Crypto Evolution 05 | OKX Ventures, LongHash, ANAGRAM: The Future of Web3 Social and Consumer Tracks
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Crypto Evolution 05 | OKX Ventures, LongHash, ANAGRAM: The Future of Web3 Social and Consumer Tracks
Jointly explore the future development of Web3 social and consumer sectors.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
Against the backdrop of soaring chaos metrics, it has become critical to better perceive cyclicality and uncover future narrative trends. As hunters of innovative narratives, investment firms have consistently maintained a forward-looking edge. In light of this, OKX has specially launched the "Crypto Evolution" column, inviting leading global crypto investment institutions to systematically share insights on current market cycles, emerging narratives, and key verticals—offering initial thoughts to spark broader discussion.
Below is the fifth installment, featuring a joint exploration by OKX Ventures, LongHash Ventures, and ANAGRAM on the future of Web3 social and consumer赛道, offering perspectives we hope will inspire your own thinking.
About OKX Ventures
OKX Ventures is the investment arm of OKX, a leading cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 technology company, with an initial capital commitment of $100 million. It focuses on identifying top blockchain projects globally, supporting cutting-edge blockchain innovation, promoting healthy industry development, and investing in long-term structural value. By backing visionary entrepreneurs shaping the blockchain ecosystem, OKX Ventures helps build innovative companies and brings global resources and historical expertise to blockchain projects.
About LongHash Ventures
LongHash Ventures is a crypto-native venture capital firm founded in 2017, based in Singapore and Silicon Valley. We work closely with founders to develop their Web3 models and unlock Asia’s vast potential. We invest in and walk alongside visionary founders pioneering the next stage of open economies.
About ANAGRAM
We are a technology-focused institution dedicated to advancing innovation that brings ownership economics to the masses through human and financial capital.
1. How does this cycle’s SocialFi evolution differ from previous waves?
OKX Ventures Researcher:
This cycle's SocialFi wave centers on Memecoin trading and casual game development built on high-throughput protocols like TON, shifting focus from the NFT-driven creator and consumer tooling emphasis of the last cycle. While major brands (e.g., LVMH, Nike) experimented with crypto narratives, they ultimately failed to adapt to the hyper-financialized culture of crypto communities. However, the success of memecoin trading and “casino-style dApps” like Polymarket demonstrates that applications embracing hyper-financialization can achieve positive outcomes. Other notable trends include:
1. From Content Monetization to Social Monetization
Early social platforms such as Steemit and Mirror incentivized content creation, but struggled with content quality, resulting in floods of low-quality posts. This cycle, friend.tech undeniably introduced a new experiment—monetizing social relationships—where each user becomes a “Key” asset, creating a novel asset class based on social identity and turning every individual into a potential investment. Pump.fun inherited and expanded on friend.tech’s liquidity innovation, further advancing low-liquidity AMM models and effectively bridging liquidity between DEXs and CEXs. Compared to friend.tech, Pump.fun places greater emphasis on integrating liquidity models with social interaction, deeply binding asset liquidity to social activity. UXLINK’s innovation lies in its “Link to Earn” model—rewarding users for contributing their social network data—addressing the limitations of relying solely on content creation, emphasizing the value transformation of social relationships while avoiding the pitfalls of short-term financial incentives.
2. Balancing Decentralization and Financialization
Projects now adopt more flexible approaches to decentralization. Platforms like Farcaster emphasize digital ownership of social relationships and user-controlled content, but do not pursue full decentralization immediately. Their innovation lies in enabling users to control their social data and leaving room for future on-chain experimentation, prioritizing community-driven development and culture. TON + Telegram, on the other hand, champions a pragmatic Web2.5 model, embedding mini-apps like casual games to provide seamless entry points, integrating financial operations into daily social interactions, enhancing the financial attributes of social identities, and gradually introducing on-chain activities to lower the transition cost to Web3 while leveraging existing platform trust and user experience.
In addition, there’s a growing trend of moving intellectual property (IP) on-chain, primarily driven by the surge in UGC and AI-generated content.
LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui):
In this cycle, infrastructure is now ready to support mass adoption.
First, scalability: Rollups, alt-L1s, and data availability layers have reduced on-chain transaction costs to mere cents or less. More innovative rollups (e.g., zkSync) further optimize costs by aggregating data via state differences.
