The forgotten public chain TON is the next opportunity to get rich. How big will the explosion be in 2024?
After a long period of downturn, the TON public chain finally started to take off, with the total locked-in volume exceeding 78 million, a record high. In addition, a large number of Memecoins have emerged in its ecosystem, and the TON Foundation has also announced the recruitment of a Memecoin ecosystem leader, which shows its intention to vigorously develop the Meme ecosystem. However, this move has also sparked some controversy, namely, can TON replicate the Solana Meme craze? After all, unlike the Solana ecosystem, TON's DeFi ecosystem is still in its early stages, and the current DeFi applications and tools are relatively limited. There are also challenges such as centralization and insufficient capital efficiency.
Project Description:
TON (The Open Network) is a decentralized network that aims to build an open Internet environment for everyone. Originally conceived by Telegram founders Nikolai and Pavel Durov, TON's development has now shifted to community-driven. This shift emphasizes its fundamental principles of decentralization and the broader community's commitment to its growth and innovation. Although Telegram later distanced itself from the project due to regulatory challenges with the SEC, the network remains closely associated with the messaging app, integrating various blockchain-based services (such as cryptocurrency payments and storage solutions) directly into Telegram's ecosystem.
TON chain development and status:
TON's goal is to provide easy-to-use tools and reliable and stable infrastructure to make massive adoption easier. Although TON was launched on exchanges in 2021 and subsequently launched infrastructure and functions such as TON payment, storage, DNS, and cross-chain bridges (official bridges support TON/ETH and BSC), TON really attracted widespread attention due to the craze for Telegram Bots such as Unibot and Bananagun in July last year. In the Token 2049 event in September, Telegram officially announced its official cooperation with TON and launched the self-hosted crypto wallet TON Space, which pushed TON to a climax. So far, the price of TON has risen from $1.2 in August last year to $3.8 (an increase of 215%), and its market value has squeezed into the top 20, becoming a bright dark horse in the previous bear market. Now, although TON's popularity has declined, as the only public chain officially supported by Telegram and backed by Telegram's 900 million active users, TON will unfold a completely different narrative from the perspectives of payment, social interaction, and mini-programs against the backdrop of a number of existing public chains' volume performance (TPS), volume MEV compatibility, and volume narrative.
As of March 20, 2024, there are 301 validators on the TON chain, and the total number of $TON staked under the PoS mechanism is 440 million, distributed in 29 countries. The total number of accounts on the TON chain has been on the rise for a long time, with 8.12 million accounts. According to official information from the Dubai Conference, TON has achieved a 2.5-fold increase in active user addresses in the past year, with a daily transaction volume of approximately $220,000. The current TVL on the TON chain is $53.43 million, and a total of 13 projects have been included in DefiLlama. In addition to the TON chain, TON also has TON Storage, a decentralized file storage system; TON DNS, which assigns readable names to accounts, smart contracts, services, and nodes; TON Pay, a small payment channel that enables instant off-chain transactions; and TON Proxy, a network proxy anonymous service for the TON network, which is used to hide the IP addresses of TON nodes. Although TON has been established for 5 years, its grand blueprint has just begun, and developers and users are slowly exploring this ecosystem.
Project highlights and technical analysis:
Sharding technology: TON's architecture uses sharding technology to divide the blockchain into multiple shardchains. Each shardchain can independently process transactions and smart contracts, greatly improving the ability to handle large numbers of transactions.
Main chain and work chain: TON includes a main chain (masterchain) and up to 2^32 workchains (workchains), each of which has its own set of rules covering account address formats, transaction protocols, and virtual machines that execute smart contracts.
Hypercube Routing: TON uses slow hypercube routing and instant hypercube routing technologies to achieve effective message delivery between shard chains, ensuring the scalability of the network and the needs of instant communication. Slow hypercube routing ensures that the distribution of messages between multiple shard chains can grow logically with the increase in the number of shard chains, which means that as the network grows, the increase in message delivery time is minimized, ensuring scalability. Instant hypercube routing is used in scenarios that require instant messaging between shard chains, supporting almost instant communication, which is critical for operations that rely on real-time data exchange and coordination of different network parts.
PoS consensus mechanism with Byzantine Fault Tolerance variant: Combining Byzantine Fault Tolerance technology with the PoS consensus mechanism, TON's consensus mechanism not only improves network security, but also ensures efficient network operation and lower energy consumption. Verification nodes need to pledge tokens to participate in the consensus process, which not only provides economic incentives, but also increases the economic cost of malicious behavior, thereby enhancing the security of the network. In addition, by introducing BFT technology, TON can maintain the normal operation of the network even in the face of node failures or malicious attacks, ensuring the correctness and consistency of transactions and data.
TON Foundation Partners with Fireblocks and DWF Labs to Promote Web3 Mainstream Adoption
According to official news, the TON Foundation announced a partnership with Fireblocks and DWF Labs on the X platform to provide users with direct hosting technology to make Web3 safer and more accessible.
Fireblocks’ integration with TON will enhance security and facilitate DeFi integration. DWF Labs will bridge the gap between TON’s retail-focused ecosystem and Fireblocks’ enterprise-level services, developing a Web3 ecosystem for mainstream adoption.
