Will Telegram's public blockchain Ton rise to become a challenger to Solana?
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Will Telegram's public blockchain Ton rise to become a challenger to Solana?
By leveraging Telegram's vast user base, TON simplifies cryptocurrency transactions and enhances the usability and accessibility of blockchain technology.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: HAMSTER
Recently, TON has finally begun to gain momentum after a prolonged period of stagnation, with total value locked surpassing $78 million—a new all-time high. Additionally, a surge of Memecoins has emerged within its ecosystem, and the TON Foundation recently announced it is hiring a head for its Memecoin ecosystem, signaling strong intentions to develop its Meme ecosystem. However, this move has also sparked controversy: Can Ton replicate Solana’s Meme craze? After all, unlike Solana’s ecosystem, TON’s DeFi landscape remains in early stages, with relatively limited DeFi applications and tools, alongside ongoing challenges related to centralization and capital efficiency.
Introduction
TON (The Open Network) is a decentralized network designed to build an open internet environment for everyone. Initially conceived by Telegram founders Nikolai and Pavel Durov, TON's development has since transitioned to community-driven efforts. This shift underscores its foundational commitment to decentralization and broader community involvement in growth and innovation. Although Telegram later distanced itself from the project due to regulatory challenges with the SEC, the network remains closely tied to the messaging app, integrating various blockchain-based services—such as cryptocurrency payments and storage solutions—directly into Telegram’s ecosystem.
Integration with Telegram
The integration between TON and Telegram began with the vision of creating a new blockchain platform—the Telegram Open Network—and its native cryptocurrency, Grams, which the Telegram team had been developing since 2017. The goal was to enhance speed, efficiency, and security for everyday commercial transactions through TON blockchain technology, positioning Grams as a genuine complement to traditional currencies. Telegram envisioned that the TON blockchain would create a stable ecosystem representing significant improvements in speed, usability, and scalability.
However, due to legal conflicts with the U.S. SEC, Telegram was forced to abandon the project. Nevertheless, TON did not come to a halt. In May 2021, a developer community called NEWTON took over Telegram’s unfinished TON project and continued its research and development independently. This self-organized group of Telegram community members later rebranded as the TON Foundation in 2021, marking a new beginning for the project. With this major transformation, the project name evolved from the original "Telegram Open Network" to "The Open Network," reflecting its broader application scope and openness. Simultaneously, the native cryptocurrency was renamed from Gram to Toncoin, symbolizing TON’s determined shift toward a more decentralized and open network.
The development of the TON ecosystem has received extensive support from the Telegram community, most notably demonstrated through seamless integration. Telegram has already embedded a TON-based crypto wallet directly into its ecosystem, enabling nearly one billion Telegram users to easily conduct cryptocurrency payments and access numerous Toncoin-powered DApps. This not only boosts Toncoin adoption and visibility but also offers Telegram users a highly practical and convenient way to explore and participate in the Web3 economy.
Furthermore, at last year’s Token2049 event in Singapore, the TON Foundation and Telegram officially announced their partnership, showcasing their shared ambition to transform Telegram into a Web3 gateway via Toncoin, along with Telegram’s ongoing support and commitment to the TON ecosystem.
Through such integration, the collaboration between TON and Telegram not only strengthens Toncoin’s market position but also injects fresh momentum into the cryptocurrency community on Telegram. As more products and applications are launched and integrated, the TON-Telegram partnership will continue expanding its influence, further increasing Toncoin adoption and awareness, and energizing the entire ecosystem.
Technical Analysis
Technical Architecture
Sharding Technology: TON’s architecture employs sharding, dividing the blockchain into multiple shardchains. Each shardchain can independently process transactions and smart contracts, significantly enhancing the network’s capacity to handle large transaction volumes.
Masterchain and Workchains: TON consists of one masterchain and up to 2^32 workchains. Each workchain operates under its own rule set, including account address formats, transaction protocols, and virtual machines for executing smart contracts.
Hypercube Routing: TON uses slow hypercube routing and instant hypercube routing to enable efficient message passing across shardchains, ensuring both scalability and real-time communication. Slow hypercube routing ensures logical growth in message distribution across increasing numbers of shardchains, minimizing increases in message delivery time as the network scales. Instant hypercube routing supports scenarios requiring immediate inter-shard communication, enabling near-instantaneous data exchange—critical for operations relying on real-time coordination across different parts of the network.
PoS Consensus Mechanism with BFT Variant: By combining Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) with Proof-of-Stake (PoS), TON enhances network security while maintaining efficient operations and low energy consumption. Validators must stake tokens to participate in consensus, providing economic incentives and raising the cost of malicious behavior, thereby strengthening network security. The incorporation of BFT allows TON to maintain normal operations even during node failures or malicious attacks, ensuring transaction validity and data consistency.
Technical Features
High Efficiency and Scalability: Through sharding and advanced routing mechanisms, TON can process millions of transactions per second while maintaining low latency and low costs, effectively addressing blockchain scalability challenges.
Security and Decentralization: TON’s governance model is inherently decentralized, requiring approval from the majority of validator nodes for any network changes, enforced through PoS consensus. This mechanism reinforces both network security and decentralization.
User-Friendliness: TON offers various services such as TON DNS and TON Storage, allowing users to interact with blockchain technology in a more intuitive and accessible manner.
