The price of the public chain TON token has continued to hit new highs in 2024. This week, its market value has jumped to ninth, and it has risen nearly four times since the beginning of the year.
Since the launch of the main network in 2021, TON's development has been tepid. Although it has Telegram's 900 million traffic pool, its highest increase in the last bull market was only three times.
Before 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 divested Telegram and developed independently. In September 2023, Telegram and TON announced that they would cooperate deeply.
Backed by Telegram's 900 million traffic reservoir, it is the most attractive story in the TON narrative. The development of blockchain must continue to absorb Web2 users. TON, which has deep cooperation with Telegram, undoubtedly plays the role of a bridge between Web2 and Web3 in such a narrative.
For investors, they are worried that early miners will hold too many positions and manipulate the price of coins. However, its technical route 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 its chain has not ushered in a big outbreak and the price of coins has been tepid.
And the above reasons why TON is not optimistic have changed this year.
Quietly ambushing institutions and steady technological progress
First of all, it cannot be ignored that in 2023, TON received multiple financings. 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, and the amount is unknown.
This year, TON also released news that it is looking for large users who are willing to hold coins for a long time and sell TON tokens at a "discount". Of course, this is also a financing behavior. In this way, Mirana Ventures invested $8 million in TON in March 2023.
In April 2022, the TON Foundation announced the establishment of a $250 million ecosystem fund TONcoin Fund, with funds 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, 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 investment 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 be confirmed that the price of TON will be supported and participated by well-known exchanges and well-known market makers.
With the frequent rounds of financing in 2023, it can also be guessed that it will enter an accelerated period of development in 2024. In 2024, it is certain that TON is vigorously expanding 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.
And the information revealed in the keynote speech "TON 2024 Roadmap and Asian Expansion" can be seen. 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 pledgers, and will improve token economics and strengthen voting participation in pledge 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 cross-chain bridges that support all chains.
Previously, there was a consensus in the industry that TON's development was 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.
With the cooperation of news and pull-up, the price of the currency continues to rise
Since the beginning of this year, TON has been constantly reporting good news, such as ads placed on Telegram can be paid with TON. Founder Durov said that Telegram will be profitable next year and will consider an IPO in the United States.
If TON was constantly holding hackathons and various development rewards to encourage developers to create Dapps on TON last year. Then this year is the time to harvest. This year, the marketing approach of the TON Foundation is very clear, using various airdrops to promote users' use of the TON chain and promote the activity on the chain. And continue to release good news to cooperate with pull-up.
As reported on April 12, the TON Foundation has airdropped 300,000 TONs (about $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 continues to enrich. This year, the Web3 native smartphone Universal Phone designed specifically for the Telegram ecosystem has opened pre-sales. It is reported that there will also be a wealth of airdrop activities on it.
In addition to Telegram's attempt to inject the practicality of the TON chain into its applications, the decentralized TON Foundation is also working to promote the use of the chain itself. Its open alliance activities began on April 1, distributing 30 million TONs (worth $204 million at current prices) to applications and users, and using an additional 1 million TONs to incentivize users to join HumanCode (the chain's identity proof primitive). All of these plans have very positive price-to-coin and various on-chain indicators: the number of wallets on the TON chain has doubled and TVL has increased sixfold compared to the beginning of March.
Now it 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. At present, 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 attributes of Telegram and Web3. For Web2 users, the entry threshold is very low.
In the process of booming ecology and increasing users, TON is seen by more people and its price will continue to rise.
How much more can TON rise?
The TON token was late in 2021 and only rose three times in the last bull market. In this round of bull market, the highest increase from the low point of the bear market has been 8 times. The market value has been promoted to the ninth place. For investors, the most concerned thing is, how much can TON rise?
In February 2023, a proposal to optimize the economic model of TON tokens was passed. The proposal 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 that time.
This is actually one of the solutions to people's concerns about the excessive number of tokens held by early miners.
Although the early mining of TON has ended, about 0.6% of TON is newly created each year as a reward for the work of validators.
TON is continuously generated, which will dilute the price. In response to this 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. But 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 addition, 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 in TON at a price lower than the market price for 1-4 years to lock in TON, stabilize the ecosystem and reduce volatility.
How to dilute the TON in the hands of early whales and how to minimize the negative impact of inflation on the price of the currency, the above measures can 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 continuously 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.
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