Pavel Durov promised that TON would be completely transformed in 2-3 weeks.
Written by Eric, Foresight News
On the night of May 4th, Beijing time, Telegram founder Pavel Durov suddenly tweeted that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation as the driving force of TON and become the largest validator of TON. It's worth noting that Durov only mentioned TON in 7 tweets throughout 2025, making his sudden announcement of "taking over" TON this year quite unexpected.
The ton.org website is currently under maintenance, and the page only displays the sentence: ton.org is now controlled by MTONGA (Make TON Great Again).
As a result, the price of TON rose from around $1.35 to $1.85 within two days, an increase of more than 37%.
In 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused Telegram Open Network of issuing Gram tokens through an ICO in 2018 as unregistered securities. Telegram was forced to abandon the project, return funds, and publicly announce its cessation of participation in the project after open-sourcing the code. Subsequently, Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko, two developers who met at a Telegram programming competition, took over the project. They launched the community-driven project NewTON, inheriting the original TON code, maintaining nodes and testnets, and gradually advancing the mainnet.
In 2021, the NewTON community upgraded the testnet to the mainnet and officially transitioned to the TON Foundation. The foundation was officially registered as a non-profit organization in Switzerland in 2023 and is supported by community contributors.
Therefore, six years have passed since Telegram was forced to abandon TON due to regulatory pressure, to Telegram's founders voluntarily announcing that they would dedicate their time and energy to promoting TON's development. In these six years, TON has experienced a complete cycle of rise and fall.
In April 2022, just as the entire market was immersed in an atmosphere of uncertainty, the TONcoin Fund, invested by Huobi Incubator, Kucoin Ventures, MEXC Pioneer Fund, and others, suddenly announced the launch of a $250 million ecosystem fund to support projects on Ton. The TON Foundation followed suit by launching a $1 billion ecosystem fund to promote the development of the Ton ecosystem.
After that, the TON ecosystem experienced a small boom, with infrastructure such as domain names, storage, and DeFi gradually being built, but it never really made a big splash until the emergence of Telegram mini-games.
In fact, TON began collaborating with Telegram from the very beginning of its ecosystem development. Both official and third-party projects launched mini-apps for cryptocurrency transfers and payments on Telegram, and the connection between the two gradually grew stronger. Mini-games further enhanced this synergy. Prior to this, many on-chain games had declined due to poor user experience, complex gameplay, and difficulties in promotion. However, TON's mini-games, leveraging Telegram's hundreds of millions of users and using simple gameplay like "Match-3" and "Sheep Dance," spread like wildfire on Telegram.
During the mini-game boom, many teams amassed millions of users within days of developing their games. The most popular at the time were Tap-to-Earn games like Notcoin, with tokens from numerous game projects experiencing a rapid surge in value, creating many wealth opportunities. Meanwhile, the price of the TON token broke through $8 in mid-2024, with a total market capitalization exceeding $26 billion.
But this hype came and went quickly. As the popularity of the mini-games gradually declined, TON lacked a compelling second move to maintain attention. Furthermore, the arrest of its founder by French authorities on charges of failing to effectively control illegal activities on the platform fueled concerns about TON's future, causing on-chain interest to plummet almost overnight.
Recently, TON's return to the market spotlight also began with a tweet from Pavel Durov. On April 9th, Pavel Durov posted that TON had completed an upgrade, increasing speed tenfold, block generation efficiency sixfold, and transactions could be completed in one second. But this is only the first step in TONGA's seven-step plan; the next step will be to further reduce already low transaction fees by six times.
The improved chain performance stems from the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade completed in April. TON's new consensus mechanism introduces a "streaming layer" to push state updates, replacing the previous polling mechanism. This reduces block production time to approximately 400 milliseconds, and transaction finality confirmation takes only about 1 second. The fee reduction mentioned by Pavel Durov was also completed in early May; currently, Ton's base fee has been reduced to approximately $0.0005.
In addition, TON optimized its infrastructure in the first quarter of this year, adopting new nodes implemented in Rust, which significantly simplifies operations and maintenance, making it suitable for institutional and large-scale deployments, and more secure and modular. The developer tool Builders Portal also released version 2.0, with version 3.0 expected to launch in the second quarter.
While the ultimate purpose of these changes wasn't explicitly stated, it's clear that Pavel Durov hopes to leverage Telegram as a traffic portal to make TON a payment and interaction hub that supports the development of Mini Apps and AI tools on Telegram. Especially in the AI field, many "lobster owners" currently choose to control AI to perform tasks through Telegram. In the future, Telegram may not only be a tool for communication between people, but also an important tool for human-computer interaction. Supporting low-cost and high-frequency transactions is the necessary infrastructure to realize these visions.
