Future Developments in the TON Ecosystem: What to Expect

Key Takeaways

1. TON Ecosystem’s Rapid Growth: The TON blockchain, leveraging Telegram’s massive user base, has achieved significant milestones with 3,435% growth in daily active addresses and a 760% increase in trading volume in 2024 alone.
2. Innovative Features and Upgrades: TON is advancing blockchain interoperability with tools like TON Teleport BTC, a decentralized bridge for Bitcoin, and is focusing on scaling through native token (Jetton) integration, sharding stabilization, and a TON payment system for microtransactions.
3. Challenges to Overcome: The ecosystem faces hurdles such as multi-chain complexity, limited developer talent, and dependency on Telegram, alongside regulatory and geographical risks that could impact its growth potential.
4. Secure TON Storage: Non-custodial options like NOW Wallet offer a safe, user-friendly solution for managing TON and Jettons, ensuring security, accessibility, and ease of use for enthusiasts.

The TON ecosystem, or the Telegram Open Network, is a major powerhouse in the crypto market landscape, a rising network promising scaling and opportunities for development to countless dApps and their users. The system itself is being positioned by the developers – the original team behind the Telegram messenger – as a “fully decentralized layer-1 blockchain”, intending to onboard billions of users as its ambitious goal. The technology behind the network has been in the works since 2020 under the auspices of the TON Foundation.

The TON blockchain is based on the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm and is known for its reliability, scalability, and resilience to bottlenecks. This makes the network ideal for processing a large volume of transactions fast and at minimal fees thanks to a lack of any third parties in the chain. The system also utilizes the concept of sharding for accelerating transaction processing. The process involves the fragmentation of the network into a large number of subnets known as shards, each of which processes its own cluster of operations, thus easing the overall network load.

These aspects have made the TON ecosystem quite attractive for users and has thus recorded significant growth over the past year, largely thanks to the snowballing introduction of mini-apps, such as Hamster Kombat, Notcoin, Catizen, and many others. Data from Artemis states that the TON ecosystem experienced 3,435% in daily active addresses in 2024 alone, its daily average trading volume on native TON DEX platforms skyrocketed from $2 million to $17.2 million in September of the year, representing 760% year-to-date growth. The growth potential is only just being tapped, leading to the conclusion that the TON ecosystem is headed for further scaling and development.

Such impressive performance was made possible thanks to the introduction of a number of unique features within the TON ecosystem, advanced by a series of upgrades. Knowing the main distinguishing features of TON is thus an absolute must for all crypto market users, both novice and experienced, who hope to seize the opportunities and advantages the network offers. In this material, we shall explore the development of the TON ecosystem and its potential future.

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Key Areas of Development

The basis for the development of the TON ecosystem is the original Telegram messenger, which provides a convenient and straightforward onboarding ramp into the network. The transition is made possible thanks to the messenger’s built-in support for mini-apps and the TON Wallet. This, coupled with the messenger’s massive user base, makes it easier for TON to attract target audiences for its Web3 applications.

Based on these key factors, the development of the TON ecosystem is projected to take the following vectors in the coming two years:

• Native blockchain expansion as the basis for attractive more liquidity. This is achieved through the massive introduction of so-called Jettons – TON analogues of classical blockchain tokens. Coupled with the popularization of jettons, TON will also focus on stabilizing its sharding mechanism. These features are meant to streamline the overall user experience and optimize it for further scaling.

• The TON Proxy will play a key role in TON’s ambitious goal of transferring all major local services to the native website. This means that the network’s browser extension, wallet, and other sites will make the transition from public entry to local entry nodes. This herculean task will require the presence of a dedicated proxy service for each system to ensure uninterrupted operation.

• The TON Payment System is another important milestone for the ecosystem as it strives to facilitate the processing of microtransactions via a single entry point. The system will leverage the approach taken by the Lightning Network in Bitcoin, thus allowing users to establish payment channels directly.

• The TON Storage space is the last node of the system currently being considered – a major storage marketplace that will be graded based on multiple criteria and allow the operating nodes to earn on renting storage space and data traffic flows.

