TL;DR
Background: The founder of Telegram stated that Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON, attracting market attention.
Historical Origins of TON: The native project of Telegram - cut off after SEC accusations - community takeover continues - product embedding - deep participation in organization and infrastructure.
Current Ecosystem Status: The application layer is stronger than the financial layer, traffic entry is stronger than asset accumulation, and payment imagination is stronger than on-chain revenue realization.
Key Opportunities: Payment and stablecoin scenarios | Advertising and creator economy | Mini Apps and games | AI Agent and Bot economy.
Key Risks: Centralization risk | Regulatory risk | Application quality and value capture risk | Insufficient DeFi depth to support large-scale financial activities.
Conclusion: Whether Telegram can boost TON depends on its ability to transform social traffic into a verifiable on-chain economic closed loop.
On May 4, 2026, Telegram founder Pavel Durov posted on X, stating: The fees for TON have decreased sixfold to nearly zero; next, Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and become the largest validator of TON; in the next 2-3 weeks, focus will be on advancing the new ton.org, new developer tools, and performance upgrades. This event quickly changed the market's pricing logic for TON. Previously, TON's core narrative was “a public chain closely related to Telegram”; now, the market is beginning to reassess whether it will turn into “an on-chain consumption and payment network directly driven by Telegram.” So, can Telegram's formal takeover genuinely push TON from a narrative of traffic to verifiable ecological growth?
I. Historical Origins of TON: Ancestry, Cut-off, and Return
The TON network originally stemmed from the Telegram Open Network concept, aimed at serving high-frequency payments, applications, and digital asset scenarios at the Telegram level. In 2019, Telegram raised $1.7 billion through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to develop TON. The SEC subsequently accused Telegram of selling Gram tokens as unregistered securities, violating U.S. securities laws. In 2020, Telegram reached a settlement with the U.S. SEC, returning about $1.2 billion and paying a $18.5 million fine; Telegram was forced to halt the original TON project, and the community and foundation continued its development. This history has left TON in a delicate state for a long time: it has Telegram ancestry but is not completely the same as an official Telegram chain.
The real relationship restoration occurred after Telegram's product ecosystem began to go on-chain. Since 2023, Telegram Mini Apps, Telegram Wallet, Telegram Stars, advertising revenue sharing, and the Bot ecosystem gradually formed a new business closed loop, and TON also regained the opportunity to be embedded in the Telegram product system. By January 2025, the relationship between TON Foundation and Telegram reached a critical turning point: the TON Foundation announced that TON would become the exclusive blockchain infrastructure for the Telegram Mini Apps ecosystem, and TON Connect would become the exclusive protocol for blockchain wallet connections in Telegram Mini Apps; at the same time, Toncoin would continue to be used for non-USD payments and ecosystem settlement scenarios in Telegram Stars, Premium, Ads, Gateway, etc. This indicates that the relationship between TON and Telegram has moved from the "historical origin" to the "product embedding" stage.
Durov's tweet further pushed this cooperative relationship to the organizational and infrastructure level. The market is not just focused on Durov “supporting TON” again but on how it has changed the market's three-layer assessment of TON:
Telegram becoming the largest validator: means it is no longer just the traffic entry for TON, but is directly involved in network security, node governance, and infrastructure operation. For a public chain that emphasizes high-frequency payments and Mini App application scenarios, the change in validator role represents a significant increase in Telegram's participation depth in the chain itself.
Telegram replacing TON Foundation as the main driving force: The development focus of TON may shift from foundation-led ecosystem expansion to scene-driven within the Telegram product system. The future growth logic of TON may no longer primarily rely on external DeFi, games, or cold-start on-chain projects, but rather depend more on whether internal Telegram products can continuously create demand for payments, advertising, subscriptions, developer shares, and Mini Apps transactions.
New official website, new developer tools, and performance upgrades provide a near-term delivery window: The market is no longer just trading on the long-term narrative of “the 1 billion user entry of Telegram,” but has started to focus on whether Telegram can really improve the developer experience, network performance, and application conversion efficiency of TON in the short term, making the narrative of TON shift from “long-term imagination” to “short-term verification.”
