Telegram’s crypto layout: TON and its ecological development potential

Telegram is an open source cross-platform IM tool (similar to Whatsapp, Messenger, WeChat), founded by Pavel Durov, the “Russian Zuckerberg” in 2013, currently has 180 million users and sends 70 billion messages every day. Telegram is also the most popular communication software among the cryptocurrency community because of its encryption technology and privacy, but Telegram is not satisfied with just being a communication software, Telegram has been actively in the crypto industry. TON is Telegram’s important distribution in the crypto industry, and the project has raised $850 million to develop the TON open source network.

What is TON and its advantages

TON, known as The Open Network, is Telegram’s decentralized first layer blockchain designed for billions of users, with its scalable and shardable performance. TON currently has 85 million network transactions, 1.4 million accounts, 240 verified nodes, and 171K official Twitter followers. According to OKX data, TON currently has a market capitalization of $2.561 billion in circulation, ranking 23rd on the network.

Existing blockchains lack scalability and user-friendly interfaces. Even blockchain pioneers like Bitcoin and Ether have their own problems, such as high transaction fees, slow transactions, and lack of communication between blockchains, the most critical of which is that existing blockchain networks are too complex and difficult to learn for the average user, which greatly reduces their usability. TON was created to change this situation. As a representative of the TON Foundation said in an interview, “TON is made for millions of users. One of our goals is to make the blockchain network as easy and fast as those applications that users are used to using on a daily basis.”

TON solves the blockchain’s problems of scalability and interoperability through its multi-blockchain architecture. TON blockchain is a collection of blockchains, consisting of a main chain, a working chain and a shard chain. The main chain is the main blockchain that contains all information about the protocol and current parameters; the working chain is the blockchain that processes smart contract transactions, and the working chain is further sliced to become the shard chain. TON can verifiy and process millions of transactions per second with the working chain and its dynamic sharding, allowing for massive scalability, interoperability, and instant message transfer between any two blockchains rapidly regardless of network size. In addition, to solve security problems and maintain decentralization, TON uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and allows verifiers to add new blocks on top of any invalid ones to avoid unnecessary forks. With the crypto industry in a crisis of confidence after the FTX incident, TON relies on utility and strong efficiency to be one of the few ecosystems in the crypto industry that still remains viable.

TON’s development history

Back in 2017, Telegram developed a blockchain platform called Telegram Open Network (Initial TON), issued the native crypto asset Gram, and raised $1.7 billion in an initial token offering to selected investors the following year.

TON’s initial path did not go smoothly. In 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Telegram with violating the U.S. Securities Act by issuing Gram without registering, banning Telegram from issuing Gram and circulating the coin globally. This forced Telegram to abandon the Telegram Open Network, and stop the two-and-a-half-year blockchain project.

The collapse of the initial TON project did not affect Telegram’s presence in the crypto industry, and a community of developers called Newton soon replaced Telegram to continue working on TON. Although Telegram is no longer involved in any of TON’s technology development, CEO Pavel Durov still supported and worked with the TON Foundation and the TON blockchain to drive the development of the crypto industry together. The crypto industry is growing. On April 12, 2022, the TON Foundation announced the launch of its first ecosystem fund, the TONcoin Fund, with $250 million in investments from Firecoin Incubator, KuCoin Ventures, MEXC Pioneer Fund, 3Commas Capital, TON Miners, Kilo Funds, and other institutions and exchanges. The fund will be used for financing, incubation, hackathon, educational programs and grants for TON-based development projects.

TON’s ecological distribution

Ton Token

Toncoin, as TON’s crypto asset, aims to be the easiest payment method to use, enabling users to send crypto assets directly to others in chat rooms, just like LinePay, which is undoubtedly simpler and more accessible than other public chains such as SOL, AMAX, BSC or the decentralized wallet Metamask. Toncoin has also made crypto-asset payments popular in society through Telegram’s huge user base.

In addition to being able to send and receive Toncoin directly in chat rooms like Line Pay, Toncoin can also interact with TON Foundation’s wallet bot to purchase, trade and send bitcoins, as well as use credit cards to purchase crypto assets. According to the TON Foundation, more than 800,000 Telegram accounts have already used this feature. In terms of mining, Toncoin uses the same proof-of-work as Bitcoin and can be mined using a computer. According to the TON Foundation, Toncoin will soon be mined out. Toncoin will switch to proof-of-stake and enter deflation.

