Written by: Asher Zhang
With the recent market recovery, market speculation has risen again, and the most noteworthy one is the TON ecosystem. It is worth mentioning that the Meme token, which was previously popular on Solana, has recently become popular on the TON ecosystem. In addition to the previous NOT token, Hamster Kombat, Catizen and DOGS have also been popular recently. Once these projects were launched, they received widespread attention. So, why does the TON ecosystem get attention? What other popular projects on the TON ecosystem are worth paying attention to?
Meme craze turns to the new frontier
Since the beginning of this year, the TON ecosystem has developed rapidly, and the MEME tokens and mini-program applications on the TON ecosystem have shown an explosive trend. The rapid development of the TON ecosystem is related to TON's technical advantages and Telegram's broad user base.
TON uses a unique multi-layer multi-chain architecture to achieve high speed and scalability. This architecture includes the masterchain, workchain, and shardchain. The masterchain is the core of the entire network, while the workchain is the part that supports smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). The workchain is divided into multiple shardchains, each of which is responsible for processing a subset of accounts of a specific type, thereby improving the scalability and transaction processing speed of the network. Through sharding technology and efficient routing mechanisms, TON is able to process millions of transactions per second while maintaining low latency and low costs, which is the underlying technical support for Notcoin's success. Earlier, Telegram and TON integrated, which enabled Notcoin, which is built on TON, to quickly acquire customers from Telegram. Telegram has more than 900 million active users. Telegram's monthly downloads are almost 10 times that of its closest competitor Signal, with 36.7 million downloads in January alone.
Howard, the head of developer relations for Asia at the TON Foundation, said that 99% of people are focused on mini-programs and click-to-earn or tap-to-earn projects, which is expected to give birth to out-of-circle applications for Web3. In addition, the real potential of TON and Telegram lies in their DeFi and social integration capabilities. In the future, TON is likely to achieve growth in DeFi and other on-chain applications.
Inventory of Ton Ecosystem Hotspot Projects
Notcoin can be said to be TON's leading project, and it has been officially recognized by mainstream exchanges and TON. The Notcoin game code is open source. From the perspective of game design mechanism, Notcoin allows users to earn virtual currency in the process of participation and interaction through gamification (such as click mining). This model is simple and interesting, which increases user participation and loyalty and attracts a large number of users to participate. Since its launch on January 1, 2024, its popularity has surged. Currently, the number of participants in the game exceeds 30 million, and the average daily activity reaches 5 million. After Notcoin became popular, the "Tap to Earn" projects in the TON ecosystem have received a lot of attention, including Hamster Kombat and Catizen.
Hamster Kombat
Hamster Kombat is a TON ecosystem game of Tap to Earn that simulates the role of a CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. Players collect game points by clicking on the hamster on the screen. At the same time, Hamster Kombat provides a variety of ways for players to obtain rewards, and encourages players to unlock more rewards through community interaction and cooperation. For example, players can obtain extra points and increase the speed of obtaining points by purchasing and synthesizing special cards, daily check-ins, following official social media accounts, and recommending friends. According to official information, Hamster Kombat currently has more than 200 million registered users, more than 48 million Telegram fans, more than 31.5 million YouTube subscribers, and more than 11 million Twitter fans. It can be said that Hamster Kombat has a super large user base.
Catizen
Catizen is a cat-raising chain game on the TON ecosystem, created by the Pluto Studio team and the first game on its GameFi platform. At the intersection of casual games and breakthrough innovations, Catizen launched the "PLAY-TO-AIRDROP" mode. "The user's journey is not just a game, but a treasure hunt for tokens in the vast universe of Meow Star." With its cute cat image and unique gameplay, Catizen quickly attracted a large number of players and continued to grow at an astonishing rate, with nearly 20 million registrations in just 2 months. According to official information, as of June 23, the total number of users on the Catizen chain exceeded 1.25 million.
Pixelverse
Pixelverse is a cyberpunk-themed entertainment studio and game where players enter the game as freelancers and can participate in quests, PvE battles, craft and upgrade robots, and fight other players in the arena. Pixelverse aims to create a low-barrier game that introduces users to Web 3, provides true ownership of in-game assets and rewards loyal players, while creating an immersive gaming experience for Web 2 gamers.
Pixelverse recently announced a $5.5 million round of financing led by Delphi Ventures, Merit Circle, and Mechanism Capital. Other investors include Bitscale Capital, Ghaf Capital, Big Brain Holdings, LiquidX, Foresight Ventures, The Sandbox founder Sébastien Borget, Luca Netz, Dingaling, DCF GOD, Grail, and James Kwon.
