solana in various metrics such as transaction confirmation time ( and Time-to-finality ).

Four, Market Analysis

Token Economics

● Token Function: $Toncoin is positioned similarly to the native token on Telegram, which can be used on Telegram to pay for Telegram Premium membership fees and purchase other virtual products at a more favorable discount. On the TON blockchain, $Toncoin can be used for transaction fee payments, staking, cross-chain transactions, decentralized data storage, proxy services, and more.

● Token Supply: The maximum supply of $Toncoin is 5 billion coins. As of June 28, 2022, all $Toncoin have been fully mined, marking the complete transition of TON from the Proof of Work ( PoW ) model to the Proof of Stake ( PoS ) model. Each year, 0.6% (, approximately 3 million coins ), will be used for rewarding validators who maintain network security.

● Token Distribution: Initially, 5 billion $Toncoin tokens were allocated to the team (1.45%) and miners obtained 98.55% through mining. In February 2023, TON initiated a community proposal to freeze 171 inactive early wallets for 48 months, totaling 1.08B $Toncoin(, about 21% of the total supply). This move reflects the TON community's unanimous optimism about the development of the TON chain.

Secondary Market Analysis

● Market Cap: As of June 3, 2024, the market cap of $Toncoin is $18.759 billion, ranking No. 9, with a fully diluted market cap of $39.382 billion, a circulating supply of 2.432 billion coins, and a total supply of 5.107 billion coins.

● Chip Distribution: As of June 3, 2024, according to data analysis, 85.45% of holders hold $0-$1k $Toncoin, 14.16% of holders hold $1k-$100k $Toncoin, and 0.38% of holders hold more than $100k $Toncoin.

According to the analysis of whale holdings, whales hold 68.68% of $TON, while retail investors hold 31.32% of $TON.

According to the holding time analysis, 29.20% of holders have held $Toncoin for more than a year, 16.7% of traders have held $Toncoin for no more than 1 month, indicating a high proportion of diamond hands, and the public is very optimistic about the prospects of TON.

According to the data, the top 10 addresses hold 29.99% of $Toncoin tokens, with a relatively loose chip distribution, indicating a good market condition.

● Trend: In the past year, the price of $Toncoin has risen from 12.4071￥ to 56.54￥, an increase of over 400%, reflecting the strong market expectations and wealth effect of the TON chain.

Five, Ecological Construction

The TON ecosystem currently has over 500 Dapps and a large number of Telegram Bots, covering major areas such as infrastructure, development tools, DeFi, GameFi, NFT, SocialFi, inscriptions, and almost all popular directions. The vertically segmented tracks include Launchpad, wallets, cross-chain bridges, staking and lending, DEX, various chain games, collectibles, and more.

![The elephant in the room, exploring the development context and future potential of the TON ecosystem](