Second, interoperability: Chain abstraction and intent-based protocols allow assets and credentials to be easily recognized or used across any chain. For example, tipping on SocialFi apps can be seamlessly aggregated across multiple chains and sent in one step using solutions like Particle Network.
Third, account user experience: Account abstraction, MPC, passwordless, and social logins allow users to interact with Web3 without managing private keys or gas fees. Today, the Safe protocol secures billions in assets, peaking $120 billion higher than Binance and Robinhood, comparable to real-world banks. With account abstraction, users can log into SocialFi apps via session keys and authorize multiple on-chain actions without re-authenticating their wallet each time.
ANAGRAM (David Shuttleworth):
The SocialFi landscape has evolved significantly since the last cycle, particularly in the volume of original experiments and novel mechanism designs. In the prior cycle, builders often focused on replacing legacy systems—for instance, Lens was launched as a decentralized version of X, and Farcaster followed a similar path. However, in this cycle, many projects (including Lens and Farcaster) go beyond simple replacement and begin implementing more compelling features, such as Farcaster’s Frames.
This progress is largely enabled by advancements in underlying blockchain technology. Lens leveraged ZKsync to launch the Lens Network, enhancing its ability to reshape how social networks operate. Ethereum rollups now allow networks and their protocols to scale efficiently, handling millions of transactions—technology that was largely unavailable in the previous cycle. Additionally, features like Farcaster Frames enable users to seamlessly interact with multiple apps running on the Farcaster feed, allowing developers to distribute apps with “one-click” ease. Such innovation and user experience were absent in the last cycle.
To expand applicability, Solana recently launched Actions and Blinks, connecting Solana to the entire internet and enabling users to perform actions like swaps and payments directly from websites or apps (e.g., X, Reddit). These new primitives transform on-chain operations into shareable links, vastly expanding the design space compared to the last cycle.
Another exciting frontier is the fusion of social interaction with speculation. Friend.tech and Fantasy.top exemplify this, combining social elements with user engagement around speculative parameters—such as the popularity of a post on X. Friend.tech enables community monetization and trading of “keys” that unlock exclusive features (e.g., private chat rooms), while Fantasy.top allows users to collect and trade NFTs linked to prominent crypto figures on X. While many established projects struggle with user retention, these previously unseen experiments offer valuable guidance for future development.
3. What is the current state of Consumer Apps? Where do they intersect with social?
OKX Ventures Researcher:
The market is transitioning from a traditional “trust-based” model to a smart contract-driven “execution-based” paradigm. The application landscape is no longer limited to whale-dominated playgrounds but is increasingly catering to broader user bases. Users no longer just seek “get-rich-quick” platforms—they want consumer apps that meet everyday needs. The historically complex blockchain interfaces and cumbersome operations are being simplified, as developers recognize that users don’t need to understand blockchain; they just need smooth experiences.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are emerging as a new distribution channel for crypto apps, offering Web2-like fluidity while bypassing the 30% fees of traditional app stores. In payments, crypto payment experiences are becoming mainstream—examples include Venmo and PayPal integrating ENS, and EtherFi launching its own credit card compatible with Apple Pay. From Solana’s Saga to Seeker’s launch, Web3-native devices are evolving, functioning as mobile wallets with double-tap payments and built-in seed storage, improving distribution and user experience. The integration of hardware, payments, and distribution simplifies complexity and accelerates mainstream adoption.
Whether entertainment- or finance-oriented, most apps eventually enter a financialization trajectory. Once ownership (via NFTs or tokens) is introduced, financial attributes emerge immediately. Entertainment-driven financialized apps—like mini-games and memecoins—attract mass participation through speculation, while serious DeFi apps focused on investment and wealth preservation prioritize asset appreciation and stability.
The convergence of consumer and social goes beyond “buying crypto assets on social platforms.” Many crypto apps are now built around social interaction at their core. Examples like Polymarket and Pump.fun show that community and social dynamics are powerful forces. Social elements keep users engaged because people naturally enjoy interaction, sharing, and expressing opinions on events.
Imagine memecoins not just as speculative instruments, but as news itself—microcosms of social dynamics. People bet on or engage with memes around specific events or topics—this is also crucial in DeFi. Previously, many DeFi apps relied on whales for volume; now, apps with social functionality leverage user interaction and community power to drive liquidity and engagement.
