In-depth Analysis of the TON Inscription Ecosystem
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In-depth Analysis of the TON Inscription Ecosystem
TON users based on Telegram are highly authentic and low-cost to acquire, making them a unique phenomenon in today's blockchain landscape.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Vivi, TON Foundation
1. The Inscription Revolution: From BTC to Multi-Chain
1.1 Drivers Behind the BTC Inscription Boom
1) Capital Foundation: Thanks to improved macro liquidity, the approval of spot ETFs, and expectations around the 2024 BTC halving, the market identified Bitcoin’s inscription ecosystem as a breakout point. Capital flooded in, triggering a bull run where both narrative-driven and value-driven projects took center stage.
2) Consensus Foundation: BTC holds the strongest consensus in the crypto space—less due to its technology and more due to the historical narrative of cryptocurrency. Building products atop this powerful existing consensus is far easier than creating new narratives or establishing fresh consensus from scratch.
3) Growth Expectations: Financial markets trade on expectations. Low valuations and underdeveloped ecosystems imply massive growth potential. If we benchmark BTC's ecosystem against Ethereum’s hundreds of billions in market cap, BTC’s growth outlook remains highly promising. BTC is now following a path similar to Ethereum’s early development, with speculation driving momentum—and indeed bringing capital and attention to the Bitcoin ecosystem. This wave has also attracted numerous builders, laying an initial foundation for BTC’s long-term evolution.
4) Diversity of Protocols: While Ordinals dominates Bitcoin’s inscription landscape, there are many competing protocols such as Atomical, Rune, SRC20, BRC420, and Taproot Assets, each offering unique technical advantages, use cases, and communities of supporters.
5) Head Dominance: Liquidity and capital are concentrated in top-tier inscription protocols like Ordinals, while other protocols often have only one or a few projects with meaningful market cap and liquidity. This contrasts sharply with previous bull markets that saw broader participation across diverse projects.
1.2 Why Multi-Chain Inscription Hype Endures
1) Spillover Effect: Transaction costs (miner fees) on the BTC chain act as a barrier to entry for many users. As the BTC inscription ecosystem booms, network congestion increases minting costs, pushing users to explore inscription opportunities on alternative chains—fueling inscription activity elsewhere.
2) Low Development & Deployment Cost: Developing inscription protocols requires relatively low technical expertise and cost compared to building core infrastructure or most DeFi projects. This lowers the barrier for project teams. If OP Stack enables “one-click” chain deployment, inscription protocols often achieve “one-click” deployment via standardized frameworks. Thus, success hinges more on utility, roadmap, and—critically—operations and marketing.
3) Lottery-Like Nature of Inscriptions: Minting inscriptions resembles buying lottery tickets. With thousands of new inscriptions emerging daily, liquidity is scarce. Users rarely commit large sums; instead, they allocate small amounts with a speculative mindset—“mint 30U for safety, 50U as a baseline.” This mentality ensures sustained user engagement. After spending time in various inscription communities, I found this behavior widely shared: individual users don’t want to miss any potential windfall opportunity.
4) Fair Launch as a New Narrative: Every asset carries meme qualities. If a meme represents the sum of a project’s mechanism, story, market cap, background, and history, then Fair Launch is currently the most favored distribution model in secondary markets. From POW to ICO to Fair Launch, retail investors’ desire for equitable access to minting rights remains unchanged. Compared to public sales, inscriptions take fairness further—users only need to pay minimal network gas to mint tokens.
2. Overview of the TON Inscription Ecosystem
As a major blockchain in the crypto space, TON has actively joined the inscription trend. From December to January, multiple inscription projects launched on TON—including protocol layers and foundational tools—some achieving remarkable results. These initiatives are collectively shaping TON’s inscription ecosystem, expanding into mini-app frontends, asset trading, DeFi, protocol integration, and lightweight gaming applications.
2.1 Tonano
Tonano is the first inscription protocol deployed on the TON blockchain: TON20. The minting process of the first TON20 inscription, nano (early December 2023), had a profound impact on the TON ecosystem. The sheer number of participants and transactions triggered a de facto stress test on TON’s infrastructure.
Tonano launched its TON20 inscription protocol on December 5, 2023. Despite no prior marketing, the $nano minting event generated massive traffic and transaction load on the TON blockchain, causing temporary delays and network congestion. As a result, Tonano paused minting. After network recovery, Tonano resumed on December 11 and completed the entire $nano mint within a single day. The $nano launch brought over 20 million interactions and 37,000 unique minting addresses to the TON ecosystem.
