Authors: Xiyu, ChainCatcher
Editors: Marco, ChainCatcher
"The number of participants in the event exceeded 500, and the venue, which can accommodate about 200 people, was packed with no empty seats. The corridor was filled with attendees, and many users even organized satellite venues on the grass outside the venue, as well as at nearby Starbucks and KFC. The enthusiasm of users for the TON ecosystem seems to harken back to the ICO boom on Ethereum in 2017," described a crypto OG returning from the TON Shenzhen developer event on June 22 to ChainCatcher.
Not only are users paying attention to the development of the TON ecosystem, but many top crypto investment institutions have publicly expressed optimism and have long been positioning TON tokens. Following Pantera Capital's public announcement to raise funds for investing in more TON tokens, Kingsway Capital founder revealed on June 30 that their institution currently holds the largest amount of TON tokens.
Pantera Capital investment partner Ryan Barney explained the investment in TON as follows: 99.9% of blockchain projects are trying to create community technology from scratch, but this is a difficult path. Telegram, on the other hand, has 900 million daily active users, which is beneficial for TON to acquire users.
Driven by popular small games such as Notcoin and Catizen, the "TG+TON ecosystem" has become the new mainstream narrative in the crypto market, attracting a large number of Web2 and Web3 developers to enter the TON ecosystem in search of new opportunities.
Vivi, head of research at the TON Foundation, revealed in an interview with ChainCatcher that the projects scheduled in the current TON mini-program store have exceeded 2000+.
TON is the Best Commercialization Path for Telegram
Fundamentally, TON is the commercialization of Telegram, as Telegram is using TON to complete its commercial deployment.
Jerry, who has studied traditional internet commercialization models, explained that Telegram has always faced tremendous survival pressure. Although Pavel Durov's original intention in creating Telegram was to provide users with a private and free instant messaging tool and to consider it a public product, with the exponential growth of users, the operating costs for servers and bandwidth will also increase, making it necessary to find a sustainable source of income to maintain normal operations.
Since 2017, Telegram has been exploring its own business model, including payment services, advertising, and ICO financing, which was halted by the US SEC, but the final results were not ideal.
Last year, Pavel Durov revealed that the annual cost of maintaining Telegram's normal operation is about $630 million.
According to The Wall Street Journal, as of April 2021, Telegram has accumulated debts of hundreds of millions of dollars. Therefore, since 2021, Telegram has publicly issued oversubscribed bonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars multiple times, and in March of this year, it raised $330 million through the sale of bonds.
Telegram is often seen as the Web3 version of WeChat. From the perspective of active users, there is little difference between WeChat, with approximately 1.2 billion active users, and Telegram, with 900 million active users and still growing. However, there is a significant difference in their profit models.
Payment is the main commercialization path for WeChat, and in comparison, Telegram will also choose payment. However, because Telegram is not regulated and cannot obtain mainstream financial regulatory licenses, it only has the Web3 payment path, and founder Pavel Durov entered the crypto industry very early.
Therefore, from both a business perspective and the background of the founding team, TON is the best choice for the commercialization of Telegram.
Steve Yun, chairman of the TON Foundation, stated that there is a collaborative business agreement between the TON Foundation and Telegram, similar to how Google is the default search engine for Apple devices.
"TON has unlocked various ways for the Telegram community, enabling its business to achieve profitability, sharing, and development. For example, the virtual digital product trading market Fragment developed based on TON supports users to trade virtual phone numbers and TG usernames, and other NFT products, which has led to sales of over $350 million," wrote Pantera Capital in its reasons for investing in TON.
Regarding the relationship between TON and Telegram, Vivi, head of research at the TON Foundation, told ChainCatcher that although TON and Telegram are two independent legal entities in organizational form, their relationship is becoming increasingly close, and at times TON can be seen as the blockchain department of Telegram.
Since last year, TG founder Pavel Durov has repeatedly expressed his support for TON and its ecosystem in public. The Telegram platform provides multiple empowerment measures for the TON token, including TG advertising, creator economy, and Stars virtual points, all of which can be paid for using TON tokens.
In March, Pavel Durov wrote in his personal TG channel that the Telegram advertising platform is open to all advertisers, and all owners of TG channels will receive a 50% share of the advertising revenue displayed in their channels, which will be paid in TON tokens.
