Reinterpret the cross-ecological interconnection of the “unpopular public chain” TON

Author: Lydia Wu; Source: MintVentures

Introduction: Decoupling of Classical Public Chain Concepts

The numbers on DefiLlama and CoinMarketCap seem to conclusively show that TON is a "giant and unpopular public chain" - the total market value has been among the top 20 for a long time, but the 24-hour transaction volume is always It is outside the top 100; TVL’s new high is only 53M, which is not among the top 50 in the public chain; MC/TVL valuation has reached an astonishing 293, which is 33 times that of Ethereum.

The past few months have seen the impact of Rollup and modularity on Ethereum The decoupling of the public chain concept defined by Blast and the weak narrative of the chain's concubine. The market accepted Blast's mere chain name and also realized that AO's use of the name of the network to implement a public chain was real.

This change has accelerated the release of TON’s potential under its “less than orthodox” position. The market's understanding of TON begins with the classical public chain narrative that no longer frames it in terms of TVL. The daily/monthly active numbers that are closer to the user side may also be taken into consideration.

Telegram founder Durove recently told the Financial Times that Telegram’s monthly active users have exceeded 900 million, its valuation exceeds US$30 billion, and it is considering an IPO. Compared with Meta’s 3 billion monthly active users and 1.3 trillion market capitalization, Telegram’s valuation is only 1/40. Moreover, Telegram’s user groups are concentrated in Asia, Europe, South America and the Middle East, with obvious retail characteristics and strong demand for peer-to-peer payments, making it an ideal group to be converted to Web3. With the growth of Telegram itself, if TON can attract 30% of Telegram users within 3-5 years, it may be able to effectively support its valuation.

Web3 New paradigm of creation: Content packaging and value transfer based on Telegram

Splitting the distribution model, Telegram opens up the Web2 incremental market

In an article last year, I sorted out the Web3 creator economy Of the three stages, the 1.0 stage conforms to the simplest "blockchain +" logic and adopts the centralized content creation + Web3 distribution model (mainly in the form of NFT). This model is still the current mainstream, but NFT has begun to be used more as a pre-token speculation tool rather than a creative carrier.

Since this year, the process of experiencing the TON ecosystem has made me gradually realize that the content/rights/governance encapsulation function of NFT may be used by the "channel-advertisement-payment" system based on the same attention-based traffic path. Replaced more naturally. The popular Friend.tech is an intermediate form of this idea - packaging group chats into assets, but the content is difficult to expand and the economic model lacks sustainability.

Compared with many NFT and SocialFi projects that are still struggling to find application scenarios for assets, the TON ecosystem based on Telegram has built a product experience and value network that is more friendly to Web2 developers/creators and users— —On existing social networks, the Web3 distribution model is further divided into Web2 business form + middleware wallet + Web3 settlement. On the one hand, it lowers the understanding and operation threshold for creators and users, and on the other hand, it also enriches the creators’ experience. Revenue source (advertising share).

From content to services, Trading Bot helps convert Web3 stock

Web2’s Supper App WeChat launched a service account and Mini Programs have realized ecological expansion from content to services. Telegram has also followed a similar idea and consolidated its position as a mobile traffic portal by launching corporate accounts and service Bots. Among them, Trading Bot is very popular among crypto users.

The Trading Bot track has developed rapidly since 2023 and is one of the few products with real demand and cash flow in the bear market. After the bear turned bull, the money-attracting effect of the Bot track was further amplified. The daily revenue of top protocols such as Banana Gun and Unibot exceeded 200,000 US dollars. Currently, except for a few deployed on web pages and Discord, most Trading Bots interact through Telegram.

At this stage Trading Bot trading has little to do with TON. It mainly uses Telegram’s Bot module to access Ethereum and Solana. However, the popularity of Bot has greatly contributed to the market education and user mental cultivation of the TON ecosystem. When crypto users become accustomed to new interaction methods like Bot, the psychological friction of experiencing other non-transaction products in the TON ecosystem will be significantly reduced. Supplemented by a complete on-chain identity system and payment module, TON can theoretically build an autonomous Consistent content packaging and value transfer system.

Exploration of the bazaar model: TON’s Bot Universe and Mini App Store

Many products in the TON ecosystem currently look like simple Telegram Bot entrance + H5 web page, with a jump to refresh the screen The Telegram group makes people feel like they are in a lively and chaotic market.

In the Meme project Notcoin, all players do is keep clicking on the gold coins on the screen in exchange for points. They can also join the team of celebrities (such as Telegram founder Durove), or "send red envelopes" to friends to attract traffic. . With brainless gameplay and viral spread, Notcoin gained 5 million players within a week. Currently, the number of players exceeds 26 million, and X (Twitter) follows 1 million people. In the pre-market trading not long after it went online, the current highest transaction volume was a transaction of purchasing 100 million points for 1100TON (approximately 4521U).

As the darling of crypto celebrities, Farcaster’s Frames feature launched in January 2024 was Known as "amazing innovation". However, the performance of this function on mobile terminals with higher traffic distribution density is not satisfactory - although users can perform a few Swap and Mint operations, if it is the turn of more complex interactions, even the simplest mini-games, to Completing it in a small box that takes up less than one-third of the mobile phone screen is also a big challenge for vision.

