TON ecosystem becomes a blue ocean for Mini Dapps. How can developers seize the opportunity?

"More than 500 people signed up for the event, and the venue, which can accommodate about 200 people, was packed. The corridors were full of participants, and many users even spontaneously organized sub-venues on the grass outside the venue, in the Starbucks and KFC next to it. The users' fomo enthusiasm for the TON ecosystem seems to have brought people back to the ICO grand occasion on Ethereum in 2017." A crypto OG who returned from the TON Shenzhen developer event on June 22 described to ChainCatcher.

Not only users pay attention to the development of the TON ecosystem, but many top crypto investment institutions have publicly expressed their optimism and have already laid out TON tokens. After Pantera Capital publicly announced that it would raise funds for a new fund to invest in more TON tokens, on June 30, the founder of Kingsway Capital disclosed that the largest token currently held by his institution is TON.

Ryan Barney, investment partner of Pantera Capital, explained the investment in TON by saying that 99.9% of blockchain projects are trying to create community technology from scratch, but this is a difficult road. Telegram has 900 million daily active users, which is conducive to TON's acquisition of users.

Driven by popular mini-games such as Notcoin and Catizen, "TG+TON ecosystem" has become the new mainstream narrative in the crypto market, and a large number of Web2 and Web3 developers have poured into the TON ecosystem to find new opportunities.

Vivi, head of Research at the TON Foundation, revealed in an interview with ChainCatcher that there are now more than 2,000+ projects scheduled in the TON mini-program store.

TONis the best way for Telegram to commercialize

TON is essentially the commercialization of Telegram, and Telegram is completing its own commercial deployment through TON.

Jerry, who has studied the traditional Internet commercialization model, explained that Telegram has actually been facing tremendous survival pressure. Although Pavel Durov's original intention in founding Telegram was to provide users with a private and free instant messaging tool and regarded it as a public product. However, as the number of users grows exponentially, the operating costs such as servers and bandwidth that it needs to pay will become higher and higher, and it has to find a continuous source of income to maintain normal operations.

Since 2017, Telegram has actually been exploring its own business model, whether it is payment services, advertising, or ICO financing that has been paused by the US SEC, but the final result is not ideal.

Last year, Pavel Durov revealed that it costs about $630 million a year to keep Telegram up and running.

According to the Wall Street Journal, by April 2021, Telegram had accumulated $700 million in debt. Therefore, since 2021, Telegram has publicly issued excess bonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars several times, and in March this year, it also obtained $330 million in funds through the sale of bonds.

Telegram is often regarded as the Web3 version of WeChat. From the perspective of active users, Telegram and WeChat are not much different. WeChat has about 1.2 billion active users, and Telegram has 900 million and is still increasing, but they are far apart in terms of profit methods.

Payment is the main commercialization path of WeChat. Compared with WeChat, Telegram will also choose payment. However, since Telegram is not regulated and cannot obtain mainstream financial regulatory licenses, it only has the Web3 payment route, and its founder Pavel Durov entered the Crypto industry very early.

Therefore, whether from a business perspective or from the background of the founding team, TON is the best choice for Telegram's commercialization.

Steve Yun, chairman of the TON Foundation, said that there is a collaborative business agreement between the TON Foundation and Telegram, similar to Google being the default search engine for Apple devices.

"TON has unlocked many ways for the Telegram community to make its business profitable, shared and developed. For example, Fragment, a virtual digital product trading market developed based on TON, supports users to trade NFT products such as virtual phone numbers and TG usernames, and has facilitated sales of more than $350 million." Pantera Capital wrote in the reasons for investing in TON.

Regarding the relationship between TON and Telegram, Vivi, the head of Research at the TON Foundation, told ChainCatcher that although TON and Telegram are two independent legal entities in terms of organizational form, the relationship between the two is getting closer and closer, and sometimes TON can even be regarded as Telegram's blockchain department.

Since last year, TG founder Pavel Durov has repeatedly publicly expressed his support for TON and its ecosystem. The Telegram platform has provided a number of enabling measures for TON tokens, including TG advertising, creator economy, and value-added services such as Stars virtual points, which can be paid with TON tokens.

In Pavel Durov's recent personal TG channel, he has repeatedly released products such as the TON ecosystem's click game Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, and the DEX platform TapSwap, expressing his optimism about them.

In March, Pavel Durov wrote in the channel that the Telegram advertising platform is open to all advertisers, and all TG channel owners will receive 50% of the revenue from display ads in their channels, which will be paid in TON tokens.

Web2.5 product form under the combination of "TG+TON"

"TG's 900 million daily active users + TON's Web3 technology" have formed a Web2.5 product form for the two, which not only inherits the traffic advantage of Web2, but also integrates the technical characteristics of Web3.