Ecosystem Diversity: Beyond supporting cryptocurrency transactions and smart contracts, TON aims to build a comprehensive ecosystem encompassing decentralized storage, anonymous networks, DNS, and instant payments—driving broader blockchain innovation.
Additional Services and Features
TON DNS: Enhances user experience by converting complex blockchain addresses into human-readable names, similar to traditional domain systems in the crypto space, using the ".ton" domain suffix. This allows users to access DApps via short, memorable domains instead of long alphanumeric strings. Users can link these domains to their wallet addresses, simplifying access to blockchain resources.
TON Storage: A distributed file storage system inspired by the Torrent network, utilizing decentralized technology to store and distribute files. Users contribute disk space to the network and earn rewards in TON. Those needing additional cloud storage can purchase space by paying in $TON. To ensure security and anonymity, TON Storage leverages encryption and IP masking via TON Proxy, protecting data against censorship and tracking. Its architecture supports diverse dApp developments, including video streaming platforms with integrated search, directory, and recommendation features.
TON Payments: An internal payment system built on TON. While primarily using Toncoin as the transaction currency, it also supports transfers between different cryptocurrencies within the ecosystem. It facilitates wallet-to-wallet transfers, microtransactions within DApps, payments for TON Proxy, and fee settlements for DNS and file storage services. Leveraging decentralized and distributed technologies, TON Payments enables fast, efficient, and secure transactions, allowing users to freely and securely conduct various financial operations within the TON ecosystem.
In summary, the TON blockchain combines cutting-edge technology with broad application scenarios to deliver a high-performance, scalable blockchain platform. Through close collaboration with Telegram, TON leverages the messaging app’s massive user base to simplify cryptocurrency transactions and improve blockchain accessibility and usability. This synergy not only accelerates TON adoption but also promotes the mainstream diffusion of blockchain technology.
Will It Become the Next Solana?
In this cycle, many public blockchains are emulating Solana by leveraging Memes’ wealth-generation effect to attract users, and TON is no exception. Recently, FISH led a surge in memecoins within the ecosystem, leading many to believe TON could become the next Solana.
At the time of writing, Toncoin ranks 11th on CoinMarketCap with a market cap of $17.1 billion, compared to Solana’s fifth-place ranking and $78.3 billion market cap—a fivefold difference. In terms of trading volume, SOL records a daily volume of $2.21 billion, whereas TON stands at $333 million. Moreover, crypto researcher Ri Yue Xiao Chu analyzed TON’s on-chain token distribution, noting that TON has a total supply of 5.1 billion tokens, with 3.8 billion in circulation. Approximately 960 million are held by the project team, while early low-cost miners hold over 1 billion—some of whom are affiliated with the foundation. This distribution highlights that key stakeholders retain substantial token holdings, potentially allocated for future development, marketing, and ecosystem incentives. However, it also reveals TON’s initial reliance on a small group of influential supporters.
When assessing whether TON can replicate Solana’s success, we can examine both supportive and critical perspectives.
Positive View: TON Has Unique Advantages and Potential
Technological Innovation and Scalability: TON’s architecture natively supports sharding, theoretically achieving up to 104,715 transactions per second with high efficiency. Furthermore, its multi-chain structure and customizable workchains offer strong flexibility for diverse application types.
Integration with Telegram: TON’s greatest advantage likely lies in its deep integration with Telegram. Backed by Telegram’s 900 million monthly active users and its mini app functionality, TON can deliver unique user experiences in social and gaming sectors—something difficult for other blockchain projects to replicate.
Community and Ecosystem Growth: Despite being a latecomer, TON is rapidly expanding its ecosystem with rich developer tools and resources. Its vision emphasizes community-driven development rather than dependence on a single company or core team.
Negative View: Challenges and Limitations Facing TON
Market Competition and Technical Hurdles: Despite TON’s theoretical high TPS, it faces stability issues in practice. While showing growth potential in DeFi, TON still confronts several challenges. Its DeFi ecosystem remains in early stages, with limited applications and tools, and suffers from centralization and poor capital efficiency. These factors may undermine TON’s appeal and credibility in the competitive DeFi landscape. In absolute terms, TON’s TVL remains incomparable to networks like Polygon or Solana.
Legal and Regulatory Risks: Telegram’s founders have expressed interest in pursuing an IPO on stock markets. Whether they can avoid repeating past regulatory missteps remains uncertain. Failure to do so could constrain TON’s growth trajectory.
Market Manipulation and Cybersecurity Risks: Early miners holding around 1 billion low-cost tokens could destabilize market supply and price stability. If these miners decide to offload large amounts, it could trigger sharp price declines, harming other investors. Additionally, such concentrated holdings increase the risk of network control by a few actors, threatening the blockchain’s decentralization and security.
Comprehensive Analysis
While TON possesses distinct advantages in social and gaming applications through Telegram, along with notable technical strengths, the challenges it faces are equally apparent. In contrast, Solana has established a robust ecosystem across DeFi, NFTs, and high-frequency trading thanks to its technological innovations and developer-friendly environment. Solana’s success largely stems from its ability to achieve ultra-high transaction speeds and low costs—capabilities that TON has yet to fully demonstrate.
In conclusion, although TON holds unique market advantages in social and gaming integration via Telegram, the technical hurdles, legal risks, and fierce competition may hinder its path to replicating Solana’s success. Therefore, investors and market observers should maintain cautious optimism, closely monitoring TON’s potential in social media applications while remaining vigilant about the various risks it faces.
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