What is rarely mentioned in comparison is that the combination of Telegram and TON has actually already completed an almost seamless jump from chat box to semi-native application, and the somatosensory speed of summoning the application through Bot is even Faster than WeChat mini program.

Telegram launched the Bot function in June 2015 that "cannot customize the interface style" and "the client does not communicate directly with the server". The Trading Bot built based on this function is not an independent application, but an agent interface, so the response speed is limited and it is difficult to conduct multiple interactions in parallel.

In April 2022, Telegram launched Mini App, allowing developers to fully control the user interface and "the client communicates directly with the server." Mini App provides more friendly interaction and stronger composability, and can seamlessly connect with infrastructure such as wallets. It is suitable for the deployment of various Web3 products and can even replace all mobile web pages.

After the launch of Mini App, Bot did not withdraw from the stage of history. Instead, it played the role of a "communication room" and served as the first entrance for user interaction to connect multiple Mini Apps in series.

It is not difficult to deploy a Bot and Mini App at this stage. Users can quickly set up their own Bot through Q&A on the Telegram @BotFather channel , you can also experience the Mini App virtual ordering experience at @DurgerKingBot after the setup is completed.

Differentiated on-chain experience: the highlight of TON ecology

Lightweight games

In the era of excessive public chain performance, a game can be found in Ethereum L2, Solana is still played on BSC, so the experience will not be much different. For a game with strong social attributes (such as chess and card games or other party games), the experience of sharing a team with one click on Telegram or waiting for random matches with strangers on the Internet will be very different.

Tap Fantasy was originally an MMORPG game on Facebook. After entering Web3, it attracted more than 700,000 players on the BSC and Solana chains. In August 2023, as the first IDO project of TonUP, the first Launchpad of the TON ecosystem, Tap Fantasy’s token $MC was sold out within half an hour. In November 2023, Tap Fantasy officially launched a new version based on TON, published by Web3 game incubation company Pluto. The number of players in the new version exceeded 600,000 in 3 months, and the number of players on the chain exceeded 16,000. Due to the well-functioning in-game economy, the exchange rate of the token $MC against TON increased from 0.2 to 1.

Catizen, a new game incubated by Pluto, is a metaverse cat-raising game that combines AI. It was launched for deletion testing on March 7, 2024, and accumulated more than 160,000 players and 13,000 players in five days. User on the name chain. Catizen has also cooperated with $FISH, the leading meme in the TON ecosystem, and will airdrop it to $FISH holders after the test.

Social inscriptions and Meme

As a new asset issuance method that emerged this cycle, the BTC inscription ecology Spilling to multiple chains is a trend in experiments. TON's inscription ecological development also integrates the Telegram front-end and built-in wallet, which not only improves the convenience of interaction, but also kills two birds with one stone by preventing scientists.

• $NANO: The first TON20 inscription, bringing 20 million interactions and 36,000 independent minting addresses to the TON ecosystem

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• $GRAM: Named after the native Token of Telegram Open Network that was stopped by the SEC. It is the first time that the Telegram applet front-end is used to perform deployment, casting and transfer

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$TONOT: broke the record held by $NANO with 61,000 independent minting addresses and 57,000 holders. It supports the conversion between inscriptions and NFT-Tokens. The product plan also includes in-game currency, DID and pledge mining. Mines, etc.

Meme assets have been relatively barren on the "unpopular public chain" TON for a long time, and crypto users have always lacked a window to understand TON until Notcoin emerged from the circle.

• $NOT: Notcoin will airdrop $NOT tokens at the end of March or early April, and the pre-market trading is on Getgems, the NFT trading market of the TON ecosystem. Go ahead

• $REDO: The concept comes from the hand-drawn drawings of Telegram founder Durov when he participated in the protests. It is the Meme with the highest market value in the TON ecosystem

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$FISH: Ton Fish is the first social meme in the TON ecosystem, with more than 18,000 current holders

• $TPET: Ton Fish ecological Meme, fair launch Lasting until March 26, it will serve as the main token of the game Ton Pet: Tik Ton, and $FISH and NFT holders have the opportunity to receive airdrops

Multi-chain liquidity Launchpad

XTON is the first Launchpad in the TON ecosystem to introduce multi-chain liquidity, and the team members are from the TON Foundation. XTON will complete the mainnet launch and token sale in Q1, and launch the first project in Q2. In line with XTON's vision, the TON ecosystem will have the opportunity to complete the bilateral traffic integration between the Web2 social giant and the Web3 EVM world.

Conclusion: Heading towards the future of interconnection

Since March, stimulated by news such as Telegram’s announcement to use TON to handle advertising revenue, Binance’s launch of U-based contracts, and Telegram’s pursuit of an IPO, The price of TON, which had been silent for a long time, quickly completed a two-level jump, and the activity on the chain also increased significantly.

Look through TON’s Roadmap since 2018, from From the launch of Telegram to the community taking over, from the launch of the first cross-chain bridge to the gradually improving infrastructure, the resilience and vitality of the TON ecosystem are impressive. In 2024, TON will focus on stablecoins, cross-chain bridges and the Asian market. We look forward to seeing TON become a truly open network for interconnection between different regions, different ecologies, and different applications. Each of us in it may It will also provide a glimpse into the ancient future that blockchain has long promised.

*All data in this article are as of March 13, 2024