The Sediment After the TON Craze: A Key Period from Traffic Miracle to Value Transformation

In the third quarter of 2024, the TON blockchain rapidly exploded, leveraging Telegram's vast user base through the Tap-to-Earn mini-games, attracting hundreds of millions of users and creating a miracle of on-chain growth. The token issuance of multiple TON ecosystem projects also brought a strong wealth effect, making "TON/Telegram" one of the hottest narratives in Web3.

However, after the frenzy, TON is entering a cooling period worth paying attention to. Similar to the usual Web3 narrative, after the bubble bursts, will anything solidify or will it revert to zero? Is it a temporary drop in traffic, or has value conversion failed to materialize? At this critical juncture, it is necessary for us to reassess whether TON has the long-term potential to become a "super on-chain gateway" through detailed data, ecological development paths, and technological layouts.

1. The Tap-to-Earn Craze Retreats: The Data Decline and Cooling Period of TON

According to the official introduction of TON, TON( The Open Network) is a decentralized open internet aimed at bringing 500 million people on-chain, built by the community based on Telegram's technology. Leveraging the Web2 social platform Telegram, which has nearly 1 billion users, TON indeed has the potential to achieve the goal of bringing 500 million people into the on-chain world and has seen great success in 2024:

1. Toncoin(TON token ) has a market cap exceeding 25 billion USD, ranking among the top 10 in cryptocurrency market value.
2. Tap-to-earn mini game Hamster Kombat officially reveals it has attracted over 300 million users;
3. The number of new addresses added daily on the TON blockchain reached over 700,000, with active addresses exceeding 1.657 million;
4. Multiple Telegram mini-game assets have a market value exceeding $500 million, and the on-chain DeFi TVL is expected to grow by over 5500% in 2024.

The dual miracle of traffic and wealth has made TON one of the absolute focal points of the Web3 narrative in 2024. However, similar to previous Web3 booms, short-term surges are often accompanied by data declines. The TON ecosystem is currently experiencing a phase of "narrative cooling": whether it's the daily new wallet numbers, active addresses, or the TVL and trading volume of core DEX (Stone.fi and Dedust), all have significantly declined from their peak levels. Although there have been some short-term rebounds during this period, they are mostly temporary recoveries driven by specific projects; looking at the annual trend, several indicators have fallen back to the levels seen before the narrative began.

However, it is not all pessimistic signals. The number of Jetton Wallet ( non-zero balance wallets ) is still steadily increasing, indicating that the accumulation of fundamental users is ongoing, but the growth rate has clearly slowed down. At the same time, the number of NFT mintings also continues to grow, showing that the on-chain application ecosystem is still being continuously promoted.

According to the keyword trends from Google Trends, the overall search popularity of TON is gradually declining, especially the attention to the ecosystem itself is more significantly decreasing. In contrast, the market's focus on Token prices remains stronger.

However, a decline in data does not necessarily mean the end of the narrative. Similar examples are not uncommon: Bitcoin once experienced on-chain overload due to the inscription craze, but ultimately activity returned to a relatively stable level; Solana and Base, after experiencing a data halving, saw a resurgence of user inflow and reached new highs again alongside technical optimizations and ecosystem advancements.

Does TON also have the ability to complete a deep transformation from traffic to value after the hype fades? Is it a temporary dormancy, or will it ultimately become a "narrative relic"? The answer will ultimately be determined by action. Next, we will analyze the changes that are quietly happening in TON "after the tide recedes" from aspects such as its organizational strategy, ecological construction, technological upgrades, and narrative transformation.

2. Major Actions Frequent: Team Reshuffle, Compliance and New Markets, Major Infrastructure Development

Since the launch on a well-known trading platform in August 2024, the narrative of TON has entered a new phase. On the surface, the enthusiasm has cooled, but in reality, it is a period of accelerated layout: including team restructuring, regulatory compliance exploration, deep binding with Telegram, technology stack expansion, and incentives for developers and capital injection aimed at the global market.

2.1 High-level Replacement and Compliance Efforts: TON Accelerates Mainstreaming Path

At the beginning of 2025, the personnel adjustments at the TON Foundation sent a clear signal: globalization and compliance will become the core strategic directions for the coming years.

On January 15, former board member and founder of Kingsway Capital, Manuel Stotz, was appointed as the new president of the TON Foundation. Kingsway is a veteran investment institution managing billions of dollars in assets for American investors, and Stotz's background brings a strong "traditional capital markets" signal to TON. According to the official announcement, he will work alongside the former president and current board member Steve Yun to promote TON's international expansion, with a focus on the U.S. market—an active but highly regulated region, seen as a battleground in TON's strategy.

On April 24th, the TON Foundation further appointed MoonPay co-founder Maximilian Crown as CEO. MoonPay is a leading global cryptocurrency payment infrastructure company that has obtained compliance licenses in multiple jurisdictions, including the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands. Crown has extensive experience in global operations and compliance handling, and his appointment is widely seen as a significant step for TON to officially embrace regulation and move towards global mainstream adoption.

It is worth noting that Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram and an early promoter of the TON blockchain, was briefly detained in August 2024 due to Telegram's alleged violations of regulatory rules, returning to the public eye only in March 2025. Although there has been no conclusion regarding the incident, the timing highly coincides with the strategic adjustments of the TON Foundation, which may have indirectly prompted the team to pay more attention to regulatory issues, clearing obstacles for future global expansion.