In the view of Vivi, the head of Research at the TON Foundation, TON is no longer just a Web3 product. With the support of TG, ecological products can penetrate into various Web2 businesses.

Compared with the traditional Layer1, TON is more like a functionally enhanced Layer1 platform, which can be regarded as a Web3 product matrix based on specific Web2 applications.

In the past, Web3 practitioners mainly focused on products such as the DeFi three-piece set (DEX, Lending, and machine gun pool), but with the increase in conference activities held by TON, more and more Web2 users have begun to build and develop various applications and projects on the TON platform, covering foreign trade, payment, e-commerce, small games, and artificial intelligence tools.

With the help of TG's Mini Dapp (applet) function, products and business forms that have mature operating models in the Web2 world can also be realized on the TON platform. At present, there are many applications based on e-commerce, air ticket booking, and hotel booking on the TON platform.

Web3 accelerator Starbase Founder Vivian, who has participated in many TON offline events, said that among the participants in recent events, TON has successfully produced a breaking circle effect. Most of the participants in Web3 offline events before were Web3 practitioners, but in TON offline events, you will see many Web2 developers from Internet giants and traditional game companies.

Chris, founder of TonArk, the oracle and lending protocol of TON ecosystem, revealed to ChainCatcher that Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, a well-known company that has developed many Web2 games, has participated in the development of many small games on TG.

Andrew, founder of the TONxFans community, who came from a Web2 Internet giant, added that most of the previous Web3 products were complex in design, lacked real user scenarios, and the user experience was not friendly, making it very difficult to use encrypted DApps. Take the wallet as an example. If you want to use it, you need to write down the password of the disordered combination of letters and numbers. Forgetting the password means the loss of assets, and most encrypted applications are operated on the PC side.

The integration of TON and TG has brought Web3 into the era of mobile Internet. All Web3 operations can be completed through only one TG APP and personal chat page, from easily buying, selling or managing tokens and NFTs.

The relationship between the project party and the user will also be more active. In the past Web3 applications, the connection between the two was one-way, and developers could only wait for users to come to Discord or the community to find them. However, for applications built on TON, developers can set up their own Telegram groups and frequencies when creating products, actively push messages to users, and do some wake-up actions. The two are a more active two-way relationship.

Benchmarking WeChat Mini Programs

The explosion of click games such as Notcoin and Catizen has set off a wave of entrepreneurship in TG+TON mini programs, attracting a large number of Web2 and Web3 developers to flock in and look for new opportunities.

Andrew analyzed that both Web2 and Web3 are now facing growth bottlenecks and trying to find new growth breakthroughs. TG's 900 million daily active user base provides a foundation for it to become an incremental market.

For Web2 products, TG's global market layout enables it to find new growth points in different regions; for Web3 projects, the huge user traffic pool behind TG has user on-chain needs, etc.

The co-founder of the sliding casual game Yescoin said that when the launch of the Mini DApp applet was announced, it meant that TG had changed from a simple chat communication product to a super application.

In Chris's view, the product integration of TG+TON is simply the second WeChat ecosystem. The success of the WeChat ecosystem has set a benchmark for it. The TG+TON ecosystem has just started, which means that there are huge Alpha opportunities hidden in this ecosystem, and early products or projects can gain huge benefits.

TG's user base is not much different from WeChat, but because TG is global, its potential opportunities may be greater than WeChat.

Vivian also feels the same way. She introduced that the social form of TG products behind TON is currently moving closer to WeChat mini-programs. In line with the WeChat mini-program ecosystem, Web2 project parties that have had successful experience in WeChat mini-programs, whether games or any products and tools for traffic, are suitable for transplantation to the TG ecosystem and redoing.

TG mini-programs support developers to carry out a series of Web2 businesses. With the help of TON payment, even if there is no token issuance, no exchange, and no financing, project parties can still realize their own business models and monetization paths. For example, providing cross-border services, in-game purchases, and in-app advertising, products such as the pet cultivation game Catizen and the social product UXLINX have accumulated a large number of users in TG in the early stages.

Vivi revealed that the development cost of deploying mini-programs on TON is low, and a series of technical development documents and templates are provided, so that developers can complete the deployment without writing code from scratch. According to feedback, project parties with a Web2 background can complete the deployment of a mini-program within two or three days.

In addition, Andrew and Vivi both mentioned that the TG mini-program is launched online with a post-review mechanism, while Tencent WeChat mini-programs adopt a pre-review mechanism. This means that to develop a mini-program on WeChat, you need to submit a series of materials such as company licenses and developer information for filing, and the application can only be released after the review is passed. However, there is no need for prior review to develop mini-programs on TG, and developers do not need to submit any materials, only a post-review system.

