State of TON in 2024: Mass adoption, Mini Apps, Notcoin, Defi and Price prediction
TON is one of the top L1s by hype, user base, and market cap, but it is quite different from other chains in terms of its use cases and the kind of users it attracts. This is a deep dive into the TON ecosystem in 2024
In this article, we’ll talk about
- DeFi and why we’re still early
- Mass adoption — how Telegram simplified payments
- The infamous clicker apps and how they changed the landscape of TON
- Why is it so hard to build stuff on TON, and so few apps exist? And how the Foundation is solving this.
- Future of TON price
DeFi
A good measure of the maturity of the DeFi ecosystem on any chain is the chain’s TVL compared to the MCAP. Here are some examples of leading DeFi chains
- Ethereum: 114b$ TVL, 314b$ MCAP, 314b$ FDV. TVL:MCAP ratio — 1:3
- Arbitrum: 4.4b$ TVL, ~2b$ MCAP, 5.85b$ FDV. TVL:MCAP ratio — 2:1
- Mantle: 587m$ TVL, ~2b$ MCAP, 3.81b$ FDV. TVL:MCAP ratio — 1:4
- Hyperliquid: 670m$ TVL, token not out yet
Now TON has a TVL of less than ~1b$ and a MCAP of ~16b$, that’s a 1:18 ration, 3–4 times smaller than on other chains. DeFi on TON is still in very nascent stages, now TON only has:
- Lending/borrowing — EVAA Protocol
- Native DEXs — STON.fi and DeDust
- Perp DEX — Storm.trade
- DEX aggregator — swap.coffee
- LST protocols — bemo and tonstakers
Nothing as advanced as interest rate derivatives, RWAs, synthetic dollar protocols, or yeild aggregators yet.
There’s no good bridge yet either, the official one is quite expensive and only supports ETH and BSC
TON didn’t even have a good stablecoin until recently they announced USDT support. That was one of the factors supporting TON’s parabolic TVL growth. One caveat is that it would be more accurate to look at TLV in terms of TON, not in terms of USD as we don’t want TON’s price to influence our thinking. E.g. when TON goes up the TVL in USD goes up as well, but TON TVL stays the same.
One of the catalyzators for TON’s TVL and user base increase is it’s increase in price, as people wanted to try the blockchain that was “pumping”. Notcoin and other clicker apps also played a big role, but we’ll talk about them later. However, that might not be very sustainable as we see that users are slowly starting to drop.
As an attempt to boost the DeFi ecosystem TON has started liquidity mining programs. EVAA Protocol — TON’s native money market was among the first to get boosted yields. But this was only the beginning.
Later, to reach 1b$ in TVL The TON Foundation had a massive incentive program, with LP APYs on DeDust and STON.fi reaching up to 100% and currently sitting at 30–32%. In total — 115m$ or 30m TON in incentives was distributed
Liquidity mining and incentives are a double-edged sword.
While they can boostrap your initial user base, your ecosystem needs to be sticky enough for users to stay even when the APYs are on par with other chains.
Looking at it bluntly, TON DeFi looks like every other chain. Only time will tell if TON will have some fresh and unique DeFi primitives. But protocols on Telegram are already trying to solve some interesting problems:
- Blum is bringing crypto to everyone via Telegram Mini Apps
- Storm.Trade is bringing commodities to Telegram like Gold.
But I think the real “revolutionary” use case of TON in Telegram lies within different Mini Apps.
How Mini Apps are changing the game
Mini Apps are the best tool for mass adoption, as they allow you to use crypto from a familiar telegram interface. All while abstracting many of the crypto complexities away. Kirill Bondarenko, a pro Mini App Dev and semi-finalist of the open league, wrote an article about Mass Adoption and Mini Apps. Check it out!
First, Telegram created its own account abstraction wallet mini app: @wallet. It allows people to freely transfer funds between each other with easy p2p withdrawals and even savings options now via Wallet Earn.
But Community mini apps are taking it further. There’s even a quite popular TON dating mini-app. It’s subscription-based and costs $50$ a month to allow only the most dedicated people to participate. It might sound funny, but consumer apps are what crypto and TON are both lacking, so I’m bullish on Ton dating!
Payment mini apps are taking it further, allowing you to have payment-gated channels, communities, bots, raffles, giveaways among your subscribers, and more.
What Telegram is doing for payment can only be compared to apple cash. But telegram started doing it earlier.
Recently, Telegram also added “stars” as a new, native way for creators to get paid for their content. Now, you can set a price for some of your content, and the community can give back to creators. Later, stars can be converted to TON. A nice on-ramp, huh?
What’s so cool about Telegram stars is that they are essentially cryptocurrency payments, wrapped in a super web2(or even web0) friendly way of “stars”. People don’t even think they are using crypto, as you can simply buy stars with your credit card.
