In the summer of 2021, in response to an open request from open-source developers who had been continuing to support and develop the TON network all along, Telegram transferred the ton.org domain as well as the github repository to the TON Foundation team. From that moment on, I began to actively follow the development of TON, and in November 2021 I started creating a project based on The Open Network.
TON Blockchain - Pavel Durov legacy
About the author
At the moment, I am connected to TON by the TON NFT PLUS telegram channel, the tonnft.plus analytics service, and the p2e game Rotgar.Game.
I won't tell much about my way, if it's interesting you can read these two articles about one of my projects.
TON Chart
Let's start with the most boring part, the TON price on CEX's.
TON chart on CoinMarketCap.com
As you can see from the chart, from the middle of November 2021 an active TON price dump started, and till February 2022 various events took place, Pavel Durov wished success to the TON Foundation team, or (ru celebrity who leaves the country in February.) Morgenstern flew into TON and released a clip mentioning it. There were other events, such as participation in the Jumpstart program on the OKX cryptocurrency exchange, the creation of a fund, for more than a billion dollars (at the exchange rate at the time of its creation), and so on.
As of this writing, the value is back to pre-November 2021 values. Obviously, this is due to the general decline of the crypto market, and the entire fund as well. Bitcoin is now worth 19,000, the last time it was like that was in November 2020.
Funds supporting TON
In my opinion, this is one of the most important points in the development of blockchain.
At the moment there are three funds in operation.
- Reserve from the TON Foundation team. On April 7, 2022, the TON Foundation team announced the creation of a new Toncoin reserve and invited members of the TON ecosystem to donate. The new reserve has raised over 530 million TON coins in donations. At the rate of exchange at the time of collection, that's over $1 billion.
- toncoin.fund, a $250 million ecosystem fund dedicated to developing the ecosystem.A number of major cryptocurrency investors including Huobi Incubator, Kucoin Ventures, MEXC Pioneer Fund, 3Commas Capital, Orbs, TON Miners and Kilo Fund will invest $250,000,000 in TON through the first formal ecosystem fund backed by the TON Foundation.
- TON Alpha-Vista Fund (TAV for short) is a $90 million fund backed by a number of major global cryptocurrency funds such as VistaLabs, Alphanonce, Miner's Fund and Kilo Fund.TAV's mission is to attract entrepreneurs and developers to participate in the TON ecosystem, as well as to help and assist existing projects at an early stage of development.CoinTelegraph wrote about the launch of the fund.
In total, there are currently three funds, with a total capital of about a billion dollars. This money is waiting for the development teams.
Attracting developers to TON
Since November 2021 there have been several waves of developer teams.
Before November 2021, there were already some teams that existed since the days of Gram, such as Kirill Fillimonov's team from Give me TON project, Sergey "Tester"'s team from Ruton, the team that was actively engaged in mining - Ton Whales, and Oleg Andreev - the creator of Tonkeeper wallet. Sorry if I missed anyone, at that time I was not so familiar with the teams in TON.
First wave
Along with the TON rate hike in November 2021, many people realized that blockchain was coming to life and started to make their projects in the emerging ecosystem. That's when I joined the project, with my game rotgar.game.
At that time there were several working explorers, tonkeeper wallet and a few channels about TON, which could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Also, in November, the TON developers created a special channel toncontests, where they started publishing announcements of contests for developers from the TON Foundation.
And in December we have already heard about the appearance of "soft" integrations in Telegram. For example, the donate bot, which allows channel owners to monetize their audience with subscriptions, and the wallet custodial wallet.
Also in December 2021, Pavel Durov wrote an inspiring post about blockchain developers.
When Telegram said goodbye to TON last year, I expressed the hope that future generations of developers would one day carry on with our vision of a mass-market blockchain platform.
So I was inspired to see the champions of Telegram's coding contests continue developing the open TON project, which they rebranded to Toncoin.
I'm proud that the technology we created is alive and evolving. When it comes to scalability and speed, TON is still years ahead of everything else in the blockchain realm. It would have been a shame to see this project not benefitting humanity.
Unlike the original TON, Toncoin is independent from Telegram. But I wish its team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-market strategy, they have all they need to build something epic 💪
Second wave
In January 2022, the NFT team of the TON Diamonds project held a historic presale. At the rate at the time, they raised more than $1 million. This event spurred a second wave of team influx into TON.
