I have one fundamental issue with $TON.
Its biggest advantage is also its biggest drawback: Telegram.
$Gram is often marketed as a blockchain with potential access to a billion users. But those billion users don’t belong to TON. They belong to Telegram. And that’s a pretty important distinction.
If a restaurant is the only one past airport security, a large number of customers doesn’t necessarily make it the best restaurant in town.
Decentralization is much the same story. You can have hundreds of validators, open-source code, and a beautiful architecture. But if one private product is also your main source of users, your main distribution channel, and largely determines the rules of the game for developers, the dependency doesn’t go away. It’s just a little further up the stack from the blockchain.
The second problem with TON is that it’s quite complex technologically. Sharding, asynchronous messages, contracts interacting through chains of transactions. On paper, it’s a powerful architecture for scaling. In practice, someone always pays for complexity. Usually the developer, and then the user.
And the third issue is reliability. TON has already run into network problems during sharp spikes in load. That’s normal for a young blockchain. But if your main thesis is that a billion Telegram users will join the blockchain tomorrow, high load stops being a stress test. It becomes a regular Tuesday.
So I’d evaluate TON with a very simple thought experiment.
Take Telegram out of the picture.
Would developers still choose this blockchain over Ethereum, Solana, and other networks purely for its technology, liquidity, tools, and ecosystem?
That’s where the answer is no longer so obvious.
Its biggest advantage is also its biggest drawback: Telegram.
$Gram is often marketed as a blockchain with potential access to a billion users. But those billion users don’t belong to TON. They belong to Telegram. And that’s a pretty important distinction.
If a restaurant is the only one past airport security, a large number of customers doesn’t necessarily make it the best restaurant in town.
Decentralization is much the same story. You can have hundreds of validators, open-source code, and a beautiful architecture. But if one private product is also your main source of users, your main distribution channel, and largely determines the rules of the game for developers, the dependency doesn’t go away. It’s just a little further up the stack from the blockchain.
The second problem with TON is that it’s quite complex technologically. Sharding, asynchronous messages, contracts interacting through chains of transactions. On paper, it’s a powerful architecture for scaling. In practice, someone always pays for complexity. Usually the developer, and then the user.
And the third issue is reliability. TON has already run into network problems during sharp spikes in load. That’s normal for a young blockchain. But if your main thesis is that a billion Telegram users will join the blockchain tomorrow, high load stops being a stress test. It becomes a regular Tuesday.
So I’d evaluate TON with a very simple thought experiment.
Take Telegram out of the picture.
Would developers still choose this blockchain over Ethereum, Solana, and other networks purely for its technology, liquidity, tools, and ecosystem?
That’s where the answer is no longer so obvious.