Telegram becoming a super-app
Telegram is becoming closer and closer to the vision of a super app, where you can chat, pay, order food, date, book plane and train tickets and more. Telegram is going in Alipay or WeChat’s footsteps(amazing paper to learn more about China Digital innovation), but bringing crypto support along the way. Instead of all “mini apps” in Alipay being owned and created by Alipay itself, Telegram allows anyone to create their own mini apps facilitating a truly free market instead of a monopoly. The obvious benefit is that demand can easily dictate supply: if people want to buy plane tickets on ton, they don’t have to ask Telegram core team for it and wait — instead, someone from the community can quickly create it. Elon Musk envisioned twitter to be a superapp, but even it is far from Telegram in terms of features.
The only obstacle may be crypto regulations, besides that, Telegram is well on it’s way to become the “everything app” thanks to Mini Apps.
Clicker mini apps
Notcoin and Hamster Combat might be the crypto apps with the most mass adoption; even people who haven’t used crypto a single time in their life have heard about them.
Telegram’s user base is about a billion people, while Notcoin has 35m users, Pixelerse hit 75m users and 15m DAU, and Hamster Combat recently hit a whopping milestone of 300m users. To compare, crypto’s native user base is estimated to be about 500m.
Notcoin and Hamster Combat are the first generation of clicker apps, with their main way of attracting users being the possibility of an airdrop. What happens when the airdrop is over? We all know the answer to that…
Some games, like Pixelverse are trying to make purely playing the game more fun and they are also collabing with prominent projects on other chains like Pudgy Penguins. They are using the Telegram Mini App as a way to onboard more users onto their browser-based game
Onboarding people to crypto through games and consumer apps makes it more like web2, but in a good way. People need incentives other than money to use web3.
No one pays us to use web2, but we still do, because it’s actually useful
Why is it so hard to build on TON?
TON has hype, a pumping price, and a huge userbase, but why aren’t there any builders in the ecosystem?
FunC — TON’s language is extremely low-level and one of the hardest languages to learn
At MiKi, our Lead Blockchain dev and Lead TON dev—Vladislav Lenskii and Semyon Mikhailov—both know the ins and outs of TON and FunC. They have helped build numerous protocols, like LST, sniper bots, omnichain DeFi Hub with TON support, and even helped build an L2!
But they still think that FunC is extremely hard and uncomfortable to use.
The Foundation is trying to solve it with Tact. It’s compiled to FunC underneath, and while it’s not as performant — it’s way easier to use. But the developer adoption is extremely low.
A potentially more effective way of increasing dev adoption is TON L2s! We helped build the very first of them — Atlas Protocol, so I might be slightly biased towards them, haha. But there’s also TON’s official L2 — TAC.
P.S. We’re making an article about Atlas Protocol, so stay tuned!
Good news is that The TON Foundation sees adoption difficulties and is actively trying to solve them via new languages and L2s, but only time will tell how effective will those be.
Future of TON price
While TON hasn’t publicly announced any funding rounds, we know a number of VC that bought it at 1$ or 2$: Kingsway Capital, Animoca Brands, Ryze Labs. And more recently, Pantera capital. Currently, more than 50% of the total supply is locked, but 1,317,379,088 TON, representing a quarter of the total supply beginning on October 12, 2025, will start to get unlocked over the course of 3 years. Another ~20% of tokens will only start to get unlocked on February 27, 2027. That might negatively affect the price, and even now the general community sentiment is that 6–8$ for TON is way too expensive to buy.
We can only hypothesise how TON’s price will look coming into 2025. But let’s compare TON with it’s (in)direct competitors
Founder of Telegram — Pavel Durov is eyeing an IPO, but there’s nothing concrete now. So far, Durov only said that Telegram was offered, 30bn$+ valuations. So if we use TON as proxy of Telegram’s value, it is probably close to the peak.
But if Telegram manages to achieve the vision of WeChat/Alipay and become a superapp, we can look at similar valuations. The number of Telegram users is 900mil, close to that of WeChat/Alipay, so it definitely has the potential.
The owner of Alipay, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba — Ant Group, was set to launch an IPO back in 2020 with a valuation of 313 billion USD. The IPO actually never happened since China stopped the process from moving forward. However, that doesn’t really matter in our case.
The company behind WeChat — Tencent, has a valuation of 442 billion USD
TON’s FDV is 36bn$ right now, 10x lower than WeChat or Alipay but rightfully so — now you can do 10x less stuff with TON, and it has 10x less actual, paying users. But if Telegram and TON are to pick up the pace and bring the actual mass adoption by encouraging useful mini apps — there’s still room for TON to grow.
Conclusion
While TON has a very high potential to adopt the masses to crypto via Telergam, it’s still a long way.
A lot of problems need to be solved for that to happen:
- Developer experience — L2s and Tact are still barely used, and there’s a handful of FunC devs in the world (luckily, we have some!)
- VC Interest — TON isn’t the easiest chain to raise money or get a grant on, paired with an extremely difficult language disincentivizing builders.
- Nature of Mini Apps — They are mostly games, which people play to get money. But the mindset has to shift to more consumer-focused apps solving real problems.
- Telegram penetration — While almost everyone uses Telegram for chatting, very few use it for payments. To achieve WeChat-like dominance Telegram has to penetrate retail as well. I’m talking as far as QR codes in real grocery stores/other shops which allow you to pay from your Telegram Wallet.
How do you think TON looks right now, and what do you think is the future?
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