(Discussion draft March 14, 2024)

While BTC keeps reaching new highs in March 2024, some DEFI users are focusing on TON. The best advertisement in the crypto world is probably the rising price. TONCOIN price increased from $2.1 in late February to more than $4 in recent days, driving all tokens in the TON ecosystem. TONCOIN has a current market cap of $14 billion.

On March 14, 2024, TON became overloaded because the actual preliminary usage has far exceeded the anticipated capacity, indicating high demand for TON.

What is TON?

TON came from the failed Telegram Open Network. Telegram is a popular messaging software outside U.S. and is reported to have daily active users near 200 millions in 2024, and 800 millions of monthly active users. Telegram has its own ecosystem including many apps, such as wallet, games, and other applications, and is widely used by crypto users for discussion. Telegram had a plan to develop a blockchain, but had to give up after a dispute with the Security Exchange Commission. TON was taken over by a community and evolved into The Open Network. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Network, the mainnet came online a while ago, but seldom paid attention.

On February 28, 2024, Telegram founder announced that the firm would start to share advertising revenues with Telegram channel owners, and all payments will be settled on TON. Since the channel owners may use the same tokens to incentivize their users, this action may theoretically bring hundreds of millions, or at least tens of millions of users to the TON blockchain. Comparatively, the Ethereum blockchain has less than half million of daily active addresses and 20x market cap.

TON DEFI Status

TON probably has not seen this coming, and does not have a full suite of applications. For a normal blockchain, it needs:

• Decentralized exchanges: TON has two major ones, but does not yet have uniswap v3 type with concentrated liquidities
  • https://ston.fi is the dominant dex, with 900M market cap
  • https://dedust.io is a smaller one with 71M market cap. The token name is SCALE
• DEX token price tracker: since TON is relatively unnoticed, Dexscreener and Dextools do not track token price on TON; only Geckoterminal has it at https://www.geckoterminal.com/ton/pools
• DEX aggregator: this type of site such as 1inch or paraswap is not available yet
• Stablecoin: there is a jUSDT with a pathetic 1.7M market cap. It is uncertain whether this is a wrapped version of USDT by TON
• Stablecoin swap: not available yet
• Lending site: not available yet
• Leveraged trading: there is one, but too small to recall
• NFT marketplace: https://getgems.io/

To use TON, we need to select a wallet. TonKeeper seems to be the default choice, and has desktop version, chrome extension and ios/android app. To move funds to TON, there are several approaches:

1. Withdraw TONCOIN from a centralized exchange such as MEXC to TON. Well, due to fierce demand, MEXC ran out of TONCOIN on March 12 and stopped withdrawal, which costs less than $1
2. Crosschain-swap using https://www.rocketx.exchange/. This site allows us to exchange many tokens from many other blockchains to TONCOIN on TON. However, this swap may cost 1%
3. There is also an official bridge https://bridge.ton.org/

However, the amazing point about TON is: they have an entire layer of infrastructure already built on Telegram.

• Wallet is a built-in app for Telegram, and can receive TONCOIN, BTC, or USD
• There are many bots on Telegram functioning as apps. For example, stonks bot can purchase any TON tokens on DEX using TONCOIN through a text interface

TON Token Status

There are so few TON tokens compared to other blockchains. At https://www.geckoterminal.com/ton/pools, we can see the following, sorted by full diluted value in descending order. Many tokens are also for apps inside Telegram.

• STON (900M): for ston.fi
• DFC (600M): DF Capital token, which seems to be a memecoin by one of the largest Telegram communities
• JetTON (200M): seems to be an online casino on TON
• PUNK (87M): a Telegram game with NFTs
• UP (79M): this is a TON launchpad
• SCALE (70M): for dedust.io
• GRAM (40M): the first token on TON. Usage … unknown
• VIRUSON (30M): memecoin by Russian?
• MC (28M): Magic Crystal token for a Telegram game of Tap Fantasy.
• FISH (28M): memecoin
• REDO (26M): memecoin
• GLINT (12M): token for an NFT marketplace. Uncertain how that compares to getgem

https://defillama.com/chains reported that total value locked on TON is $54 million, a shocking low number compared to $14 billion of current market value of TONCOIN. https://www.tonstat.com/ presents the key stats of TON.

Needless to say, there are plenty of tokens issued hourly, and most are designed to fall to zero quickly. Please read other articles about high risks.