• TON is revolutionizing blockchain interoperability with the launch of TON Teleport BTC, a decentralized bridge that brings Bitcoin into the TON ecosystem. By transforming BTC into tgBTC—a 1:1 pegged synthetic token—users can seamlessly engage in DeFi activities such as yield farming, lending, and staking. This trustless, decentralized system eliminates reliance on centralized bridges, ensuring secure and transparent cross-chain transactions. With TON Teleport BTC, Bitcoin holders can activate dormant assets, unlocking new opportunities and redefining BTC’s role in decentralized finance.

Challenges in TON Ecosystem

Though these developments look attractive and colossal in both their scale and ambition, their implementation faces some challenges that the TON ecosystem will have to address.

For instance, multi-chain system complexity is the biggest stumbling block, since the concept of sharding itself requires constant maintenance and adjustment due to the dynamic nature of a blockchain based on such an approach. Ensuring complete sync with the shards, and thus ensuring uninterrupted communication within the network, is a daunting task that will inevitably lead to temporary bottlenecks, or even system breakdowns, until a viable solution is found.

The limited availability of skilled developer support remains one of the key challenges, as there is currently a shortage of talent familiar with the operating principles of the TON blockchain. Being relatively new compared to Ethereum, TON is still in the process of building an active developer community. Additionally, the specialized nature of programming languages like FunC and Tact poses a learning curve for developers, further contributing to the challenge.

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Upcoming Upgrades

Though the challenges may seem insurmountable, the TON ecosystem is intent on implementing a series of upgrades in the coming year. Among the most important of these for market players to consider are the following:

• Ongoing integration with the Telegram messenger to effectively channel and engage them in the growing ecosystem of Web3 applications on TON. This step will not only provide a smooth transition into Web3 for a large number of users, but will also promote adoption as a whole for the benefit of the entire industry.

• Tap-to-Earn game and NFT market leveraging are two crucial points that the TON ecosystem will focus on. First, such games are lightweight, easy to develop, and appealing to users. Secondly, the integration of NFTs gives users of such games a broad range of opportunities in terms of unique asset crafting and trading.

• New token models are under consideration as part of TON’s scaling ambitions. These include so-called lock-up tokens and associated rewards. The big plan is to improve the economic model of the network by giving more earning opportunities to its users, thus enhancing value and liquidity flow.

• Governance model optimization is the last step in TON’s future plan, which involves optimization of the underlying mechanism by further advancement of its decentralization and transition to community governance.

Overall, the development of the TON network is focused on capitalizing on the existing user base of the Telegram messenger for its integration into the Web3 environment. The ultimate goal is to secure liquidity flows and turnover by offering these users a host of convenient services, games, payment channels, and other applications for everyday use.

TON Timeline of Development

It is no secret that the current state of the TON ecosystem is the result of a legal debacle in 2020, which destroyed the original team along with the Gram coin, resulting in the compilation of the so-called NewTON development team, now known as the TON Foundation. This team is responsible for all the plans of the TON ecosystem outlined above.

As for the timeline of TON’s development, it can be traced as such through the years:

1. 2018 – The founder of Telegram develops the TON Layer-1 solution, raising $1.7 billion through the sale of Gram tokens.

2. 2019 – Two TON blockchain test networks are launched, but the SEC intervenes and postpones the launch of TON.

3. 2020 – Telegram abandons the TON project, pays a settlement, and the NewTON team takes over the undertaking.

4. 2021 – Testnet2 is renamed to Mainnet, and the TON Foundation is established.

5. 2022 – TON grows and launches various features, such as TON nominators, TON DeFi, developer programs, TON DNS, TON payments, TON proxy, TON sites, and TON storage functionalities.

6. 2023 – Introduction of cross-chain bridges, TON Connect, a token toolkit, DAOs, databases, a deflationary mechanism, integration with Telegram, TON Space, Telegram Wallet, and collaboration with Tencent Cloud.

7. 2024 – The TON ecosystem gets upgraded with the TON browser, TL-B, smart contract interfaces, multisig 2.0, wallet 5.0, gasless transactions, enhanced coordination of validator nodes and chain sharding guidelines. Multiple Tap-to-Earn projects are launched and boost the network’s user base.

The timeline was dotted with multiple other events that boosted the network’s development and introduced new features based on developer and user feedback. The TON Foundation played a key role in establishing numerous partnerships and collaborations with leading market players.

The most prominent collaboration initiatives include the integration of USDT on the TON Network, which was announced at the TOKEN2049 conference in April of 2024 in Dubai. The next month, TON partnered with Oobit plus another 100 platforms for the purpose of growing and facilitating the use of USDT within the network.