Successful apps must embed social elements, not just as social media platforms, but by capturing user interactions at the frontend to create network effects. The reason is simple: you need users on your frontend to generate revenue. Without a strong frontend, competitors can use your protocol directly and steal users. User familiarity, interaction habits, and dependency form a moat. The user network at the frontend drives everything—just as financial liquidity is essential for bootstrapping a protocol, user liquidity is equally vital for launching an app.
Crypto’s composability means smart contracts can be called from anywhere, making protocols scalable and interoperable. This flexibility allows embedded apps to interact directly with on-chain functions—imagine prediction markets appearing exactly where people discuss news; SocialFi mini-apps letting users stake tokens, follow trades, or buy fan tokens; governance mini-apps enabling members to brainstorm, collaborate, and vote. All of this depends on a host “avatar frontend,” where on-chain financial transactions become fun and interactive within familiar social structures—sending messages to traders on a DEX, competing with friends’ portfolios, etc.
There are two main paths for consumer app adoption: optimizing existing products or creating new demand. The first improves user experience to outperform competitors, involving marginal technical improvements and token incentives to shape community behavior. The second focuses on unmet user needs, opening new market spaces—similar to how Twitter redefined social media. While the latter offers higher alpha potential, the former remains essential. If today’s apps require long waits and complex steps, fertile ground for breakthrough innovations like Twitter cannot exist.
Conversely, products like collateralized lending can succeed despite complexity because motivated users will overcome friction. But for apps addressing unmet needs, users won’t fill the gaps themselves. Therefore, prematurely over-investing in UI/UX may not be optimal; as long as target users exist, suitable providers or partners (e.g., underwriters) can be found to refine the service.
LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui):
Consumer apps, as B2C use cases, refer to any application built for end-users. From this perspective, social apps are a subset of consumer apps. Innovations in social apps have lowered the barrier to building seamless consumer experiences. Beyond the Web3 ecosystem, Telegram has emerged as a key distribution channel. With 950 million users, it is the most popular messaging app in crypto, bypassing Android and Apple app store approvals and fees.
Both consumer and social apps have strong incentives to attract new users, deliver seamless experiences, and accumulate value through real consumer behaviors. For example, Catizen has 34 million users and over $25 million in revenue. Leading gaming ecosystems like Ronin and YGG also have millions actively spending time and money in Web3.
TON demonstrates how blockchains can offer new opportunities for monetization, engagement, and innovation by supporting small-to-medium Web2 game developers. Tokenized economies create reward systems for content creation and consumption, while digital ownership boosts engagement. The main challenge in merging Web3 consumer products with Web2 platforms like social media and mini-games lies in simplifying the Web3 experience for Web2 users. While Web2 excels in user-friendly interfaces, Web3 complexity (e.g., wallets, tokens) must be minimized to encourage adoption. Another opportunity lies in decentralized governance—platforms and games shaped by community input foster loyalty and democratized ownership.
ANAGRAM (David Shuttleworth):
Consumer and social apps are becoming increasingly powerful, delivering real utility to users. They take diverse forms—prediction markets (e.g., Polymarket), token launchers (e.g., Pump.fun), and highly social platforms (e.g., Farcaster, Lens). When executed well, these apps serve as powerful engines for mass adoption and revenue generation.
In the past year, consumer apps have generated growing fees for both protocols and underlying networks, acting as “lighthouses” that attract new users, boost liquidity, and drive demand for blockspace. They’ve had significant impact on the DeFi sectors of their networks. For example, since March, Pump.fun has generated nearly $100 million in fees, making it one of the most profitable protocols in the space. Notably, it positively impacted other Solana DeFi apps—Raydium reached record-high activity in July when Pump.fun peaked, with monthly volume hitting $28.7 billion. Pump.fun made token issuance and meme-building simple and fun, translating into real demand for tokens. While concerns about “killing the goose” exist, it provided a useful short-term experiment on how consumer and social adoption shapes user behavior and network outcomes. Indeed, app transience itself has become a new trend this cycle.
Ultimately, success stems from improved network scalability, enhanced user experience, and stablecoin ubiquity. Infrastructure-wise, blockchain costs have dropped significantly while performance continues to improve, with upcoming high-performance chains like Solana’s Firedancer, MegaETH, and Monad further pushing boundaries. Years of infrastructure development have made cross-chain interactions smoother than ever—users can access apps on any chain with just a few clicks, often without leaving their wallet. Wallet experiences have evolved from basic custody and trading into super apps, unlocking innovations ranging from messaging and content distribution (e.g., concert tickets) to integrated DeFi services. While UX isn’t perfect, it’s vastly improved from just a few years ago.