From the market performance perspective, the feedback from the price level of TON is also quite direct. According to CoinGecko data, before and after Durov's post, TON quickly started from around $1.60 and subsequently climbed to about $2.90, with a stage increase close to 80%. Currently, TON has fallen back to around $2.08, significantly cooling from its peak. This means that the market has basically completed the first round of emotional pricing for this event: short-term funds first trade on the narrative premium brought by “the strengthening relationship between Telegram and TON,” rather than the complete realization of the fundamental results. As the price has declined from its high, the trading logic of TON is also shifting from event-driven to a verification phase. The subsequent market focus will no longer just be on Durov's statements but rather on whether Telegram can genuinely bring continuous user conversion, on-chain activity enhancement, ecosystem revenue growth, and clearer commercial closed loops to TON.
II. TON Ecosystem Data: Real Fundamental Analysis
Telegram is the largest narrative entry for TON, but on-chain data determines whether TON can transition from "user stories" to "financial networks." Telegram has over 1 billion monthly active users, but social monthly activity does not equate to on-chain monthly activity, and chat users do not naturally equal wallet users. What TON really needs to prove is whether Telegram's user distribution can convert into wallet activation, transaction frequency, stablecoin accumulation, DeFi usage, and developer revenue.
According to TON Stat data, as of May 14, 2026, the number of on-chain accounts in TON is approximately 181.7 million, with about 53.39 million active wallets and around 126,400 daily active wallets; the number of transactions on that day is around 3.4392 million. This indicates: TON already has a considerable wallet and account base, but the truly high-frequency, sustainable on-chain activity is still below its imagined space of “billion-user entry.”
Source: https://www.tonstat.com/
On the validator side, as of May 14, TON Stat shows that the number of validators is 417, with about 598.6 million TON staked. This suggests that TON already has a substantial scale of staking security layer. If Telegram further becomes the largest validator, the endorsement of network security would increase, but discussions about centralization would also heat up.
Source: https://www.tonstat.com/
More attention should be paid to asset accumulation. According to DeFiLlama data, as of May 14, 2026, the DeFi TVL on the TON chain is approximately $79.43 million, with DEXs volume only at $8.18 million; the total supply of stablecoins is about $752 million, including USDT at approximately $580 million, and Ethena USDe at around $171.9 million. This comparison is critical: the stablecoin scale is significantly larger than DeFi TVL, indicating that TON has a foundation as a payment and capital entry, but the DeFi composability, lending depth, yield scenarios, and institutional-level liquidity have not yet been fully released.
Source: https://defillama.com/chain/TON
III. Representative Projects: From Mini Apps Traffic to On-Chain Financial Closed Loop
The core feature of the TON ecosystem is not merely to replicate Ethereum-style DeFi paths but to leverage Telegram's social distribution capability, forming a relatively unique growth pathway: first acquiring users through Mini Apps, then using wallets, stablecoins, DEXs, lending, staking, and derivatives to sustain asset flow, and finally attempting to convert Telegram's social traffic into on-chain financial activities. Thus, observing the TON ecosystem should not only consider TVL, but also user scale, payment scenarios, asset retention, and the maturity of financial infrastructure.
1. Telegram Native Applications: High Traffic Entry, but Retention Needs Validation
The most recognizable category of projects in the TON ecosystem are consumer-grade applications based on Telegram Mini Apps, particularly Tap-to-Earn, mini-games, and lightweight Web3 interactive products. The advantages of these projects are quite clear: users do not need to download an additional standalone App and can directly complete access, interaction, wallet connection, and task participation within Telegram, significantly lowering the cold start threshold for Web3 products.
Notcoin: Quickly expanded user reach with a minimalist click mechanism within Telegram, reaching about 35 million users and leaving approximately 2.8 million on-chain holders. The significance of Notcoin lies not only in the success of a single game but in its first proof that Telegram Mini Apps can serve as a Web3 user entry point, converting traditional social platform users into on-chain addresses and token holders.
Hamster Kombat: Further pushes this model towards extreme traffic figures. It is officially claimed to have over 300 million players and forms extremely strong viral diffusion through gamified tasks, channel subscriptions, video dissemination, and potential airdrop expectations. It validates Telegram's distribution efficiency and amplifies the controversy of the Tap-to-Earn model: user growth can happen very quickly, but how many of those are real high-value users, whether they can retain post-airdrop, and if they can convert into long-term on-chain behavior still need subsequent data verification.
Catizen: Represents a more commercialized type of Mini App. Catizen has over 39 million users, more than 18 million monthly active users, and has become the first consumer-grade Web3 application to breach 1 million paid users. Compared to Notcoin and Hamster Kombat, Catizen's highlights are not just about user acquisition but also its paid capabilities and centralized operation ability of games, making it a closer sample of “consumer application + Web3 incentives” within the Telegram ecosystem.
