Data: TON's explosive growth relies on mini-apps. What are the highlights of Mini apps?

Author: Stacy Muur, Crypto KOL; Compiler: 0xxz@Golden Finance

In 2024, the TON applet has become a real phenomenon.

The complete story of TON's success

From the record-breaking ICO in 2018 to becoming the center of mass adoption in 2024.

TON was originally created by Telegram in 2018 and launched a record-breaking ICO in 2019, raising $1.7 billion. In 2020, the wind changed, and the US SEC's lawsuit stopped the process, but for most Web3 products, this may be a disaster, but it made TON stronger.

In 2021, an open source development team (now the TON Foundation) rebuilt the ecosystem and shaped it into its current state. GRAM was renamed TON and issued at a price of $0.7.

In 2023, TON announced plans to bring 30% of users into its network by 2028, with a goal of reaching 500 million users.

The target number of users in 2024 is about 3-4 million.

In fact, the number of wallets activated on the TON chain has exceeded 9 million.

What is the key to TON's explosive growth?

Telegram mini-programs.

With mini-programs, developers can create flexible interfaces that launch directly within Telegram, potentially replacing any website or web application.

You can see the full list of mini-programs here: https://t.me/tapps_bot

Since its launch, thousands of mini-programs have been created.

Here are a few highlight mini-programs:

• Notcoin: 35 million users in 3 months

• Hamster Kombat: 150 million users, 46 million daily active users

• Catizen: 21 million users, 3 million daily active users

• TapSwap: 50 million users, 17 million daily active users

• Yescoin: 20 million users, 5 million daily active users

No wonder the number of daily active addresses of TON has exceeded that of Ethereum.

The Hamster Kombat craze is an extraordinary part of this saga. Many of my Web2 friends who have nothing to do with crypto are now posting their referral links and sharing their stats.

Hamster Kombat is popular on YouTube and Twitter, and also has a large following on Telegram. The game’s YouTube channel has 23 million subscribers, while its Twitter account has 8.1 million followers.

With Notcoin and Hamster Kombat popularizing the Telegram applet framework, hundreds of developers have created their own touchscreen games on TON, forming a snowball effect. Users actively explore the ecosystem, searching for the next promising application.

TON incentives further fuel this process: more than $150 million worth of TON will be distributed to communities and projects in 2024, and more than 894,000 users have already shared $9 million in rewards.

As a result, Messari data shows that TON's ROI remains positive relative to all asset classes. This seems like a rare achievement today.

The real impact is the growth of TON, not just a reallocation of interest from Web3 native users, as seen by other chains.

Instead, it attracts non-crypto users and gets them to join the Web3 journey.