Following $nano’s success, other TON20 inscriptions were rapidly deployed. Bolt20 completed minting on December 16 with over 31,000 minter addresses. Dedust.io also attracted over 20,000 minters.
First is first. Tonano established both user mindshare and brand recognition for inscriptions on TON. Looking at the BTC inscription ecosystem, sequence matters significantly for asset and protocol value. For example, ordi—the first BRC20 token—gained immense influence and community consensus, greatly helping it become the “number one” project.
Beyond core TON20 functions (deployment, minting, querying, transferring), Tonano continues to expand its product suite, launching a TON20 inscription indexer, marketplace, and cross-protocol asset bridge for on-chain inscriptions. Tonano’s marketplace has achieved over a million dollars in trading volume, providing essential liquidity for TON20 assets. Its cross-protocol bridge enables swaps between TON20, other inscription standards, and Jetton tokens, enabling a broader interconnected inscription ecosystem.
In Q1 2024, Tonano will release a miniapp to improve usability and solidify its ecosystem position, making inscriptions more accessible and widely used. Going forward, Tonano will continue focusing on technological innovation and contributing to TON ecosystem development—leveraging TON’s high throughput, low fees, and integration with Telegram’s 800 million-user base to drive scalable adoption.
2.2 Gram20
Gram20 is the second inscription protocol on TON. Unlike TON20, it offers enhanced usability and richer functionality. Gram20 was the first inscription protocol to leverage Telegram miniapps for deploying, minting, and transferring inscriptions, and it also launched a trading marketplace. The protocol supports features such as time interval restrictions between mints, penalties for early minting, and customizable start times—improving upon basic inscription models.
The Gram20 team conducted strong pre-launch promotion, beginning minting on December 22, 2023, and engaging in a live discussion with Odaily, OKX Ventures, and TON DevRel managers. To ensure sustainable development, Gram20 imposed mandatory platform fees on minting—a decision that dampened community enthusiasm. The full mint concluded on December 29 after seven days. While well-intentioned, this fee structure backfired by conflicting with the prevailing freemint narrative dominant in today’s inscription market.
Although Gram20 collected protocol fees during minting, the team committed these funds to future economic incentives and sustainability of the GRAM project: 50% allocated to buy back GRAM tokens, and 50% to infrastructure development, ecosystem incubation, liquidity management, team growth, and marketing. Subsequently, Gram20 launched an OTC market via Umbrella and partnered with multiple institutions and KOLs to draw user attention and facilitate gram inscription trades.
The Gram20 team demonstrated strong market-making capabilities, backed by extensive resources including coordinated promotions with exchanges, VCs, and KOLs. As a latecomer, it gained significant visibility. On the business side, it secured exchange listings and partnered with Umbrella to pioneer an OTC market, while maintaining strategic reserves of protocol assets for future operations.
By using Telegram miniapps as a key entry point, Gram20 initially avoided direct competition with TON20 and delivered a highly user-friendly experience aligned with Telegram’s miniapp vision. Implementing cooldown periods and penalties helped increase fair participation and prevent exploitation by bot-wielding “scientists.” Additionally, leveraging TON smart contracts to charge users introduced a novel concept: Proof-of-Stake Chain ICO, or Inscriptions Coin Offering (ICO). However, unlike traditional ICOs, the final token redemption rate can be determined by the project team.
For ecosystem growth, Gram20 launched a $200,000 Ecosystem Grant Program to support wallet integrations, browsers, and indexers; developed bridges and DEXs to build DeFi on inscriptions; and plans to create miniapp-based games to enhance Gram20’s utility.
2.3 TONOT
TONOT combines the concept of inscriptions with Telegram’s social nature to enable fair inscription creation for every community member. By linking and activating Telegram accounts, TONOT ensures authenticity of minting users. Each activated Telegram account can mint 500 TONOT inscriptions, with an additional 50 per new referral (capped at 2,000).
TONOT launched its inscription protocol on January 5, 2024. User participation surged beyond expectations, causing frontend issues. After fixes, TONOT relaunched on January 11 and completed full minting within nearly 24 hours. $TOT itself drove massive interaction on TON, setting a new record with 61,751 unique minting addresses—an exceptionally rare level of engagement for any blockchain project.