However, these types of projects also expose the first layer of challenges in the TON ecosystem: traffic comes quickly, but retention and asset accumulation are hard. Tap-to-Earn can bring users into wallets, tasks, and airdrop systems, but it is easy to enter an active decline after the TGE or airdrop ends. If the TON ecosystem only stays in the cycle of “gaming user acquisition - token distribution - user exit,” Telegram will provide only short-term attention, not a sustainable network effect. What truly matters is whether projects like Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen can continue leading users to more frequent scenarios such as payments, transactions, staking, lending, consumption, and content payments.
2. DEX and Trading Infrastructure: The First Layer of TON Financial Closed Loop
Source: https://defillama.com/chain/TON
After Mini Apps complete user introduction, TON needs to rely on DeFi and liquidity infrastructure to sustain asset flow. According to DeFiLlama data, as of May 14, 2026, the 24-hour DEX trading volume on the TON chain is about $8.18 million, with a 7-day trading volume of about $14.5 million; the 24-hour Perps trading volume is approximately $4.55 million, and the 7-day trading volume is about $23.09 million. This indicates that TON already has some foundational on-chain trading activity, but compared to Telegram's narrative regarding traffic, its financial depth is still in the early stages.
Liquid Staking Yield Layer: Tonstakers is the core project in the TON liquid staking track, with an LSD TVL of about $172.1 million, primarily tokenizing TON staking yield to provide foundational assets for subsequent mortgages, trading, and yield strategies. Stakee TVL is about $29.7 million and, along with Tonstakers, bemo, UTONIC, among others, constitutes TON's staking yield layer, reflecting that users are not only focused on trading TON but also beginning to seek native yield sources.
Regarding DEX trading infrastructure: STON.fi has a TVL of about $34.64 million, is a well-known AMM protocol in the TON ecosystem, and takes on asset exchange, liquidity pool, and trading routing functions. DeDust has a TVL of approximately $6.23 million, which is more of a native community trading entry covering many TON ecosystem long-tail assets but also faces issues of liquidity dispersion and slippage. TONCO has a TVL of about $5.93 million, further enriching TON's trading routing and fee income structure.
In terms of lending and derivatives: EVAA Protocol has a TVL of around $14.09 million, representing the TON lending market, filling the gap in mortgage lending and stablecoin utilization scenarios. Storm Trade with a TVL of about $6.1 million focuses on on-chain leverage and derivatives trading, helping to enhance trading activity but requiring higher liquidity, oracle, and liquidation mechanism standards.
Overall, TON DeFi has initially formed a basic structure of “staking yield - DEX trading - lending - derivatives,” but the current core contradiction is still: strong traffic entry, weak financial accumulation. Whether the ecosystem can further amplify its value depends on stablecoin depth, quality asset supply, and whether Mini Apps users can convert into real on-chain trading, lending, and yield users.
3. Stablecoins and Cross-Chain Assets: The Key for TON to Transition from Traffic Chain to Payment Chain
Stablecoins are one of the most important foundational assets in the TON ecosystem. The reason is simple: the payments, tips, advertising revenue sharing, developer settlements, cross-border transfers, and Mini Apps commercialization within Telegram all require stable unit pricing rather than relying entirely on the volatility of TOKEN's native currency.
The most important stablecoin asset currently on TON is USDT. DeFiLlama stablecoin data currently shows that the total market value of stablecoins on the TON chain is approximately $752 million, among which USDT is about $580 million, accounting for around 77%. The significance of USDT to TON lies not just in supplementing trading pair liquidity, but more importantly, it enables “digital dollar transfers” within Telegram, providing basic settlement units for wallets, payments, merchant payments, and cross-border remittances.
In addition to USDT, Ethena USDe has also become one of the important stable assets on TON. DeFiLlama data indicates that USDe's scale on TON is about $171.9 million. The introduction of USDe means that TON not only has payment-type stablecoins, but also begins to connect yield-type dollar assets, providing more combinational space for subsequent DeFi yields, mortgage lending, and structured products.
These stablecoins and cross-chain assets are crucial for TON to upgrade from a “social application chain” to a “payment settlement chain.” If in the future USDT, USDe, potential BTC mapping assets, and more cross-chain assets can form a closed loop with Telegram Wallet, Mini Apps, advertising revenue, creator sharing, and DeFi yield layers, the value capture logic for TON will no longer just be limited to on-chain Gas and transaction fees, but will extend to payment flows, asset accumulation, capital retention, and application-level income.
