TON Blockchain: how it connects to Telegram and beyond
9 min de lecture
After a rocky start, which saw its founders abandon the project following scrutiny from the U.S. financial authorities, TON now ranks as one of the top 15 blockchains, with a market capitalisation of nearly $9 billion (as of February 2025). Its native token, Toncoin, performed strongly in 2024, surpassing bitcoin’s return of 125%, and its ecosystem grew rapidly, adding more than 36 million1 new wallets and increasing the total value locked (TVL) in its decentralised finance (DeFi) apps by over 1,800%.
History of TON
Originally the Telegram Open Network, TON was unveiled in early 2018. Founded by Pavel Durov, creator of Telegram and VKontakte, the blockchain aimed to integrate with Telegram beyond messaging.
Investors poured $1.7 billion into TON’s 2018 private ICOs, but the SEC challenged the token sale as an unregistered securities offering in 2019. After a legal battle, a U.S. judge blocked Telegram from issuing Grams in March 2020, prompting Durov to withdraw and refund investors.
The community revived the project, renaming it The Open Network in late 2020. By May 2021, the TON Foundation was formed, and the TON mainnet was launched.
Protocol
TON positions itself as a blockchain of blockchains, with a masterchain coordinating the network’s consensus mechanism and storing the protocol’s final state. Transactions are hosted on workchains, which scale through multiple shardchains during periods of heavy activity. Finally, account shards handle transactions for individual accounts.
This architecture is similar to that of Polkadot and even Near Protocol, both of which also utilize sharding.
While TON started as a ‘proof of work’ (PoW) network, it switched to a relatively standard ‘proof of stake’ (PoS) consensus mechanism when the community took over from Telegram.
TON differs from other PoS protocols by assigning validators to specific parts of the network, which enables parallel processing. Up to 100 are elected to the mainchain for a cycle lasting 18 hours, while shardchains consist of 23 who rotate every 1,000 seconds. TON processes blocks every 2.8 seconds (as of January 2025), much faster than Ethereum’s block speed of 12 seconds.
Tokenomics
Toncoin, TON’s native token, has several utilities within the ecosystem:
A medium of exchange to conduct peer-to-peer transactions.
Validators participate in TON’s consensus mechanism by ‘staking’ or locking up their Toncoin in a smart contract.
Users pay transaction fees in Toncoin (validators receive a share).
Holders can also take part in TON’s governance by voting for TON Enhancement Proposals, such as network upgrades.
The initial supply of Toncoin was just over five billion, but it has no hard cap, unlike Bitcoin. Most tokens came into circulation through block rewards paid to miners participating in the PoW consensus mechanism employed in the network’s early days. The primary way new tokens are issued is through block rewards earned by validators, which increases the supply by up to 0.6% each year. To counteract the token’s inflationary design, the community voted in 2023 to ‘burn’ (remove from circulation) 50% of transaction fees.
To provide greater transparency into TON’s tokenomics, given the proportion of tokens held by miners and the relatively low circulating supply, in early 2023 the community voted to freeze inactive wallets for four years that hadn’t made an outgoing transaction. The vote led to the suspension of just over one billion tokens- a fifth of the initial supply- held in 171 digital wallets and worth around $2.5 billion at the time.
Ecosystem
The market cap of TON’s ecosystem is nearly $170 billion2 (as of February 2025), although it’s dominated by Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin (over $140 billion). Toncoin is the second largest project ($9.1 billion), followed by Dai ($5.3 billion), another stablecoin issued by Sky, previously known as MakerDAO.
There’s a sizeable drop in market cap to the next project, Notcoin (nearly $290 million), which represents one of TON’s highest profile use cases to date: tap-to-earn games (T2E) which reward users in cryptocurrency for activity on the Telegram messaging platform. Other popular games include Hamster Kombat and Catizen.
Beyond Notcoin, the biggest memecoin is DOGS (market cap $87 million as of February 2025), inspired by ‘Spotty’, a drawing by Pavel Durov. The token’s launch in August 2024 was one of the largest in memecoin history, claimed by over 17 million users.
In terms of TVL, a metric measuring the funds deposited by users on a protocol’s DeFi apps, TON ranks outside the top 30 blockchains despite its growth in 2024 and current volume of more than $190 million (as of February 2025). The biggest projects by TVL (excluding subprotocols) are decentralised exchange Ston.fi ($70 million) and lending protocol EVAA ($46 million).
Performance 2024
Toncoin outperformed Bitcoin in 2024, rising by nearly 140% and hitting a record high of just over $8 in June. Some key on-chain metrics were the main catalysts:
TON’s daily active addresses rose from 26,000 to nearly 900,0003, driven by users of T2E games and memecoins.
Daily transaction volume increased nearly ten times, from 443,000 to 4.3 million.
The daily average trading volume on TON’s DeFi apps rose by 950% to more than $21 million.
TON’s TVL peaked at $773 million in July 2024, which represented an 800% increase since the start of the year.
The introduction of Tether’s USDT stablecoin in May 2024 boosted TON’s transaction volumes and user adoption. USDT’s circulating supply surpassed 1.4 billion by the end of 2024, and it accounted for over a quarter of trading volumes.
TON ranked as the sixth biggest protocol for gaming in August 2024, averaging more than 175,000 daily unique active wallets.
TON also received a significant investment from Pantera in early 2024, the venture capital fund’s largest ever. Pantera came back with a further $20 million at the end of the year.
However, 2024 wasn’t seamless for the protocol. TON’s close association with Telegram meant Toncoin fell by nearly 25% when French authorities arrested Pavel Durov in August 2024. Durov faced allegations of complicity in a range of crimes facilitated by the app including drug trafficking and fraud.
Nonetheless, ties between the companies strengthened in early 2025. Telegram announced that TON would become the exclusive infrastructure provider for its mini apps, with Toncoin remaining the only non-fiat payment method. With Telegram reportedly surpassing 900 million users as of February 2025, this infrastructure offers Toncoin an unprecedented level of exposure.
3 dune.com
5 cnn.com