Meanwhile, fiat-backed stablecoins are now ubiquitous, offering users more choices without requiring bridges or leaving the main chain. PayFi apps now allow easy fiat onboarding, instant cross-border payments, and various daily on-chain activities. This achieves the effect of “services following users,” seamlessly integrating all core components behind the scenes. Users can click a Solana Blink on X or a Frame on Warpcast and instantly connect to an app. This marks the beginning of deeper consumer-social convergence—and it’s only the start. The trend of integrating DeFi functions into consumer apps is accelerating. For example, prediction market positions could be tokenized, allowing users not only to trade their bets but also earn yield while holding them.
As transaction costs drop and speed increases, payment functionality will approach Web2 standards—immediate and convenient—opening up greater capacity and design freedom for consumer and social apps. The strength of these Web3 apps lies not just in enabling new forms of interaction and collaboration, but in establishing new economic and social norms.
4. Where will the next breakout moments for Web3 social and consumer apps come from?
OKX Ventures Researcher: Social apps are essentially a subclass of consumer apps. If the consumer direction involves high-volume apps like Pump.fun, these ecosystems will continue to expand. Currently, they may lack advanced DeFi components (e.g., leverage, shorting), but these will gradually emerge. For casual gaming communities, the key is identifying sustainable business models and determining whether token issuance makes sense.
Many on-chain apps keep protocol fees low or zero to stay competitive, attracting short-term users and speculators. This forces developers to rely on boosting user activity and liquidity rather than creating lasting value, preventing them from scaling into mass-market consumer apps. Building for whales is easier than serving mass demand—simply go fully on-chain and exploit MEV for quick profits. Most app failures occur “off-chain,” due to poor onboarding, KYC, or other everyday UX issues.
Therefore, existing on-chain mechanisms alone cannot solve user retention. To break through, Web3 social networks must evolve from finance-driven models into multifunctional platforms centered on social consensus—seamlessly navigating NFT markets, DEXs, games, and governance forums through a unified portal tightly integrated with wallets and financial behavior.
Breakout moments arise from the fusion of social consensus, speculation, and tribal behavior. Blockchain’s native decentralized consensus helps users coordinate and agree on events, assets, and dynamics they care about, building trust in system integrity.
Currently, many apps rely on short-term speculation via NFT investing and liquidity mining, leading to “in-and-out” user behavior. As the market matures, apps must retain users through content filtering, intelligent trade processing, and community management.
Optimizing user data management and quality filtering is key to ensuring experiences aren’t disrupted by financialization—enhancing the naturalness and friendliness of on-chain interactions while reducing reliance on speculative capital. Lasting communities, brand loyalty, belonging, and sticky user bases will determine app and protocol success. For example, Monad cultivates users as community guardians, encouraging tribal behavior with incentives—a community-driven model that can fuel sustainable growth.
Future social networks should separate the social data layer from the financial layer. Users don’t want every interaction burdened by complex financial transactions. Platforms should intelligently manage these, hiding financial operations in the background, while using AI-powered filters and quality standards to deliver more meaningful interactions.
Key growth areas will focus on enhancing user trust and experience through decentralized identity, proof of activity, and privacy protection. Platforms can effectively reward users who genuinely contribute to the community—not just speculators. With advances in ZK tech and scaling solutions, users will enjoy more efficient, secure decentralized networks—especially for private messaging and social privacy.
LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui): Blockchain-powered SocialFi and consumer apps could become central drivers of the crypto economy by embedding blockchain into familiar user scenarios, unlocking new monetization avenues, increasing user ownership, and paving the way for widespread adoption. Shifting ownership and financial incentives will encourage more daily engagement with consumer apps, expanding the crypto economy. Integrating DeFi with social and consumer apps creates new financial opportunities—staking, decentralized lending, and other functions can be embedded into daily digital life, blurring the lines between finance and social products, further expanding the crypto space. Beyond simplifying wallet management and security, regulatory transparency and user trust are also crucial for long-term success.
We’re seeing more apps aimed at driving new users, new assets, and new on-chain activities. Breakthrough apps are rarely confined to existing categories—the standouts will likely leverage all new infrastructure, tap into emerging verticals, and harness crypto’s speculative appeal.