Overall, the current ecological structure of TON can be summarized as: application layer stronger than financial layer, traffic entry stronger than asset accumulation, payment imagination stronger than on-chain revenue realization. Telegram provides TON with a distribution entry that is difficult for other public chains to replicate, which is TON's biggest structural advantage. However, what TON truly needs to prove is not whether it can bring in users, but whether it can keep users to retain assets, generate transactions, complete payments, and maintain consumption. If these links can run smoothly, TON's positioning will upgrade from “Telegram traffic narrative” to “Telegram native financial network”; if it cannot run smoothly, then TON may remain in a traffic-driven ecosystem, relying on blockbuster applications and event stimuli to push for periodic growth.
IV. Opportunities and Challenges: Can the Billion User Entry Transform into Sustainable Network Effects?
In April 2026, Durov proposed a seven-step upgrade plan (MTONGA), which stands for Make TON Great Again. The core includes improving TON's performance, reducing transaction costs, increasing block and confirmation speeds, strengthening Telegram's participation in TON infrastructure, and gradually improving developer tools, official websites, and ecosystem entries, with the aim of making TON more suitable for high-frequency payments, Mini Apps, Bots, and AI Agent scenarios at the level of Telegram.
1. Opportunities: What Real Increment Can Telegram Bring to TON?
After Telegram took over TON, the market's most valued opportunities mainly come from four directions.
First, payment and stablecoin scenarios. Telegram is a natural cross-border communication tool, with users distributed globally, and has strong community attributes in many emerging markets. If TON can achieve low-cost transfers, merchant payments, P2P remittances, digital goods purchases, and stablecoin settlements within Telegram, it will have a payment entry that is closer to real users than ordinary DeFi public chains. In the past, TRON gained stablecoin network effects through low-cost USDT transfers; the difference for TON is that it may embed stablecoin transfers into social relationship chains rather than just staying between exchanges and wallets.
Second, advertising and creator economy. The Telegram advertising platform has already formed a certain payment relationship with TON; channel owners, content creators, and developers can earn revenue through Telegram's advertising, Stars, and application income. If these revenues are settled in TON ecosystem assets, it will create a continuous demand and redistribution cycle. Advertisers purchase services, the platform distributes income, creators gain revenue, and users consume content; this process could become the most realistic cash flow scenario for TON.
Third, Mini Apps and games. Projects like Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, Dogs from 2024-2025 proof that Telegram Mini Apps can reach a vast number of users in a very short time. However, early cases also exposed issues: rapid user growth, high token enthusiasm, but retention, consumption, and long-term revenue may not be stable. After Telegram takes over TON, if it can guide Mini Apps from “click mining” towards games, content, e-commerce, task platforms, and financial applications through better developer tools, wallet experiences, and application review mechanisms, the ecological quality of TON will truly improve.
Fourth, AI Agent and Bot economy. Telegram itself is a platform with high activity for Bots. If AI Agents in the future take on functions such as customer service, trading assistants, content generation, task execution, and payment settlements within Telegram, then low-cost on-chain wallets and smart contract accounts could become the payment and permission layer for Agents. TON Strategy mentioned in their Q1 2026 conference call that TON's account model and Telegram distribution scenarios might be suitable for AI Agents to directly conduct payments and service interactions within chats, Bots, or Mini Apps. Although this direction is still in its early stages, it could be the most imaginative aspect of the combination between Telegram and TON.
Telegram provides an initial distribution advantage that is difficult for other public chains to replicate, but TON needs to convert this distribution advantage into payments, applications, assets, and developer income. Only by completing this conversion can TON possibly transition from a traffic narrative to financial infrastructure.
2. Challenges: Telegram's Deep Involvement Increases Pressure on TON
Telegram's takeover is not an unconditional benefit. It enhances execution power but also increases responsibility and risk exposure.
First is the centralization risk. Telegram becoming the largest validator will strengthen execution power and network security but will also weaken TON's decentralization narrative. If validator weight, critical upgrades, and ecological resources overly rely on Telegram, TON resembles a “platform chain” rather than a completely neutral open public chain.
The second is regulatory risk. Telegram previously reached a settlement with the SEC regarding the issuance of Gram tokens; this history remains a long-term burden for TON. Now that Telegram is deeply re-engaging with TON, while the pathway is no longer directly issuing Gram, the boundaries between payments, yields, stablecoins, wallets, and user assets may still attract regulatory attention.