DOGS
After several popular projects such as Hamster Kombat and Catizen, DOGS suddenly became popular recently. The black and white dog image of the DOGS project was inspired by Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. He drew the iconic dog Spotty at a charity auction to support an orphanage. According to official Telegram information, DOGS is not an ordinary commemorative coin. The team brought the tradition of Spotty into the world of cryptocurrency to create a fun, community-oriented and unique cryptocurrency. Driven by the booming TON ecosystem, the DOGS project caters to the lack of representative Meme images in the current ecosystem. By airdropping tokens to Telegram users, it attracted more than 1 million subscribers in just one day, and the daily content reading volume exceeded one million, and its growth rate was amazing.
Blum
Blum is a hybrid trading platform founded by former Binance executives. The Telegram applet was launched on April 19, but the trading function has not yet been launched. Users can earn points through Farm and Drop game, and invite new users to get Drop game tickets and extra points. Currently, Blum has more than 30 million users, and its channel number ranks TOP 6 in Telegram's global weekly ranking.
Travel Frog
Travel Frog is a development game app on Telegram. Currently, the number of active users during the beta test period exceeds 40,000, and the number of subscribers in the Telegram group exceeds 27,000. Similar to the once popular development game "Travel Frog" in Web2, players of Travel Frog need to prepare a travel bag with lunch items for the frog, collect documents for it, entertain friends, etc. The clovers earned in the game can be exchanged for TON later. The specific gameplay is: first get a frog for free; then click on the door to collect clovers from the pool every two hours; use the clovers to buy items in the store and put them in the three grids on the lower left; finally, let the frog travel for 15 minutes.
HypeSaints
HypeSaints is a game product similar to "handheld + cartridge" on TON. STEPN is the main investor in the seed round of financing for this project. The game currently only supports Telegram mobile terminal. After entering the game, players can get a TON HypeGear for free, and then earn points by clicking on the HypeGear continuously. Players can also use the points to upgrade the HypeGear or interact with it.
Majyo Treasure
Majyo Treasure is a small idle battle game. The project will be in public beta from June 21 to July 10. Players can improve their ranking by gaining points by defeating Majyo BOSS, engaging in PVP battles or fighting Majyo Boss in groups. During the public beta stage, the project has prepared a bonus pool of $10,000; the higher the ranking, the more rewards you will get.
Balaton.bet
The gameplay of Balaton.bet is similar to Joker. Players need to pay 20 points or 40 points to enter the game and get 2-3 playing cards; when other players enter the game one after another, the prize pool will become larger. When the countdown ends, the dealer turns over his five cards, and the players form the maximum card sequence of Texas Hold'em with their own cards and the dealer's cards, and get points according to the score table. The top 10% of the players share half of the prize pool, the top 10%-35% of the players share 35% of the prize pool, and the remaining players have no rewards, and 15% is used as treasury fees. At the same time, Balaton.bet can also earn points by signing in daily, inviting friends, and clicking Farming on the platform.
TypoCurator
TypoCurator is an AI data annotation applet launched by Web3 AI search platform TypoX AI on Ton. It has completed more than 500,000 data annotations within a week of its launch, attracting more than 12,000 test users. TypoCurator combines Tap 2 Earn and AI data training annotation. Users can complete data annotation questions in the Telegram applet and receive TPX rewards. Each user initially has a task quota of 20 questions per task. Users can also get more quotas by inviting new users or purchasing with TPX.
Lucky Draw Master
Lucky Draw Master is a robot on Telegram that supports the use of USDT, TON, NOT and other tokens for lottery and red envelopes. Most of its users are from Russia, Brazil and India. Project owners can use Lucky Draw Master to set lottery conditions such as joining channels and following social media for marketing. At the same time, users can also participate in coin mining activities and earn MoCoin by signing in and completing tasks. A certain amount of MoCoin can be exchanged for USDT red envelopes.
Summarize
With the strategic cooperation between Telegram and TON, the TON ecosystem has developed rapidly this year, especially some small program applications and Meme projects have attracted much attention from the market. Based on Telegram's huge user base, the small program projects on TON can quickly exceed one million users. With the development of TON tokens and ecological projects, the market is paying more and more attention to them. It is expected to continue to develop rapidly in the future and is expected to become a dark horse in this round of bull market.