TON 2024 Roadmap: Gasless Transactions, Wallet v5, New Cross-Chain Technology Teleport, etc.
On April 8, Awesome Doge, a founding member of the TON Core Dev team, disclosed TON's 2024 roadmap at the "2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival", stating that it will launch an optimized version of Jetton, Wallet v5, a stablecoin toolkit, and Gasless transactions. Developers can also build fast, cheap, and scalable TON stablecoins. At the same time, TON will also launch Multisig 2.0, allowing TON to interact with various hardware wallets. In terms of governance, TON will also upgrade Elector and Coinfig to support on-chain voting for pledgers, and will improve token economics and strengthen participation in pledge pool and wallet voting.
Awesome also stated that TON will introduce a new cross-chain technology Teleport, which will enable seamless cross-chain transactions without the need for intermediaries and private keys. TON will also upgrade all cross-chain bridges to support all chains, supporting the interaction of Jettons with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other networks and tokens.
Will it be the next Solana?
In this cycle, many public chains are imitating Solana and attracting users through the wealth-creating effect of memes, and TON is one of them. In recent days, FISH has led the surge in memecoins in the ecosystem, and many people believe that TON will become the next Solana.
Toncoin ranks 11th on CoinMarketCap with a market value of $17.1 billion, while Solana, which ranks fifth, has a market value of $78.3 billion, a five-fold gap. Similarly, comparing trading volumes, SOL's daily trading volume reached $2.21 billion, while TON's was $333 million. In addition, crypto researcher Riyue Xiaochu analyzed TON's on-chain chips and said that TON has a total of 5.1 billion pieces, 3.8 billion pieces in circulation, about 960 million pieces in the hands of the project party, and more than 1 billion pieces in the early low-cost miners. And some of the early miners were foundations. This distribution pattern highlights that the development team and related stakeholders have retained a considerable portion of the tokens, which may be used for future development, marketing, and ecosystem rewards. But it also shows the fact that the TON ecosystem relied on these key supporters in the early stages.
Token Economy:
The initial supply of the $TON token was 5 billion until June 28, 2022, when the last $TON was mined. The supply of $TON is uncapped and grows at approximately 0.6% per year (approximately 3 million coins). After Telegram settled with the SEC in 2020, all tradable $TON tokens were placed in special Giver smart contracts for anyone to mine. Therefore, 98.55% of the tokens were allocated in early POW mining. The team only holds 1.45% of the tokens. Unlike in the early days when most public chain tokens were held hostage by large capital, currently a large amount of $Ton is concentrated in the hands of early miners, and the distribution of chips is more dispersed. In order to solve the problem of most tokens being concentrated in the hands of early miners, TON launched a community proposal in February last year to freeze 171 inactive early wallets for 48 months, totaling 1.08B $TON (about 21% of the total). If this portion of frozen $TON is included, Ton’s total market capitalization will rank among the top 10 in the cryptocurrency market. After $TON is mined, it is converted from PoW to PoS. $TON's annual token inflation of 0.6% (approximately 3 million coins) will be used to reward validators who maintain network security. However, if the validator behaves inappropriately, the $ they pledged will be lost. TON will be slashed. According to information revealed at the Dubai Conference, TON intends to increase staking rewards to promote further increases in the TON chain’s staking rate.
The token $TON has multiple usage scenarios, such as transaction fee payment, staking, cross-chain transactions on the TON chain, etc. In the future, $TON can also be used to pay for TON proxy services, etc. The positioning of $TON is also similar to the fiat currency on Telegram, and the application of $TON on Telegram is also particularly worthy of attention. For example, $TON can be used to pay for Telegram Premium membership fees at a more favorable discount. Telegram wallets can currently use credit cards to purchase $TON directly, and then use $TON to purchase virtual goods such as anonymous accounts. According to statistics, anonymous accounts worth a total of 50 million US dollars have been sold within one month of going online. As of now, anonymous accounts have sales of 130 million US dollars. $TON has great payment potential in this regard. In the future, $TON may also be used for Telegram promotion, and advertising services can also be paid with $TON.
As of March 20, 2024, the total supply of $TON is 5.104 billion, the circulation is 3.469 billion, the price is $3.8/coin, the FDV is $19.276 billion, the Market Cap is $13.101 billion, and it ranks 13th. It is currently listed on CEX such as Bybit, OKX, Kucoin, Bitget, and has been listed on Binance Futures. $TON has also become the highest-ranked token that is not currently listed on Binance spot.
Summarize:
Although TON has its own unique features in social and gaming through the Telegram platform, and its technical advantages cannot be underestimated, the many challenges it faces are also obvious. In sharp contrast, Solana has established a strong ecosystem in many fields such as DeFi, NFT market and high-frequency trading by virtue of its outstanding performance in technological innovation and developer-friendly environment. Solana's success is largely due to its ability to handle ultra-high transaction speeds and reduce costs - this is exactly what TON has not yet fully demonstrated.
In general, although TON has its unique market advantages in combining the social and gaming fields of Telegram, the technical challenges, legal risks and market competition it faces may become obstacles for it to repeat Solana's success. Therefore, investors and market observers should maintain a cautious optimism and continue to pay attention to the potential development of TON in the field of social media, but also be wary of the various risks it faces.