The Web2.5 Product Form under the "TG+TON" Combination
The combination of "TG's 900 million daily active users + TON's Web3 technology" has resulted in a Web2.5 product form, inheriting the traffic advantages of Web2 and incorporating the technical characteristics of Web3.
In the view of Vivi, head of research at the TON Foundation, TON is no longer just a Web3 product. With the support of TG, the ecosystem products can penetrate various Web2 businesses.
Compared to traditional Layer1, TON is more like a feature-enhanced Layer1 platform and can be seen as a Web3 product matrix based on specific Web2 applications.
In the past, Web3 practitioners mainly focused on DeFi products such as DEX, lending, and yield farming. However, with the increase in conference activities organized by TON, more and more Web2 users have begun to build and develop various applications and projects on the TON platform, covering multiple areas such as foreign trade, payments, e-commerce, small games, and AI tools.
With the help of TG's Mini Dapp (mini-program) feature, mature operational models of products and business forms in the Web2 world can also be realized on the TON platform. Currently, there are multiple applications on the TON platform based on e-commerce, flight ticket booking, and hotel reservations.
Vivian, founder of the Web3 accelerator Starbase, who has participated in organizing multiple TON offline events, stated that in the recent event participants, it can be seen that TON has successfully broken through the circle. Previously, most of the participants in offline Web3 events were Web3 practitioners, but in TON offline events, many Web2 developers from internet giants and traditional game companies can be seen.
Chris, founder of the TON ecosystem's oracle and lending protocol TonArk, revealed to ChainCatcher that the well-known Web2 game company 37 Interactive Entertainment has participated in the development of multiple small games on TG.
Andrew, founder of the TONxFans community from a Web2 internet giant background, added that most previous Web3 products were designed to be complex and lacked real user scenarios, with unfriendly user experiences, making it very difficult to use encrypted DApps. For example, with wallets, you need to remember an unordered combination of letters and numbers to use them, and forgetting the password means losing 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, where all operations of Web3 can be completed through just one app and personal chat page on TG, from easily buying, selling, or managing tokens and NFTs.
The relationship between project parties and users will also become more proactive. In the past, the connection between the two in Web3 applications was one-way, where developers could only wait for users to come to Discord or the community. However, applications built on TON allow developers to create their own Telegram groups and channels when creating products, proactively push messages to users, and perform some awakening actions, creating a more proactive two-way relationship.
Benchmarking WeChat Mini Programs
The popularity of click games such as Notcoin and Catizen has ignited a wave of entrepreneurship in the TG+TON mini-program space, attracting a large number of Web2 and Web3 developers in search of new opportunities.
Andrew analyzed that both Web2 and Web3 are currently facing growth bottlenecks and are trying to find new breakthroughs. The 900 million daily active users on TG provide a foundation for becoming an incremental market.
For Web2 products, TG's global market layout allows it to find new growth points in different regions. For Web3 projects, the huge user traffic pool behind TG has user on-chain demand, among other things.
The co-founder of the casual sliding game Yescoin stated that the launch of Mini DApp (mini-program) signifies that TG has transformed from a simple chat communication product into a super app.
In Chris's view, the product integration of TG+TON is simply the second WeChat ecosystem. The success of the WeChat ecosystem has already set a benchmark, and the TG+TON ecosystem is just getting started, indicating that there are huge alpha opportunities hidden within this ecosystem. Early products or projects can reap huge benefits.
Furthermore, the user volume of TG is not much different from WeChat, but because TG is global, its potential opportunities may be even greater than WeChat.
Vivi also agrees, stating that the social form of TG products behind TON is moving closer to WeChat Mini Programs. For Web2 project parties that have had successful experiences in WeChat Mini Programs, whether it's games or any product and tools that drive traffic, they are suitable for being transplanted into the TG ecosystem and redeveloped.
TG Mini Programs support developers in conducting a series of Web2 businesses. With TON payments, even without token issuance, exchange listings, or fundraising, project parties can still realize their business models and monetization paths. For example, providing cross-border services, in-game purchases, and in-app advertising. Products such as the pet-raising game Catizen and the social product UXLINX have accumulated a large number of users on TG in the early stages.
Vivi revealed that the development cost of deploying mini-programs on TON is relatively low and provides a series of technical development documents and templates, allowing developers to deploy without having to write code from scratch. According to feedback, project parties with a Web2 background can complete the deployment of a mini-program within two to three days.
