TON Ecosystem: The Transformation from Hype to Value

In the past two years, TON( The Open Network) has rapidly risen in the crypto space thanks to Telegram's user base. The gamified ecosystem, bot economy, and payment system, among other narratives, once ignited market enthusiasm. However, in the face of price corrections and declining activity, TON has also exposed deep-seated structural issues.

Historical Burden of Highly Concentrated Chips

The distribution of TON tokens is extremely uneven. Most of the tokens are held by a small number of early miners, while retail investors account for nearly 99.9% but hold very few tokens. This polarized pattern stems from the project's unique history:

• Established in 2018, suspended in 2019 due to the SEC ban, and relaunched by the developer team in 2020.
• 98.55% of the tokens are used for mining, all mined out as of June 2022.
• 12 whale addresses hold more than 1% of the total supply, of which 6 have low activity.
• 171 "frozen" early miner addresses locked 1.081 billion TON

To alleviate the issue of concentrated chips, the TON official has launched a measure to repurchase tokens from early miners and offers high APY for long-term locking.

Market Value and Liquidity: Opportunities Hidden in the Decline

The market value of TON has experienced several rounds of significant fluctuations:

• November 2021: Listed for the first time and received support from the founder of Telegram
• February-March 2024: Large capital inflow, TG users exceed 900 million
• June-July 2024: Peak of ecological enthusiasm
• August 2024: The CEO's arrest led to a brief decline.

The current market value of TON is $8.64 billion, down 65.65% from its peak, but there is still significant room for growth compared to other major public chains.

Inflation is controllable, application scenarios need to be expanded

The supply of TON tokens grows at an approximate rate of 0.6% per year, making the inflation rate controllable. Currently, the tokens are mainly used for:

• Pay smart contract transaction fees
• Purchase platform services
• Staking earns approximately 4.7% APY
• Cross-chain trading
• Ecological Governance

Telegram Stars serves as a transfer solution, linking advertising placement and fund withdrawal with the TON ecosystem, paving the way for the expansion of more application scenarios in the future.

Ecological Transition Growing Pains

The TON ecosystem currently has the following problems:

• The project type is centralized, mainly focusing on games and NFTs.
• Lack of diversified layout in DeFi, AI and other sectors
• Only a little over ten projects have a TVL exceeding ten million dollars.
• The unique development architecture is not friendly enough for developers.

After the influx of traffic subsides, TON needs to shift from reliance on short-term popularity to sustainable value accumulation.

Current Status of Users and Developers Ecosystem

The number of TON users has rapidly grown to 150 million, but the activity level has significantly decreased with the decline in ecosystem enthusiasm:

• Monthly active addresses decreased from tens of millions to 2 million
• Daily trading volume decreased from 4 million transactions to 2.5 million transactions

Developer side:

• About 30 full-time developers
• 150+ monthly active developers, down 100 from the peak
• The weekly download volume of the TON Connect SDK has dropped from a peak of 25,000 to 12,000.

The number of validators is only 400, which poses a certain risk of centralization.

TAC: A Bridge Connecting the EVM Ecosystem

To address the compatibility issues with EVM, TON proposes the TAC( TON Access) solution:

• Independent EVM-compatible public chain, supporting complete smart contract execution
• Cross-chain communication is managed by the sequencer network to ensure security.
• The Proxy smart contract system supports cross-chain interactions.
• The staking mechanism enhances economic security

TAC aims to create a high-speed channel for TON to access the EVM ecosystem and expand ecological boundaries.

Conclusion

The key to the future development of TON lies in whether it can:

1. Effectively connect to the mainstream EVM ecosystem
2. Build a robust developer ecosystem
3. Break through the bottleneck of payment and application scenarios.

After the traffic dividend fades, whether TON can establish its own self-sustaining ability remains to be seen.