Though external partnerships are important, the TON Foundation is still the driving force behind the project in both strategic development and funding. A report by Bitget states that the TON Foundation launched the Open League trial run in March of 2024 as part of its new policy initiative. The step was followed by the announcement of an ecosystem incentive program worth about 30 million TON, or roughly $115 million at that time. The purpose of the initiative was to create a “positive feedback loop” to attract ideas and further bolster such key areas as airdrops, rewards, and technical upgrades.

The TON Foundation also established partnerships with HashKey Group for integrating fiat off-ramps specifically for users located in Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. Other collaborations include investments from the likes of Pantera Capital, development boosts from Fireblocks and DWF Labs, and many more.

Challenges and Risks

Data from Defillama states that the TVL of the TON blockchain is about $353 million, a collapse of over 50% from its peak value of $776 million, seen in July of 2024. There are many factors and risks affecting the overall performance of TON, some of which may seem irrelevant, while others, like the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and the conclusion of incentives and boosts previously offered by The Open League, have led to 40.2% TVL drops in less than a week.

The latter event is closely connected to a direct factor affecting the performance of TON – its DeFi sector. The ecosystem is relatively new and teeming with dApps, however, DeFi remains its low point. Compared to the other top blockchains, TON’s DeFi sector is of poor quality, as judged by TVL, and unremarkable in terms of quantity, with just a handful of standout applications and exchanges hosted. The primary source of users and liquidity for the ecosystem at present is its Telegram messenger basis and the selection of mini-apps, such as Tap-to-Earn games built into it.

The TON ecosystem’s poor DeFi performance can be attributed to two main factors, namely:

• Low level of trader activity, with the peak trading volume barely scraping the bottom of the $27 million mark in the last 24 hours at the time of writing. The volume is negligible compared to the billions registered on such platforms as Uniswap and others.

• Lack of attractive lending mechanisms is the second reason, leading to poor TVLs for such lending services on TON as EVAA. This means that the ecosystem still has a long way to cover before its DeFi sector is taken seriously, meaning that its underlying services are not attractive for traders.

Though TON has an abundance of stablecoins in its system, users are limited in terms of liquidity mining. There are virtually no liquidity pools to speak of on TON, leading to an outflow of traders to other venues off-chain. The challenge herein lies in the difficulty for EVM-compatible blockchains and their hosted applications to interact with TON. Projects and liquidity mining pools will not restructure their systems to cater to TON, as they are already enjoying the attention of its users on Ethereum and other blockchains.

The TON Foundation is seriously considering tackling the issues through the introduction of the TON Applications Chain (TAC), which will be based on Polygon technology. The question is the time it will take for this technology to be developed and integrated into the ecosystem.

There are other, non-technology related risks threatening the TON ecosystem as well. One of them is the uneven distribution of its user base. The bulk of Telegram’s users are from the countries of the CIS, mostly Russia and Ukraine. There is immense potential for growth in Southern Asia and Europe, but the TON Foundation has not found a way of attracting users from these regions yet. In the long run, capitalizing on the potential of users from regions outside the CIS, especially in Africa, will determine the success of TON as a whole.

Regulation-related challenges must also be considered, as evidenced by the arrest of Pavel Durov himself. The drop of the TON token’s value by 17.6% in the week following his arrest is abundant evidence of related risk. The fact that TON is reliant on its Telegram messenger for users is a virtual deathtrap, considering that the messenger is in an uneasy situation in terms of regulation. The secret chats it provides are havens for various illicit activities, while the end-to-end encryption makes it impossible for law enforcement to intervene, further deteriorating the messenger’s standing from a legal standpoint. Politically sensitive and even military operations related content is being disseminated through the messenger uncontrollably, making it a target of attack from the authorities, thus placing the funds and interactions of its users at risk.

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Summary

The TON ecosystem is a promising blockchain network with multiple opportunities for its users. With the support of the TON Foundation, the network is implementing a number of upgrades and is developing new services to attract more users into its native Web3 environment. However, the challenges TON faces in terms of poor DeFi activity, limited application deployment, its inextricable connection to the founder’s persona, and risks arising from regional circumstances, makes it difficult to predict just how successful the network will be in the long run.