Backed by 800 million Telegram users, what is the current status of TON’s ecological development?

Author: JZ, founder of JZ Invest

TON bucked the trend and surged in the bear market, quietly becoming the tenth largest token by market value. Is future growth still worth looking forward to? Or is a bubble coming?

To quickly understand the relationship between the value and price of a project, you can use "market value/TVL" to compare.

TON's market capitalization is very high compared to TVL because the market capitalization has skyrocketed recently, but the on-chain ecosystem is still struggling to keep up.

To understand the ceiling of ecosystem development, the fundamentals of a public chain determine most of it.

TON is an L1 public chain with the goal of establishing a complete blockchain ecosystem.

In order to quickly understand the positioning of TON, here we directly compare it with the two L1s of ETH and SOL - TON beats the two competing products in terms of block processing time and difficulty.

While ETH is still thinking about Layer 2 and expansion solutions, TON is already waiting for Ethereum at the end.

But it must be noted that when Solana first appeared, its fundamentals were the strongest at the time. Not only was it fast, but its gas fee was so cheap that it was almost negligible.

However, as usage increases, various problems begin to emerge, and even downtime occurs multiple times. Therefore, stress testing will still be needed in the future to truly verify whether TON is really as powerful as the data shows.

Although Telegram only officially announced its cooperation with TON to launch Wallet this month, the two have actually been related for a long time. In 2018, Telegram hoped to issue its own token GRAM, but the next year it was accused by the SEC of illegal fundraising.

Telegram was forced to abandon the project and the development was taken over by the TON foundation. It was not until recently that the two reunited in the form of "cooperation".

The initial total supply of TON is 5 billion, of which 1.45% is the team's share.

The current operating model is similar to ETH, giving PoS miners TON as a reward, with inflation at an annual rate of about 0.6%.

In particular, TON began to allow miners to mine using PoW in June 2020, accounting for 98.55% of the total supply, and the last TON was mined in June last year.

In February this year, TON launched a community proposal and froze 1.08 billion TON in 171 inactive early wallets. Therefore, the advantage is that early investors do not have to worry about unlocking their tokens and selling them.

The disadvantage is that the degree of token dispersion is not high. The top ten addresses (excluding official addresses) hold about 26% of the total supply of TON.

According to statistics from http:// ton.app, there are currently 551 apps in the ecosystem, but most of them are not financial DeFi products.

There are currently only 7 listed on DefiLlama, and the top-ranked DEX MegatonFi only has a TVL of $4.8 million.

Public chain ecosystems tend to develop from financial infrastructure such as DEX, Lending, and stablecoins, but there are no very innovative protocols on TON yet.

TON is backed by Telegram's 800 million users, and its ability to break out of the circle has a very large imagination space, which directly solves the problem of how other public chains can be adopted by ordinary users.

However, there is still a lot of room for development in the ecosystem. If there is no major innovative project, TVL cannot keep up with the market value, and the currency price may begin to return to a level consistent with TVL.