Recently, the TON Foundation is actively communicating with US regulators. According to the TON ecosystem report, the self-custody wallet for TON is planned to be launched in the US in the second quarter of 2025. In March 2025, the TON Foundation disclosed that several US venture capital firms hold over $400 million in Toncoin. This can also be seen as important evidence of TON's transformation towards compliance and globalization.

From the global distribution of Telegram users, if TON hopes to convert them into Web3 users, it must meet the regulatory requirements for crypto assets in various countries. Otherwise, it will not only be difficult to implement applications in key markets, but it may also pose potential legal and business risks to Telegram itself.

In fact, the global expansion of TON has already begun. Starting from November 2023, TON will launch a phased promotion in several African countries, followed by expansion into multiple markets in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, paving the way for subsequent global compliance.

2.2 TON × Telegram: Deep integration, binding ecological entry

In January 2025, Telegram officially designated TON as the sole blockchain infrastructure for its continuously evolving mini-app ecosystem, with the core being the adoption of the TON Connect protocol to seamlessly connect Telegram mini-apps with blockchain wallets, thereby simplifying user interactions with decentralized applications within the messaging app. This exclusive protocol establishes TON as the actual blockchain layer for Telegram's nearly 1 billion users. This positions TON to potentially become the "Web3 version of WeChat Pay," fully leveraging Telegram's massive network effects.

In the payment system, Telegram promises to exclusively accept Toncoin as a non-legal tender payment currency within its ecosystem, applicable to scenarios including Telegram Stars, Premium membership, advertising system ( Telegram Ads ), and payment gateway service ( Telegram Gateway ). Developers and channel operators can directly receive income through Toncoin, initially establishing an internal payment and revenue distribution system based on Toncoin.

At the same time, payment service provider RedotPay has supported the USDT version of Toncoin and USDt( on the TON blockchain, and integrated mainstream payment methods such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Alipay, which can be used at over 130 million offline merchants worldwide, further expanding TON's payment capabilities in the real world.

The TON Space wallet has recently launched the ability to pay fees using Telegram Stars, which is essentially a kind of crypto "abstraction" solution. It allows users to complete transactions without needing to understand complex on-chain operations. This approach differs from traditional chain abstraction solutions, as it relies not only on a large influx of traffic but also promotes the transformation of on-chain applications towards "lifestyle" and "normalization." According to the official plan, starting from the second quarter of 2025, American users will be able to directly experience TON wallet services within Telegram, further bridging the gap between Web2 consumption scenarios and on-chain asset management.

) 2.3 Ecology: From Mini Game Boom to Diversified Track Expansion

The first wave of the TON ecosystem boom is mainly driven by mini-games. Under the combination stimulus of "airdrop incentives + easy to get started", users quickly flocked in. For example, the airdrop of "Hamster Kombat" in September 2024 reached a peak of 300 million monthly active users in July, but by November, only 52 million active users remained, with over 86% user loss in just a few months. While simple and replicable game mechanics can create a "growth illusion" in the short term, they struggle to form long-term user retention and expose the homogenization issues in the early stages of the ecosystem.

In the face of this situation, TON is working to expand the builder ecosystem on one hand, and accelerating the layout of infrastructure on the other. In April 2025, TON announced a strategic cooperation with Chinese gaming giant KingNet###, which has over 100 million users(, and hosted the first large-scale game developer conference in Asia, attracting dozens of studios from the WeChat ecosystem to begin exploring how to build Web3 applications based on Telegram and TON.

With the launch of the Telegram App Center feature, users can directly explore integrated third-party applications within the platform. An increasing number of TON ecosystem applications are appearing on the recommendation list, and they are no longer limited to gaming categories, but also include various dimensions such as social, payment, DeFi, and NFT, marking the preliminary expansion of its application ecosystem.

According to statistics from a certain data platform, among the 187 TON projects recorded, about 14% focus on the infrastructure direction. In addition to underlying services such as oracles and wallets, there are also development assistance platforms like TONXAPI and Play Deck, which lower the technical threshold for new builders and accelerate the sustainable development of the ecosystem.

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In addition to gaming, the TON ecosystem is expanding into multiple new narrative tracks: including PayFi, RWA) which will be detailed below(, as well as applications such as AI, contract trading) Perp DEX(, DePIN, and others. For example:

• Jointly launch TON perpetual contract DEX incentive activities with a certain perpetual contract DEX;
• Launch bounty program with AI Agent operating system ElizaOS;
• Collaborate with a certain aggregator protocol to promote the development of the TON ecosystem aggregator......

The ecological potential has also attracted a positive response from institutional funds. In September 2024, an investment institution invested 30 million USD in TON, and the following month another institution announced an additional 10 million USD investment to promote the development of the Telegram application. In early 2025, former president of the TON Foundation, Steve Yun, launched the venture capital fund TVM Ventures, with an initial size of 100 million USD, focusing on supporting DeFi, PayFi, and underlying infrastructure projects, further enhancing TON's appeal to developers and its ecological moat.

) 2.4 Technical Upgrade: Advancements in Performance and Scalability

According to the roadmap released by TON for the first half of 2025, the core goal of its technological iteration is to alleviate congestion and enhance scalability and stability. This round of updates covers four major directions, reflecting TON's evolutionary logic towards a "high-load, high-frequency application type blockchain":

1. Accelerator Mainnet Upgrade

This is TON since its establishment.