Additionally, Andrew and Vivi both mentioned that TG Mini Programs are subject to post-launch review, while Tencent's WeChat Mini Programs are subject to pre-launch review. This means that developing mini-programs on WeChat requires the submission of a series of materials such as company licenses and developer information for record-keeping, and the application can only be published after passing the review. However, developing mini-programs on TG does not require pre-launch review, and developers do not need to submit any materials, only being subject to post-launch checks.
Loop, founder of the Dapp development studio Builder House, has a deep understanding of this. Mini-programs on TON support the on-chain data of product parts, which greatly saves costs for developers. Even if problems arise, they can be quickly resolved in the TON developer community.
Furthermore, the TON Foundation will provide support to outstanding project parties. For example, The Open League competition will provide substantial economic incentives and resource support to selected project parties. The winner of the fourth season of The Open League, the Yescoin project, can receive a $500,000 prize along with other group members.
Web3 Mini Programs as a Blue Ocean for Entrepreneurship
Vivi revealed in this interview that the number of queued projects in the Mini Dapp (mini-program store) has exceeded 2000.
How can developers seize the traffic advantage when participating in the "TG+TON" ecosystem?
Vivi, Chris, and the co-founder of Yescoin all remind developers that although mini-programs on TON are often compared to WeChat Mini Programs, there are significant differences in their ecosystem models.
Vivi stated that WeChat focuses on a single domestic market, while Telegram primarily targets overseas markets, and user preferences in different regions for Telegram are also different. For example, product models, user willingness to pay, and platform engagement depth are significantly different for users in Russia and India.
The co-founder of the casual sliding game Yescoin has a deep understanding of this, stating that Yescoin game users are mainly distributed in North America and Europe, and these users have completely different needs from domestic users. He gave an example that a player from the Nordic region is a teenager who values the social function of the game and can chat with other players on TG while playing.
Chris, Andrew, Loop, and ViVian all emphasize that developers need to differentiate a concept: TG is TG, and TON is TON, and the two are separate. Developers need to understand whether they want to build products based on TG or TON. Many developers actually attract customers for products made for TG, and only a certain percentage of developers will choose to integrate with TON. If they want to develop based on TON, such as integrating TON's payment function or leveraging Web3 token economic incentives, project parties need to overcome the challenges of TON's development language.
For entrepreneurs looking to build projects on the TG+TON ecosystem, Kenetic Capital, a deeply involved participant in the TON ecosystem, states that in addition to various TAP-style mini-games and socialFi games that have already gained traction, projects at the protocol and infrastructure levels will gradually receive more attention and have good growth potential. Examples include the NFT fragmentation protocol TRC404 and the TON EVM Layer2 project Atlas.
Chris agrees, stating that most entrepreneurial teams on TON are currently working on application-layer projects, but the application layer is already very crowded. Developers need to consider whether they have enough resources to carve out a niche, such as how casual games can stand out from star projects like Notcoin and Catizen.
Currently, the DeFi and infrastructure products in the TON ecosystem are still in the early stages of development, especially in terms of DeFi applications being able to handle more capital. However, due to the incomplete infrastructure functionality of TON in DeFi, the development of related products is difficult and slow.
Kenetic Capital states that, from the current perspective, socialFi, e-commerce, and DeFi projects are the types that the TON Foundation is currently focusing on.
Vivi's view is that with the increasing number of TON ecosystem projects, the main task of the TON Foundation now is to identify which projects are long-term oriented. The foundation's support strategy is to decide what kind of resource support to provide after the project goes live. However, based on her experience in direct communication with developers, she believes that developers building projects can follow the principle of "where there's a need, I'm there; where there's someone, I'm better; where someone's better, I'm cheaper; where someone's cheaper, I'm gone."
In terms of choosing the right track, Kenetic Capital advises developers to consider two approaches: quickly following similar popular projects or preemptively predicting future needs. The choice of which track to take should be based on the capabilities of their own team.
In terms of technology, priority should be given to the technical implementations officially supported and recommended by TON. In terms of operations and promotion, developers should fully leverage the viral effect of Telegram's ecosystem users and can also participate in TON's official hackathon competitions to receive more support and assistance from the TON Foundation.
ViVian sees potential in projects that can directly generate cash flow, such as viral tools and infrastructure. She gave an example that game projects with asset items can directly generate positive ROI.
However, she also reminds entrepreneurs that when entering the TON ecosystem to develop products, the first thing to consider is whether they have the ability to independently attract customers and solve the source of the first batch of seed traffic and users.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