This was made possible through its unique invitation and minting mechanisms. TONOT requires Telegram account linkage, and minting can only occur via Telegram miniapps, with limits on the total amount a user can mint within a given timeframe. Script-based cheating is difficult, ensuring real community members benefit and delivering true fairness—authentic FairMint. TONOT charges no protocol fees, allowing all users to mint TOT inscriptions for free, significantly boosting participation.
What practical applications does TONOT offer? According to official roadmaps:
1. Staking and Mining: Users can stake TONOT inscriptions to mine tokens from other projects within the TON ecosystem (similar to Binance Launchpool), unlocking additional earnings and capturing ongoing growth benefits.
2. Decentralized Identity (DID): Users can generate unique decentralized identity attributes (DID) using TONOT inscriptions. These DIDs can be used for authentication, digital signatures, encrypted emojis, etc., positioning TONOT as Telegram’s social currency.
3. In-Game Token Usage: As Telegram evolves, TON-based games will become a core focus. TONOT plans to partner with over 50 games in 2024 to expand use cases. In future GameFi collaborations, TONOT will serve as a consumable token, enabling virtual item purchases and equipment upgrades within TON-based GameFi, encouraging free-to-play and play-to-earn dynamics.
TONOT is currently the first social inscription on the TON blockchain, with over 60,000 holders. Its integration with Telegram ensures fairness, while account binding guarantees user authenticity. TONOT aims to expand inscription utility through staking, in-game currency, paid Telegram groups, and more—supporting broader TON ecosystem growth.
2.4 FairTON
FairTON is a community-native, fairness-first, full-lifecycle project launch platform. Rather than merely replicating BRC20-style inscription protocols, FairTON focuses on “localized” innovation for the TON blockchain, eliminating the Achilles’ heel of off-chain indexers by implementing native inscription operations directly at the smart contract layer.
Fairness First
The popularity of BTC inscriptions has amplified demand for fair launches across the crypto ecosystem. Most inscription projects simply copy Bitcoin’s off-chain indexing approach. Yet this design is a compromise born of Bitcoin script limitations—not intrinsic to the concept. True to Bitcoin’s original spirit is fair, open participation in token minting. Off-chain indexing not only fragments liquidity but introduces security risks, as evidenced by multiple incidents in Bitcoin’s inscription history.
Community-Native
Community is crucial for early-stage Web3 projects and their long-term sustainability. Telegram, as one of the world’s most popular messaging platforms, boasts over 800 million monthly active users—far exceeding current crypto participants. Leveraging Telegram’s native TON support and vast social networks, FairTON aims to lower the barrier for individuals and projects entering Web3.
Full Lifecycle Support
Beyond innovative launch mechanisms, FairTON provides comprehensive token management solutions, including highly customizable vesting tools, anti-rug safeguards to protect investor funds, and liquidity provisioning tools for projects.
JettonX
FairTON introduced JettonX (Jetton eXtension), fully compatible with the existing Jetton token standard on TON. Jetton (from Russian “token”) is TON’s equivalent of ERC-20, supporting fungible tokens like USDT and serving as the most widely adopted token standard on TON. FairTON enables customizable launch methods such as fair minting, lottery minting, proof-of-work minting, social-fission airdrops, and retroactive airdrops. Tokens launched via FairTON seamlessly integrate into TON’s broader liquidity and on-chain infrastructure.
2.5 TownSquare
TownSquare aims to accelerate mass adoption of the TON blockchain by effectively connecting Telegram’s 800 million users with the privacy, transparency, openness, and sovereignty inherent in Web3. The project focuses on developing critical infrastructure and key applications within the TON ecosystem. TownSquare plans to launch the first decentralized, open-source inscription indexer. Additionally, the team is actively exploring and building protocol and application tools to ensure fair and secure asset custody.
Inscription data resides on L1, but computation and results depend on indexers—essentially off-chain servers indistinguishable from traditional web2 backend systems. Token balances and transfer records are stored on centralized servers. If the indexer fails, associated assets are compromised—potentially leading to complete protocol collapse. There have been cases where bugs caused unauthorized token inflation, or inconsistent data between indexers halted entire protocols, resulting in significant community losses. Therefore, decentralizing inscription indexing is essential for the TON blockchain.
Decentralized indexing works similarly to blockchain nodes: identical code ensures consistent data output regardless of who runs it. No single entity can manipulate data. Upgrading the decentralized indexer code allows rapid protocol updates, greatly enhancing flexibility.