Third is application quality and value capture risk. Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen have proven that Telegram can create hit products, but whether these hit products can leave stablecoin balances, lending demands, paid users, and developer income is the true test. If many applications only use stablecoins or internal points, while TON merely sustains low-cost Gas, the value capture of TON may fall below market expectations.
The fourth is that the depth of DeFi is still insufficient. Compared to established ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, and Base, TON's on-chain DeFi is still in its early stages, with an overall small TVL scale, liquidity primarily concentrated in a few DEX, liquid staking, and lending projects, and the scale distribution between representative protocols is relatively dispersed. Currently, TON has initially formed foundational modules for trading, staking, lending, and derivatives, but the depth of stablecoins, asset richness, transaction slippage, lending utilization rate, and liquidation liquidity still need enhancement, insufficient to support large-scale, complex on-chain financial activities.
In summary, MTONGA provides a short-term catalyst for performance upgrades and platform synergy, while payments, stablecoins, Mini Apps, developer revenue sharing, and Bot/AI Agent scenarios form a long-term imaginative space. However, Telegram's deep involvement also brings centralization, regulatory, and platform dependency risks, and the current DeFi depth and asset retention capability of TON are still insufficient to fully support large-scale financial activities. Therefore, the next stage for TON truly needs to validate its ability to transform from “user entry” to “fund retention,” from “hit applications” to “sustainable income,” from “platform narrative” to “network effects.”
V. Outlook and Conclusion: Can Telegram Truly Propel TON?
To judge whether Telegram can propel TON, five key variables need to be observed.
First, whether Telegram really delegates core business scenarios to TON. If advertising, Stars, Premium, Gateway, Mini Apps, digital gifts, stickers, channel income, and developer revenue can continue to settle in TON or TON ecosystem assets, demand for TON will be more stable. If these scenarios are merely localized pilot projects, the value capture of TON will be limited.
Second, whether wallet users are steadily increasing and remain active. The critical factor for TON is not how many monthly active users Telegram has, but how many users truly open wallets, complete on-chain payments, use Mini Apps, purchase digital assets, and participate in on-chain applications. Wallet activation, monthly active wallets, transaction frequency, and retention rates are more important than simple Telegram MAUs.
Third, whether the developer ecosystem shifts from traffic arbitrage to real applications. Short-term projects can create heat, but a long-term ecosystem requires sustainable products. TON needs more real revenue-generating applications to emerge, such as payment tools, games, subscriptions, content economy, AI Bots, stablecoin services, on-chain identities, and lightweight DeFi.
Fourth, whether on-chain assets are retained. Transaction volume and user numbers are merely surface indicators; stablecoin scale, DeFi TVL, staking rates, application income, fees, active developers, and long-term asset retention are deeper indicators. If TON only achieves high-frequency low-value transaction activity without sufficient asset retention, its valuation as a public chain will still be limited.
Fifth, whether governance and validator structures are transparent. After Telegram becomes the largest validator, the market needs to see a clearer distribution of validators, staking scale, governance processes, changes in foundation roles, and a transparent mechanism for technology alignment. Only by increasing transparency can Telegram's strong control not translate into centralization discounts.
Thus, whether Telegram can propel TON does not hinge on a one-time 100% price surge. More accurately, this event pushes TON from the re-evaluation phase of “Telegram concept asset” to “Telegram infrastructure asset.” If Telegram can deliver on low fees, high performance, developer tools, stablecoin payments, and transparent ecological governance, TON has the chance to become the on-chain consumption network closest to mass users; if the follow-ups remain stuck in slogans, short-term games, and centralization validator controversies, TON may revert to the old path of high-volatility narrative assets.
Conclusion
The essence of Telegram taking over TON is a crucial turning point for the TON ecosystem from “external cooperative chain” to “Telegram endogenous financial infrastructure.” Telegram indeed provides TON with a distribution entry that is difficult for other public chains to replicate, but a distribution entry does not equate to ecosystem success. For TON, the real challenge is to convert Telegram's user relationships into on-chain wallets, convert wallets into payments and applications, convert applications into income and asset retention, and then convert these incomes and asset retention into the long-term value capture of Toncoin. If any link in this process breaks, TON may remain in the stage of “strong narrative, weak retention.”
Therefore, whether Telegram can propel TON hinges on whether it can continuously, transparently, and restrainedly invest product, traffic, developer, and validator resources into TON while avoiding excessive centralization and regulatory backlash. The real focus should not be on the takeover itself but on whether TON can form a verifiable on-chain economic closed loop after the takeover.
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