Pavel Durov promised that Ton will undergo a transformation in 2-3 weeks.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

On the night of May 4, Beijing time, Telegram founder Pavel Durov suddenly tweeted that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind Ton and become the largest validator of Ton. It is worth mentioning that Durov had only tweeted about Ton 7 times throughout 2025, so his sudden announcement of "taking over" TON this year was indeed somewhat unexpected.

The website ton.org is currently in maintenance mode, with only one sentence on the page: ton.org is now controlled by MTONGA (Make TON Great Again).

As a result, the price of TON rose from around $1.35 to $1.85 within two days, an increase of over 37%.

In 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Telegram Open Network of issuing the Gram token through an ICO in 2018 as an unregistered security. Telegram was forced to abandon the project, refund investors, and publicly announced the cessation of participation in the project after open-sourcing the code. Subsequently, developers Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko, who met during a Telegram programming competition, took over the project, launching a community-driven initiative called NewTON, inheriting the original TON code, maintaining nodes, creating a testnet, and gradually advancing to the mainnet.

In 2021, the NewTON community upgraded the testnet to the mainnet and officially turned to the TON Foundation, which was registered in Switzerland as a nonprofit organization in 2023, supported by community contributors.

Counting from the time Telegram was forced to abandon Ton due to regulatory pressure to Telegram's founder actively announcing the investment of time and effort to promote Ton's development, six years have passed. During these six years, Ton experienced a complete cycle of rise and fall.

In April 2022, when the entire market was immersed in confusion, the TONcoin Fund, funded by Huobi Incubator, Kucoin Ventures, MEXC Pioneer Fund, suddenly announced a $250 million ecological fund to support projects on Ton. The TON Foundation soon followed suit by launching a $1 billion ecological fund to promote Ton's ecological development.

After this, the TON ecosystem experienced a small explosion, with infrastructure gradually being established from domains to storage, DeFi, etc., but it never really made a significant impact until the emergence of Telegram mini-games.

In fact, at the very beginning of Ton's ecological push, a connection was established with Telegram, as both official and third-party projects launched Mini Apps for cryptocurrency transfers or payments on Telegram, gradually tightening the bond between the two. The mini-games took this combination to another level. Before this, many on-chain games had fallen into decline due to poor experiences, complex gameplay, and difficult promotion, while the mini-games on Ton spread like a virus on Telegram, leveraging its hundreds of millions of users with simple gameplay like Candy Crush and Sheep Game.

During the mini-game boom, many games developed by various teams were able to accumulate hundreds of thousands of users within days, with the most popular being Tap-to-Earn games like Notcoin, causing the tokens of many game projects to skyrocket in a short time, creating numerous wealth passwords. Meanwhile, the price of the TON token also surged past $8 in mid-2024, with the total market capitalization exceeding $26 billion.

But this wave came quickly and left just as fast. As the popularity of mini-games gradually declined, Ton had no substantial second act to maintain interest. Coupled with the founder being arrested by French authorities for failing to effectively control illegal activities on the platform, concerns about Ton's prospects led to a rapid decline in on-chain activity, virtually causing it to come to a halt overnight.

Recently, Ton began to re-enter the market spotlight, thanks again to Pavel Durov's tweet. On April 9, Pavel Durov announced that Ton had completed an upgrade, increasing speed by 10 times and block generation efficiency by 6 times, with transactions being completed in one second. However, this is merely the first step in MTONGA's seven-step plan, with the next step aiming to further reduce the already low transaction fees by 6 times.

The improvement in chain performance comes from the completion of the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade in April. Ton's new consensus mechanism introduced a "streaming layer" to push state updates, replacing the previous polling mechanism, reducing the block production time to about 400 milliseconds, and requiring only about 1 second for transaction finality confirmation. The reduction in fees mentioned by Pavel Durov has also been completed by early May, with Ton's base fees now around $0.0005.

In addition, Ton optimized its infrastructure in the first quarter of this year, adopting a new node implemented in Rust, significantly simplifying operations and maintenance, making it suitable for institutional-level and large-scale deployments, and enhancing safety and modularity. The developer tool Builders Portal also launched version 2.0, with version 3.0 expected in the second quarter.

Although there is no explicit statement of the final purpose of these changes, it is clear that Pavel Durov hopes to leverage Telegram as a traffic entry point, making Ton a payment and interaction gateway for the development of Mini Apps, AI tools, and more on Telegram. Especially in the realm of AI, many "lobster masters" are currently choosing to control AI execution tasks via Telegram, and in the future, Telegram may not only be a tool for human communication but also an important human-machine communication tool. Supporting low-cost and high-frequency transactions is essential infrastructure for achieving these visions.