TON, the public chain token, has continuously reached new highs in price in 2024. This week, its market value has risen to ninth place and has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of the year.
Since the launch of the mainnet and token issuance in 2021, TON’s development has been steady. Despite having access to Telegram’s 900 million user base, its highest increase during the last bull market was only three times.
Before that, the ICO launched to create the TON chain was required to refund a significant portion of the funds raised due to the lawsuit by the US SEC. Afterward, TON officially separated from Telegram and began independent development. It was not until September 2023 that Telegram and TON announced a deep cooperation and binding.
Being backed by Telegram’s massive user base is the most attractive aspect of TON’s narrative. The development of blockchain requires continuous absorption of Web2 users. TON, with its deep cooperation with Telegram, undoubtedly plays the role of a bridge between Web2 and Web3.
Investors are concerned about early miners holding too much, which could manipulate the token price. Additionally, TON’s technical roadmap is completely different from Ethereum’s, as it is not compatible with EVM. This means that programmers in the industry would need to relearn its programming techniques. These factors have led to a lack of significant breakthroughs in TON’s on-chain ecosystem, resulting in a relatively stagnant token price.
However, all the reasons why TON was not regarded highly have changed this year.
Firstly, in 2023, TON received several rounds of funding. In May 2023, Mask Network invested an undisclosed amount. In October 2023, TON announced that it had completed a multimillion-dollar funding round with the participation of MEXC Ventures. In November 2023, Animoca Brands also invested, but the amount was undisclosed.
This year, TON also announced that it is seeking long-term holders for its tokens and offering discounts. This is also a form of financing, and through this method, Mirana Ventures invested $8 million in TON in March 2023.
In April 2022, TON Foundation announced the establishment of the $250 million ecosystem fund called TONcoin Fund, with funding from exchanges and institutions such as Huobi, KuCoin, MEXC, 3Commas Capital, and TON Miners. Simultaneously, the foundation raised $527 million from 176 independent users, which were voluntary donations from early miners.
After the mining of TON tokens ended in the same year, DWF joined its $25 million TON Accelerator Program. DWF Labs contributed to the token economics, liquidity, and market-making of the TON ecosystem, as well as supporting investments and other ecosystem services.
All these pieces of information indicate that mainstream institutions in the industry have high expectations for TON and have established deep cooperation relationships. It can also be confirmed that TON’s price will be supported and participated by well-known exchanges and market makers.
Under the frequent rounds of financing in 2023, it can be inferred that TON will enter an accelerated development phase in 2024. In 2024, it is certain that TON will focus on expanding its market in the Asian Chinese-speaking region. TON has become the top sponsor of the Web3 Carnival held in Hong Kong in April, which is a clear signal.
The information revealed in the theme speech “TON 2024 Roadmap and Asian Expansion” indicates that TON will launch an optimized version of Jetton, Wallet v5, stablecoin toolkit, and gasless transactions. Developers can also build fast, cheap, and scalable TON stablecoins. TON will also introduce Multisig 2.0, allowing TON to interact with various hardware wallets.
In terms of governance, TON will upgrade Elector and Coinfig, support on-chain voting by stakers, and improve token economics by strengthening participation in the staking pool and wallet voting. TON will also introduce a new cross-chain technology called Teleport, which enables seamless cross-chain transactions without intermediaries or private keys. TON will also upgrade all cross-chain bridges to support all chains.
Previously, there was a consensus in the industry that TON’s development was still in the early stage. However, the continuous updates in these technological directions can be foreseen that the on-chain ecosystem of TON will make a leap in progress in the next one or two years.
Since the beginning of this year, TON has been continuously releasing positive news. For example, advertisements posted on Telegram can be paid with TON tokens. Founder Durov stated that Telegram will achieve profitability next year and will consider a US IPO.
If last year TON was constantly organizing hackathons and various development rewards to encourage developers to create DApps on TON, this year is the time for harvest. The marketing strategy of TON Foundation this year is very clear, using various airdrops to promote the use of TON chain by users and increase on-chain activity. They also continuously release positive news to drive the token’s price up.
For example, on April 12, TON Foundation airdropped 300,000 TON tokens (approximately $2.19 million) to the most active meme coin traders on Dedust or Ston.fi.
With more and more builders and the continuous enrichment of the TON on-chain ecosystem, the Universal Phone, a Web3-native smartphone designed specifically for the Telegram ecosystem, has started its pre-sale. It is known that there will also be abundant airdrop activities on this phone.
In addition to Telegram’s attempts to inject utility into its application through the TON chain, the decentralized TON Foundation is also working hard to promote the use of the chain itself. Its open alliance activities started on April 1 and distributed 30 million TON tokens (worth approximately $204 million at the time) to applications and users. An additional 1 million TON tokens were used to incentivize users to join HumanCode, the chain’s identity verification primitive. All these plans have had a positive impact on the token price and various on-chain indicators. Compared to early March, the number of wallets on the TON chain has doubled, and TVL has increased sixfold.
It is now apparent that the flourishing development of bots on Telegram and the integration of TON wallets into Telegram in 2023 were just the beginning of the on-chain ecosystem’s development. Currently, most applications on the TON chain are a fusion of Web2 and Web3, combining the attributes of Telegram and Web3. For Web2 users, the entry barrier is very low.
In the process of the ecosystem’s flourishing development and the continuous increase in users, TON has gained more attention, and its price will continue to rise.
How much further can TON rise?
In 2021, TON tokens were slow to rise and only increased threefold during the last bull market. In the current bull market, the highest increase from the low point has reached eightfold. With its market value ranking ninth, investors are most concerned about how much further TON can rise.
In February 2023, a proposal to optimize TON’s token economy model was approved. The proposal suggested temporarily freezing inactive mining wallets for 48 months. It is understood that these wallets have never been activated and have no outgoing transfers in their history. Currently, there are 171 inactive mining wallets holding over 1.081 billion TON tokens, accounting for about 21% of the total supply at that time.
This is one of the solutions to address concerns about early miners holding too many tokens.
Although early mining of TON has ended, approximately 0.6% of new TON tokens are created each year as rewards for validators’ work.
The continuous generation of new TON tokens will dilute the price. To address this impact on the price, the TON Foundation has proposed a mechanism to destroy 50% of all transaction fees on the TON network. However, the amount of destruction proposed has a relatively small impact on TON’s inflation level. This proposal requires the approval of the majority of TON validators to be effective.
In terms of price stability, founder Durov proposed a plan to sell excess TON tokens to long-term investors at a price lower than the market price, with a lock-up period of 1-4 years, to ensure that Telegram’s share of TON does not exceed 10% of the total supply. This helps stabilize the ecosystem and reduce volatility.
TON has been taking action on how to dilute the holdings of early whales and minimize the negative impact of inflation on the token price.
In the short term, TON spot trading has not yet been listed on Binance. If it is listed on Binance, it will definitely further boost the token price. In the long run, the continuous development of the on-chain ecosystem of TON, especially the narrative story of being backed by Telegram’s 900 million users, will be constantly told. The increase in applications and on-chain activity is the fundamental driving force behind the continuous rise in token price. From this perspective, both in the short term and the long term, TON still has great potential for further price increase.