The Rise and Challenges of TON: From Traffic Dividends to Ecological Reconstruction

In the past two years, TON has rapidly emerged, leveraging Telegram's large user base, creating a wave in the crypto community. Gamified ecosystems, bot economies, and payment systems have attracted significant attention. However, with the price adjustment, market value shrinkage, and decreased activity, TON has also exposed deeper issues: high concentration of chips, homogenization of the ecosystem, and weak infrastructure.

This article will analyze the structural issues and future development paths of TON from the dimensions of chip distribution, token economics, user and capital flow, and development ecology.

TON Chips Highly Concentrated: The Gap Between Whales and Retail Investors

The start of TON was not smooth, facing the issue of a highly concentrated distribution of tokens from the very beginning. Due to historical reasons such as early mining and project restarts, most of the tokens were concentrated in the hands of a few miners.

Currently, there are 12 whale addresses holding more than 1% of the total supply, of which 6 are low activity addresses. The "frozen" whale address marked by community voting, (, is an inactive early miner with a total of 171, locking up 1.081 billion TON.

The chip distribution of TON is extremely uneven. Users holding less than 100 TON account for nearly 99.9%, while the number of addresses holding a large amount of TON is very small. This polarized pattern has gradually formed since March 2024.

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TON valuation has declined, but there is still room for upward movement.

The price of TON has experienced several significant increases:

1. In November 2021, obtained support from the founder of Telegram.
2. In February to March 2024, there will be a large inflow of funds, coupled with the number of TG users surpassing 900 million and IPO rumors.
3. Rise in June-July 2024

Although the price of the coin has dropped more than 50% from its peak, TON still has room for growth in terms of market value. The key lies in whether the ecological enthusiasm can be transformed into long-term value.

The market capitalization of TON doubled within six months, rising from $4 billion in July 2023 to $13 billion in August 2024. Currently, the market cap has fallen back to around $8.6 billion.

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TON inflation is controllable, application scenarios to be expanded

The initial supply of TON tokens is 5 billion, growing at a rate of approximately 0.6% per year. The tokens are primarily used to reward validators, with the current annual staking yield being around 4.7%.

TON is trying to expand its application scenarios, including transaction fees, staking, cross-chain transactions, governance, and more. The official Telegram Stars program aims to connect Web2 and Web3 users, allowing credit cards to directly purchase TON for digital goods transactions.

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The Reality After the TON Traffic Recession: Growing Pains of Ecological Transformation

The TON ecosystem currently has a concentrated and severely homogeneous project focus, primarily concentrating on a few areas such as NFTs, gaming, and trading. The official team has shifted its focus away from the gaming ecosystem and is now emphasizing the payment sector.

On-chain activity continues to decline, reflecting a significant weakening of ecological growth momentum. This is due to multiple factors:

1. Initially relied on Telegram traffic benefits, but did not establish an effective user retention mechanism.
2. The ecological narrative is singular, lacking diversified track layout.
3. The unique architecture is not developer-friendly, limiting innovation efficiency.

If we cannot move away from the dependence on short-term hype, TON will struggle to establish sustainable on-chain value.

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Current Status of the TON User and Developer Ecosystem

The number of TON users has rapidly increased from 20 million in May 2024 to the current 150 million. However, the number of active addresses has significantly decreased as the enthusiasm for the ecosystem has waned, with about 2 million monthly active users currently.

The trading volume has significantly decreased compared to peak periods, but overall it remains stable, averaging around 2.5 million transactions per day.

The number of validators is relatively small, with only 400, leading to a certain degree of centralization. The number of developers has also decreased, with about 30 full-time developers and 150+ monthly active developers.

TON presents a "user-first" characteristic, but also exposes issues such as an unstable ecological foundation and insufficient support for developers.

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The Future of TON: Towards Compatibility and Connectivity

To overcome the barriers of incompatibility with EVM, TON is building a bridge to the EVM ecosystem through the TAC project. TAC is an independent EVM public chain that enables seamless connection between TON and EVM applications.

TAC is built using Cosmos SDK + Ethermint, supporting full EVM smart contract execution. Through the proxy contract system, users can interact directly with EVM applications using their TON wallet, experiencing it as if using a native DApp.

TAC has opened a fast lane for TON to the EVM world, which is expected to expand the ecological boundaries of TON. The future development of TON largely depends on whether it can leverage TAC to access the mainstream EVM ecosystem, build a robust developer community, and break through the bottlenecks in payment and application scenario implementation.

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