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ToggleOn the evening of May 4th, 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 is worth mentioning that Durov only mentioned TON in 7 tweets throughout 2025, so his sudden announcement of "taking over" TON this year is indeed somewhat surprising.
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%.
Durov announced the takeover of TON and the launch of the MTONA project.
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, refund funds, and publicly announce its withdrawal from 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 pushing forward 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 reluctantly abandoned TON due to regulatory pressure, to Telegram's founder proactively announcing that he would dedicate his time and energy to promoting TON's development. In these six years, TON has experienced a complete cycle of rise and fall.
Six Years of Ups and Downs: From Forced Abandonment to Ecological Explosion
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 rise, with infrastructure such as domains, storage, and DeFi gradually being built, but it never 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 collaboration between the two gradually deepened. 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 employing simple gameplay like "Match-3" and "Sheep Dance," spread like wildfire on Telegram.
Cooling-down period after the mini-game craze subsided
During the mini-game boom, many teams developed games that amassed millions of users within days. The most popular at the time were Tap-to-Earn games like Notcoin, and the tokens of numerous game projects skyrocketed in a short period, creating many wealth opportunities. Meanwhile, the price of the TON token also 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 competitive second move to regain 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 its on-chain popularity 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 achieved an upgrade, increasing speed by 10 times, block generation efficiency by 6 times, and transactions could be completed within one second. However, this is only the first step in TONGA's seven-step plan; the next step will be to further reduce the already low transaction fees by 6 times.
The next step in technology upgrades and cost reductions
The improved chain performance stems from the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade achieved 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 achieved in early May, with TON's base fee now reduced to approximately $0.0005.
In addition, TON upgraded its infrastructure in the first quarter of this year, adopting new Rust-based nodes that significantly simplify operations and maintenance, making them 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 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, supporting 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.
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