NFT market growth analysis on TON December 2021 - February 2022
As you can see from the graph, a lot of teams came into the ecosystem. Among them were very large projects that began to invest heavily in the development of their own services and in marketing. Teams which, in my subjective opinion, made a great contribution to the development of the NFT market:
- Sergei Romanov - Founder of Animals Red List
- Kirill Filimonov - Mintozaurs and their service Toncoin Monster
- TON Diamonds Team
- TON Punks team
- Svyatoslav Gusev - Founder of TON Tegro
- G-Bots team
- I will also mention my project TON NFT PLUS and our team
There are so many more projects that I could highlight, but then I would have to write a very long list, so I decided to stop at these.
The audience of NFT projects has been growing since the beginning, and now it seems to be the norm to have more than 50,000 subscribers on an NFT channel.
NFT-projects with largest audience
NFT Marketplaces
The creators of GetGems.io and Disintar.io marketplaces have made tremendous contributions to the development of the NFT marketplace.
The exclusive marketplace ton.diamonds and, while still low in volume, ton.market have also been created and are operating.
In some months, the sales volume at Marketplace exceeded $1 million, which seems quite significant to me.
Third wave
On July 7, the TON Community announced that TON Blockchain and Codeforces, a competitive programming platform, have become partners.
As part of the partnership, TON Foundation and Codeforces will hold regular contests aimed at involving the programming community in the TON ecosystem.
I can only assume that the third wave of development teams will soon await us. And if you remember about three funds for ecosystem development, the probability of new powerful teams in TON seems very high.
What's in the ecosystem right now?
Wallets
The main non-castodial wallets are Tonkeeper, Tonhub and TON Wallet.
Custodial: Crypto_bot and Wallet
I've highlighted only the ones I've heard a lot about or used myself. You can see the entire list of wallets here.
Marketplaces
The main marketplaces are GetGems.io and Disintar.io.
Growing ton.diamonds
In addition, there are several very small marketplaces.
DEX
Пока нет полностью функционирующего DEX, но, вот те, кто активно работает над своими проектами: Ston.fi, Scaleton, TON Tegro DEX.
Jettons (Custom tokens)
Thanks to the Jettons standard, completely new cryptocurrencies from different teams and projects can appear in the TON ecosystem in the same way. You can read more about Jettons here.
No one uses TON-based altcoins yet, but here's a list of existing ones:
$REDC is Red Company token
$TGR is token of Tegro ecosystem
$SCALE - scaleton.io token
$KOTE - meme token
TON Stacking
It is possible to generate revenue from TON stacking by using stacking pools.
In the first quarter of this year, the first centralized and decentralized stacking pools, also known as nominator pools, began to appear in the TON ecosystem.
The first centralized steaking pool powered by a smart contract was introduced by the TonWhales team, and to date, users have invested over 18,000,000 TON in this pool.
Staking on an official decentralized smart contract was introduced by the CAT team. At the moment, the total validator stack is over 7,900,000,000 TON.
There is also a staking from Red Company - Red Ziccurat. Data on the steak could not be found.
You can look at all the nominator pools at tonvalidators.org.
Network Explorers.
Explorers: TonScan, Whales Explorer, Ton.page.
There is also the useful TON NFT Explorer.
You can see a list of all explorers here.
Social networks
Social networks are actively trying to appear in the ecosystem, some about NFT, some about 18+, but all, in one way or another, use TON blockchain technology.
Here's a list of the major ones, in my opinion:
Fox Tails, ton.place, Tonex.
Other
There's also a lot of different utilities and lots of channels about TON and running lunchpads like TonStarter and TonPlay.
TON ROADMAP
So far, the core-team of TON developers is going according to plan. NFT smart contract standards have already been implemented, and, most recently, new TON DNS and TON Payments components have been introduced.
You can see the official roadmap here.
How to buy TON on CEX's?
Here is a list of the most popular CEXs on which TON trades with high trading volumes.
- Buy TON on OKX
- Buy TON on FTX
- Buy TON on Huobi
- Buy TON on Gate.io
Use the exchanges above to buy TON
Personal experience and expectations
In the beginning, of course, there were rose-colored glasses. Everything is fine, Durov supports, the NFT hype is going on, and various celebrities shoot videos attracting an audience.
Now, along with the general decline of the crypto market, the movement in TON has also slowed down a bit.
My team is faced with developing directly in the blockchain area and it is an extremely time-consuming process due to a lack of developer environment and documentation. It's worth noting that the developer community chat helps make sense of Nikolai Durov's legacy.
Having written the text above, I understand that there is tremendous growth in the ecosystem going on. Many teams have joined TON in the last six months and continue to create new services and projects based on blockchain.
Developing on TON is still an adventure, but if blockchain continues to develop at the same pace and becomes one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies on CMC, all our efforts will pay off.
