Author: Jessy, Jinse Finance
The price of the public chainTON token has continued to hit new highs in 2024. This week, its market value has jumped to ninth, and it has increased nearly fourfold since the beginning of the year.
Since the mainnet was launched in 2021, TON's development has been lukewarm. Although it has Telegram 's 900 million traffic pool, its highest increase in the last bull market was only three times.
Prior to this, the ICO launched to create the TON chain was required to return most of the funds raised due to the prosecution of the US SEC . After that, TON openly separated from Telegram and developed independently. In September 2023, Telegram and TON announced that they would cooperate deeply.
The most attractive story in TON’s narrative is that it relies on Telegram, a 900 million traffic reservoir. The development of blockchain must continue to attract Web2 users. And TON, which has deep cooperation with Telegram, undoubtedly plays the role of a bridge between Web2 and Web3 in such a narrative.
Investors are worried that early miners will hold too many positions and manipulate the price of the currency. The technical route of the coin is completely different from that of Ethereum and is not compatible with EVM. For programmers in the industry, they basically need to relearn its programming technology. The above are the reasons why the ecology on the chain has not ushered in a big explosion and the price of the currency has been tepid.
All the reasons why TON was not favored have changed this year.
Silently lurking institutions and steady technological progress
First of all, it cannot be ignored that in 2023, TON received multiple rounds of financing. The first was in May 2023, when Mask Network invested an unknown amount. In October 2023, TON announced that it had completed an 8-digit multi-million dollar financing, with MEXC Ventures participating. In November 2023, Animoca Brands participated in the investment, with an unknown amount.
This year, TON also announced that it was looking for large holders who were willing to hold the tokens for a long time and sell TON tokens at a "discount". Of course, this is also a form of financing. In this way, Mirana Ventures invested $8 million in TON in March 2023.
In April 2022, the TON Foundation announced the establishment of the $250 million ecosystem fund TONcoin Fund, with funds coming from exchanges and institutions such as Huobi , KuCoin , MEXC, 3Commas Capital , and TON Miners . At the same time, the foundation raised $527 million from 176 independent users, all of which were spontaneous donations from early miners.
After TON’s mining ended in the same year, DWF joined its $25 million TON accelerator program. DWF Labs will contribute to the token economics, market making and liquidity of the TON ecosystem, while also supporting investments and other ecosystem services.
From the above information, we can see that mainstream institutions in the industry are very optimistic about TON and have a relatively deep cooperative relationship. Moreover, the above information can confirm that the price of TON will be supported and participated by well-known exchanges and well-known market makers.
With several rounds of financing in 2023, it can be guessed that it will enter an accelerated development period in 2024. In 2024, it is certain that TON will vigorously expand the market in the Chinese-speaking region of Asia. TON became the first-tier sponsor of the Web3 Carnival held in Hong Kong in April, which is a very clear signal.
The information revealed in the keynote speech "TON 2024 Roadmap and Asian Expansion" shows that TON will launch an optimized version of Jetton, Wallet v5, a stablecoin toolkit, and Gasless transactions. Developers can also build fast, cheap, and scalable TON stablecoins. TON will also launch Multisig 2.0, allowing TON to interact with various hardware wallets.
In terms of governance, TON will upgrade Elector and Coinfig to support on-chain voting for stakers, and will improve token economics to strengthen voting participation in staking pools and wallets. TON will also introduce a new cross-chain technology, Teleport. Without intermediaries and private keys, seamless cross-chain transactions can be achieved. TON will also upgrade all cross-chain bridges to support all chains.
Previously, there was a consensus in the industry that TON’s development is still in its early stages, and with the continuous updating of the above technical directions, it can be foreseen that in the next one or two years, the TON chain ecosystem will make a leap forward.
The news and the pull of the market have caused the price of the currency to continue to rise
Since the beginning of this year, TON has been constantly receiving good news, such as ads placed on Telegram can be paid for with TON. Founder Durov said that Telegram will be profitable next year and will consider an IPO in the United States.
If we say that last year TON was constantly holding hackathons and various development rewards to encourage developers to create Dapps on TON, then this year is the time to reap the rewards. This year, the marketing strategy of the TON Foundation is very clear, using various airdrops to promote users' use of the TON chain and promote activity on the chain. And it continues to release good news to help pull the market.
As reported on April 12, the TON Foundation has airdropped 300,000 TON (about US$2.19 million) to the most active Meme coin traders on Dedust or Ston.fi.
With more and more builders, the ecosystem on the TON chain is constantly enriched. This year, the Web3 native smartphone Universal Phone designed specifically for the Telegram ecosystem has started pre-sale. It is reported that there will also be a variety of airdrop activities on it.
In addition to Telegram’s attempts to inject TON chain utility into its applications, the decentralized TON Foundation is also working to promote the use of the chain itself. Its Open Alliance campaign, which began on April 1, will distribute 30 million TONs (worth $204 million at current prices) to applications and users, and use an additional 1 million TONs to incentivize users to join HumanCode, the chain’s identity proof primitive. All of these plans are very positive for the price of the token and various on-chain indicators: the number of wallets on the TON chain has doubled compared to the beginning of March, and the TVL has increased sixfold.
It now seems that in 2023, the booming development of Bots on Telegram and the access of TON chain wallets to Telegram are just the beginning of the development of the chain ecosystem. Currently, observing the overall application types on the TON chain, most applications are a fusion of Web2 and Web3. It can be said that the Dapp on TON is a fusion of the properties of Telegram and Web3. For Web2 users, the entry threshold is very low.
As the ecosystem flourishes and the number of users continues to increase, TON will be seen by more people and its price will continue to rise.
How much higher can TON rise?
TON tokens were late in 2021, and they only rose three times in the last bull market. In this bull market, they have risen eight times from the low point of the bear market. With the market value rising to ninth, investors are most concerned about how much TON can rise.
In February 2023, a TON token economic model optimization proposal was passed, which proposed to temporarily freeze inactive mining wallets for 48 months. It is understood that these wallets have never been activated and have no outgoing transfers in their history. There are currently 171 inactive mining wallets, which hold more than 1.081 billion TONs, accounting for about 21% of the total supply of TON at the time.
This is actually one of the solutions to address people’s concerns about early miners holding too many tokens.
Although TON's early mining has ended, about 0.6% of TON is newly created every year as a reward for the work of validators.
TON is continuously generated, which will dilute the price. In response to the privacy that affects the price, the TON Foundation has also proposed a destruction mechanism to destroy 50% of all transaction fees on the TON network. However, the proposed destruction amount has little impact on TON's inflation level. The proposal needs to be approved by the majority of TON validators to take effect.
In terms of price stabilization, in order to limit Telegram's share of TON to no more than 10% of the supply, founder Durov proposed a plan to sell excess TON to long-term investors at a price lower than the market price, using a 1-4 year lock-up method to lock in TON, stabilize the ecosystem and reduce volatility.
How to dilute the TON in the hands of early whale, and how to minimize the negative impact of inflation on the price of the currency, the above measures show that TON has been taking action.
In the short term, TON spot has not yet been listed on Binance. If it is listed on Binance, it will definitely push up the price of the currency further. In the long run, the continuous development of the ecology on the TON chain, especially the narrative story backed by Telegram's 900 million users, can be constantly told. The increase in applications and the activity on the chain are the root of the continuous rise in the price of the currency. From this point of view, whether in the short term or in the long term, the price of TON still has great potential for growth.