Loop, the founder of Builder House, a studio focusing on Dapp development, has a deep understanding of this. The mini-programs on TON support the on-chain of some product data, which greatly saves costs for developers, and even if problems are encountered, they can be quickly resolved in the TON developer community.

In addition, the TON Foundation will also support outstanding projects, such as The Open League, which will provide substantial economic incentives and resource support for selected projects. The Yescoin project selected as the winner of The Open League Season 4 can receive a bonus of $500,000 with its team members.

Web3Mini Programs Become a Blue Ocean for Entrepreneurship

Vivi revealed in this interview that the number of projects in the queue for Mini Dapp (Mini Program Store) has now exceeded 2,000.

How can developers seize the traffic advantage when participating in the "TG+TON" ecosystem?

Vivi, Chris, and Yescoin co-Founder all reminded developers that although the mini programs on TON are often compared to WeChat mini programs, in fact, there are significant differences between the two in terms of ecological models.

Vivi said that WeChat focuses on a single domestic market, while Telegram is mainly aimed at overseas markets, and the user preferences of Telegram in different regions are also different. For example, the product model familiar to Russian and Indian users, the willingness to pay for users, and the depth of platform participation are obviously different.

The co-founder of the sliding casual game Yescoin has a deep understanding of this. Yescoin game users are mainly distributed in North America and Europe, and the needs of these users are completely different from those of domestic users. He gave an example that a Yescoin player is a teenager from the Nordic region. His purpose of playing the game is to value its social function, and he can chat with other players on TG while playing.

Chris, Andrew, Loop, ViVian and others reminded developers that the TON public chain is different from the familiar EVM Layer1 public chain. First of all, the development language used is FUNC and TACT, etc., which has certain requirements for the technical ability of developers.

When developers enter the TON ecosystem, they need to understand that whether they are making a Web2 product, a Web3 product, or a Web2.5 product, there are differences between them, and the integration with TON will also be different.

Both Chris and ViVian emphasized that developers need to distinguish a concept, TG is TG, TON is TON, and the two are separate. Developers need to understand whether they want to make products based on TG or TON. Many developers actually attract customers for products made by TG, and only a certain proportion of developers will choose to connect to TON. If you want to develop based on TON, if you need to access the payment function provided by TON or need to use the Web3 Token economic incentive mechanism, etc., the project party needs to overcome the difficulty of TON development language.

For entrepreneurs who want to build projects on TG+TON, Kenetic Captial, a deep participant in the TON ecosystem, said that in addition to the various TAP-type mini-games and socialFi games that have already gone viral, various projects at the protocol level and infrastructure level will gradually receive more attention and have good growth space. Such as the NFT fragmentation protocol TRC404 project, TON EVM Layer2 project Atlas, etc.

Chris agreed that most of the entrepreneurial teams on TON are now doing application layer projects, but the application layer is already very involuted, and developers need to consider whether they can have enough resources to make a name for themselves. For example, mini-games need to think about how to win from star projects such as Notcoin and Catizen.

At present, the DeFi and infrastructure products of the TON ecosystem are still in the early stages of development, especially DeFi applications can carry more funds, but because TON's infrastructure functions on DeFi are not perfect, it makes the development of related products difficult and slow.

Kenetic Captial said that from the current point of view, SocialFi, e-commerce, and DeFi projects are the types of projects that the TON Foundation is currently focusing on.

Vivi believes that with the increase in TON ecological projects, the main task of the TON Foundation is now to identify which projects are long-term, and the foundation's support strategy is to decide which resource support to provide after the project is launched. However, based on its experience in connecting with developers on the front line, it is believed that developers can follow the principle of "I have what others don't have, I am better than others, I am cheaper than others, and I leave when others are cheaper" when building projects.

In terms of track selection, Kenetic Captial proposed two ideas to developers, one is to quickly follow up on similar popular projects, and the other is to predict in advance the projects that will be needed in the future. Which track to choose needs to be determined based on the capabilities of the team itself.

In terms of technology, priority should be given to the implementation of technologies officially supported and recommended by TON. In terms of operation and promotion, full use should be made of the fission effect of Telegram ecosystem users. More support and help from the TON Foundation can also be obtained by participating in TON's official hackathon competition.

ViVian is optimistic about projects that can directly generate cash flow, such as fission tools and infrastructure. She gave an example that, for example, game projects with prop assets can directly generate positive ROI.

However, she also reminded entrepreneurs that when entering the TON ecosystem to develop products, they must first consider whether they have the ability to independently acquire customers and solve the problem of the source of the first batch of seed traffic and users.