The combination of Toncoin and Telegram also unlocks more payment options for crypto assets, which could become the pioneer of global crypto payment services, pushing crypto payments to replace traditional payments as the mainstream payment method for international transactions. The goal of the TON Foundation is to make crypto payments as simple as possible and to make Telegram’s large user base its customers.

TON Wallet Robot

In April 2022, TON Foundation announced the availability of its new wallet bot @wallet for Telegram, allowing over 500 million users to send and receive Toncoin and purchase Bitcoin directly from Telegram. Users don’t have to enter a long wallet address and wait for verification to complete a transaction. The TON Foundation is now offering a simple, fast, convenient and free alternative. Currently, the Fiat currencies supported for buying and selling Toncoin are USD, EUR, Ukrainian hryvnia, Belarusian ruble and Kazakhstan tenge.

Users are not charged any fees for purchasing crypto assets on Telegram via the wallet bot, but for each completed transaction, the seller will be charged a commission equal to 0.9% of the sale price. Currently, the app can only be used to purchase Toncoin and Bitcoin. However, the TON Foundation is planning to expand the range of crypto assets available for purchase. It is believed that it won’t be long before crypto assets can be bought and sold freely in the TON wallet.

Besides, in order to transfer crypto assets using the peer-to-peer feature on Telegram, users need to register with The Open Network. When transferring crypto assets to another person, the user will send the crypto assets to the recipient’s Telegram instead of their address for processing.

Fragment

Fragment is a non-custodial, decentralized NFT trading platform that provides a secure, anonymous place for all users to purchase digital collectibles. All transactions rely on the TON blockchain and the Toncoin (TON), originally developed by Telegram.

Back in August this year, TON Foundation already launched a domain name auction, in which Wallet.ton and Casino.ton were sold for about $260,000 and $240,000 respectively, which made TON realize the commercial value of usernames, website domains, groups and channel URLs in the social sector, and so Fragment was born. The first open auction was the NFT of Telegram username, where username refers to the personal ID set by the user in Telegram, not a nickname. In the current social networking world, whether it is Twitter or Weibo, users’ personal IDs can be withdrawn by the platform at any time, or be registered by others due to blocking. Users expect to have an ID that shows their personality. They can choose to give up their current ID for a better one. Personal IDs have a certain degree of circulation on social media, and the emergence of Fragment has given value to this circulation by creating a marketplace for user names (personal IDs) to be traded, making them more valuable for communication and circulation.

When you want to change your username, you can buy your favorite username through Fragment by bidding online; if your Telegram username is scarce, you can choose to keep it by converting your existing username into an NFT collection through Fragment or by auctioning it off at Fragment. Fragment provides a platform for creating value from usernames. According to Fragment’s official information, the auctioned username will be used as a collection, and will also be used for other empowerment and privileges in the future.

TON Virtual Phone Number

Recently, TON and Fragment launched a virtual phone number starting with + 888, which is an important use to register Telegram and bind TON wallet. This virtual number is defined as NFT goods recorded in the TON blockchain, which means that as long as users are willing to pay, they can sign up for Telegram without their real cell phone number. It not only protects the user’s privacy, but also shows the user’s personality with the exclusive virtual number, just like QQ numbers, cell phone numbers and license plate numbers. Some special virtual numbers are also highly collectible, so users can sell the NFT virtual number.

In terms of price, the current random + 888 number is priced at 9 TON. With the launch of the virtual number, TON also ushered in a wave of big increases, as of now 1TON = 2.45USD, which means that the price of getting a random + 888 (with 8 digits) is about RMB 155 yuan. In fact, the core of making virtual numbers is to enhance their own visibility and community activity, since TON is mainly promoted on Telegram.

The introduction of virtual numbers by TON is also seen as a new trend in the NFT of Web2 social accounts. Compared to the previous NFT of social accounts through usernames or avatars, changing the registered number to a virtual number NFT not only isolates the user’s real information, but also provides new elements for social accounts and brings more application scenarios. With Telegram users’ understanding of blockchain and crypto industry, the virtual numbers launched by TON will soon attract more users to join in. The trend of virtual numbers NFT will also be popularized in other social media, such as Twitter, Meta, Discord and other social media will soon launch their own exclusive virtual numbers NFT in the future.

Summary

In the past year, TON has gone where other layer1 blockchains have taken years to go, creating a complete ecosystem with all the necessary products and services, including tokens, NFT, stake, domains, marketplaces, multifunction wallets, decentralized exchanges and other DeFi services. With TON leading most layer1 in terms of transaction speed and versatility, we believe that as TON grows, it will bring us even more surprises in the future.