Pavel Durov promised that in 2-3 weeks, Ton will undergo a makeover.
Written by: Eric, Foresight News
On May 4th at night, Beijing time, Telegram founder Pavel Durov unexpectedly tweeted that Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind Ton and will become the largest validator of Ton. It's worth mentioning that Durov only tweeted about Ton 7 times throughout 2025, making this sudden announcement of 'taking over' TON quite surprising.
The ton.org website is currently under maintenance, with just one line stating: ton.org is now controlled by MTONGA (Make TON Great Again).
As a result, the price of TON skyrocketed from around $1.35 to $1.85 in just two days, marking an increase of over 37%.
In 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Telegram Open Network of issuing the Gram token as an unregistered security during its 2018 ICO. Telegram was forced to abandon the project, refund the funds, and publicly announced the cessation of its involvement after open-sourcing the code. Following this, developers Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko, who met during a Telegram programming competition, took over the project and initiated the community-driven project NewTON, inheriting the original TON code, maintaining nodes, testing networks, and gradually advancing the mainnet.
In 2021, the NewTON community upgraded the testnet to mainnet and officially transitioned to the TON Foundation, which was registered as a non-profit organization in Switzerland in 2023, supported by community contributors.
All things considered, it's been 6 years since Telegram was forced to abandon Ton due to regulatory pressure, to now where Telegram's founder has voluntarily announced that he will invest time and energy into promoting the development of Ton. During these 6 years, Ton has experienced a complete cycle of ups and downs.
In April 2022, while the entire market was engulfed in confusion, the TONcoin Fund, backed by investors like Huobi Incubator, Kucoin Ventures, and MEXC Pioneer Fund, suddenly announced a $250 million ecological fund to support projects on Ton. Following that, the TON Foundation also launched a whopping $1 billion ecological fund to drive the development of the Ton ecosystem.
After that, the TON ecosystem experienced a small explosion, gradually setting up infrastructure from domains to storage and DeFi, but it never really made big waves until the emergence of Telegram mini-games.
In fact, from the start of Ton's ecological push, connections with Telegram were established, with both official and third-party projects launching Mini Apps for cryptocurrency transfers or payments on Telegram. The bond between the two has gradually tightened, with mini-games taking it to the next level. Prior to this, many on-chain games fell into decline due to poor experiences, complex gameplay, and difficult promotion, while mini-games on Ton leveraged Telegram's user base of over a billion, spreading like wildfire through simple gameplay like (Candy Crush) and (Sheep Game).
During the mini-game craze, many games developed by various teams amassed millions of users within just days. The most popular at the time were Tap-to-Earn games like Notcoin, where the tokens of numerous gaming projects skyrocketed in a short time, creating plenty of wealth codes. Meanwhile, the price of the TON token also surged past $8 by mid-2024, with a total market cap exceeding $26 billion.
However, this wave came quickly and left just as fast. As the hype around mini-games began to wane, Ton did not have a solid second act to maintain attention. Coupled with the founder being arrested by French authorities for failing to effectively control illegal activities on the platform, concerns about Ton's future caused on-chain activity to plummet, almost overnight.
Recently, Ton started to regain market visibility, again thanks to a tweet from Pavel Durov. On April 9, Pavel Durov announced that Ton had completed an upgrade, boosting speed by 10 times and block generation efficiency by 6 times, with transactions able to be completed in under a second. But this is just the first step in the seven-step MTONGA process; the next step will further reduce the already low transaction fees by another 6 times.
The enhancement in chain performance comes from the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade completed in April. Ton's new consensus mechanism introduces a 'streaming layer' to push state updates, replacing the previous polling mechanism, which shortens block production time to about 400 milliseconds, with finality confirmation of transactions taking only about 1 second. The fee reduction mentioned by Pavel Durov was also completed in early May, with Ton's base fee now reduced to approximately $0.0005.
Additionally, in the first quarter of this year, Ton underwent an optimization of its infrastructure, implementing brand-new nodes built with Rust, significantly simplifying operations and maintenance, making it suitable for institutional-level and large-scale deployments—more secure and modular. Developer tools like Builders Portal also rolled out version 2.0, with version 3.0 expected to launch in the second quarter.
While the ultimate goal of these changes wasn't explicitly stated, it's clear that Pavel Durov aims to leverage Telegram as a traffic entry point, making Ton a payment and interaction gateway for the development of Mini Apps, AI tools, and more. Especially in the AI realm, a lot of 'lobster masters' are choosing to control AI tasks via Telegram. In the future, Telegram may not just be a tool for person-to-person communication but also an important interface for human-machine interaction, with low-cost and high-frequency trading being essential infrastructure to realize these visions.