Open-Source Infrastructure
Looking at BTC’s development, inscription infrastructure includes indexers, wallet support, marketplaces, minting tools, and analytics. After nearly a year of growth, BTC’s ecosystem is thriving. TON’s ecosystem is still nascent, but encouragingly, community-led projects like Tonano, Gram20, and TONOT have already drawn strong interest.
However, long-term growth demands robust infrastructure. Fragmented inscription standards lead to fragmented, siloed indexing. Fair participation is part of the inscription narrative itself. TownSquare will soon release a fully open-source third-party indexer, lowering barriers for new inscription projects. TON developers won’t need to build custom indexers—they can simply run the open-source decentralized indexer software. Inspired by Unisat and IERC-20’s decentralized indexing with incentive models, more participants will be encouraged to run indexers, further decentralizing the system.
Automated Services
Minting inscriptions is essentially a form of PoW (Proof of Work). In both Tonano and Gram20 launches, I observed clear asymmetric advantages held by technically skilled “scientists” over average retail users. TownSquare plans to launch an automated minting bot to make inscription minting more equitable.
I look forward to TownSquare establishing protocol standards for TON’s inscription ecosystem, unifying inscription practices, and enabling fairer user participation.
3. Conclusion
Current inscription projects across blockchains face several common shortcomings:
1. Fully free minting often undermines project sustainability. A few well-funded teams may repurchase tokens, provide liquidity, and promote listings—but this requires substantial investment. Most early-stage teams lack token incentives or sustainable fundraising mechanisms, leaving them struggling after initial hype fades. Projects must therefore balance fair launches with long-term viability.
2. Lack of innovation in clone inscription protocols. Many copy BRC20 formats and mechanics without adapting to differences between Bitcoin’s UTXO model and general-purpose smart contract chains. Standing out in a sea of identical protocols demands innovation in technology, tokenomics, and storytelling.
3. Severe market fragmentation. Most inscription implementations rely on off-chain indexing, creating a disconnect between on-chain and off-chain states. Over-dependence on centralized services restricts asset circulation and interoperability. Lack of programmability prevents inscriptions from leveraging blockchain composability and interconnectivity.
Fortunately, TON’s inscription projects are addressing these challenges in innovative ways:
1. Leveraging Telegram’s Social Infrastructure for Innovative Social Inscription Models
Telegram miniapps can handle high traffic efficiently and integrate seamlessly with built-in wallets like @wallet or TONSpace for smooth on-chain transactions. Telegram accounts naturally resist Sybil attacks, making them effective tools to prevent scientist groups from frontrunning, farming accounts, or hogging network resources. Utilizing Telegram miniapps improves Web3 user experience and facilitates Web2 user onboarding—offering a superior path toward mass adoption.
Protocols like Gram-20, TONOT, and FairTON combine Telegram and TON’s strengths to deliver innovative miniapp-based inscription experiences—with notable success. For instance, NEAR’s official NEAT inscription project, publicly supported by founder Illia, reached 24,600 minting addresses. In contrast, TONOT—a purely community-driven inscription with no official backing—achieved 61,751 minting addresses. In an era where users and traffic reign supreme, TON’s Telegram-powered user base stands out for its authenticity, low acquisition cost, and unmatched presence in today’s blockchain landscape.
2. Integrating Smart Contracts into Inscription Protocols to Enable Programmability
During a TON tech session, I emphasized the flexibility of TON smart contracts. Protocols like Gram-20 demonstrate how charging protocol fees directly in-contract can support sustainability. Contracts can even subsidize user gas fees to achieve true Free Mint. FairTON’s JettonX framework is fully compatible with TON’s Jetton (ERC-20 equivalent), enabling customizable launch mechanisms. With TON’s smart contract capabilities, diverse payment and launch models become feasible—unlocking vast creative potential.
3. The TON Blockchain Inscription Ecosystem Is Still Emerging
Similar to BTC, TON has seen the rise of multiple inscription protocols—including Tonano, Gram-20, TONOT, and FairTON—focusing on on-chain inscriptions, Telegram miniapps, social features, and smart contract-powered inscriptions. On BTC, inscription-based trading, lending, and stablecoin projects are beginning to emerge. On TON, the inscription ecosystem is just taking shape, with teams actively exploring utility expansion for their inscription products.
The above is my public analysis of the TON blockchain inscription ecosystem. All content is provided officially on behalf of the TON Foundation and does not constitute investment advice.
If you're interested in TON blockchain ecosystem projects or career opportunities, feel free to reach out to me directly: vivi@ton.org
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