AI-driven conversational agents on Telegram that drive consumption and gaming experiences are particularly promising. Telegram delivers seamless UX, AI companions offer personalized, on-demand experiences, and purchases—like collectibles and in-game items—become natural spending channels, easily implemented on-chain and within AI agents. For example, Wayfinder, Virtuals Protocol, and Theoriq are AI agent protocols enabling autonomous on-chain transactions. Notably, Virtuals launched AI idols that interact personally with users on Telegram, even engaging after Twitch streams.
ANAGRAM (David Shuttleworth): The next wave of adoption will be driven by stablecoins, RWAs, and payment innovations, along with improvements in crypto-economic security—at least in the near term. As the Fed cuts rates and global interest rates decline, users will seek opportunities beyond traditional finance. Stablecoins not only offer risk-free yield but also accumulate value through protocol fees, unlocking new monetary layers for developers. Stablecoins backed by idle capital (e.g., Bitcoin reserves) create unique value propositions. Similarly, RWA tokenization gives permissionless access to diverse financial instruments, allowing developers to build infrastructure atop them—such as BlackRock’s BUIDL-backed stablecoin.
Payments are evolving beyond cross-border transfers. Advanced developers are building apps with on-chain autonomous banking features—including traditional savings, ZK payments, and DeFi primitives like lending, staking, and market-making. Users can also easily make P2P payments from non-custodial wallets. Additionally, EigenLayer AVS will bring real demand to the restaking market, enabling apps to build core functionalities without redeployment. As protocols explore new possibilities, demand for restaking could grow significantly. With more functional AVS launching, shared security demand will drive restaking yields.
Users now have rich options for on-chain financial activities—lending, staking, restaking, and leverage—marking a dramatic improvement over two years ago. Today, major DEXs like Uniswap, Pancakeswap, and Orca collectively exceed $135 billion in monthly trading volume. Perpetual platforms like Hyperliquid and dYdX achieve $12 billion in daily volume. Lido has generated over $511 million in cumulative fees, EigenLayer manages over $12 billion in restaked assets, and Aave oversees $19 billion in loans. Meanwhile, stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle now generate over $500 million in monthly revenue.
However, beyond DeFi, average users have limited participation options, and most non-DeFi activities still revolve around financial speculation. Social and consumer apps offer hope for bringing the next wave of users into crypto.
While DeFi apps will continue evolving, future iterations may face diminishing returns, with incremental improvements shrinking. In contrast, social and consumer domains still offer vast innovation potential—small improvements can yield outsized results, revealing opportunities for transformative change.
Currently, many products remain experimental and require enterprise-grade infrastructure to function. Users also need simple, familiar ways to access them. As technology advances and barriers are abstracted away, social and consumer apps can attract users who aren’t solely driven by speculation or profit.
PayFi and payments could become an early breakthrough for cross-chain apps. Fiat-on-ramp is becoming seamless, cross-border payments nearly instant and free. Real-world integrations—like linking MetaMask to a Mastercard debit card to spend crypto directly from a self-custody wallet—are becoming possible. Payments will be among the most practical use cases. Apps that replicate traditional banking on-chain are equally important—autonomous banks that let users hold savings, borrow in DeFi, and participate in staking—all without intermediaries.
The rise of stablecoins and improvements in their underlying utility are also noteworthy. Digital dollars are evolving beyond store-of-value or medium-of-exchange roles—money itself is becoming an infrastructure layer for developers to build upon. New protocols are standardizing and making stablecoins more interoperable, introducing novel value accrual mechanisms, such as sharing protocol fees with holders—making stablecoin ownership more useful than ever.
Verifiable computing is another area with profound potential. It allows developers to move computation off-chain and verify results on-chain without re-execution—optimizing performance, reducing costs, attack surface, and centralization. Use cases include verifiable oracles—updating prices off-chain and publishing proofs on-chain, expanding oracle capacity; cross-chain proof systems—providing verifiable proofs of activity on one chain (e.g., Ethereum) to trigger actions on another (e.g., rebalancing liquidity pools after a cross-chain swap). Verifiable computing also enables interesting applications in game theory and mechanism design—such as hiding orders in dark pools to avoid slippage, or using commit-reveal schemes to verify basket values while concealing contents.
Gaming is another potential breakout area—not necessarily AAA or cutting-edge FPS games, but 8-bit or 16-bit low-res games focused on deep storylines, compelling character development, and engaging mechanics. Given blockchain’s permissionless nature and the increasing competition in traditional gaming, stronger developers may shift to new distribution models outside the current industry framework.
Finally, AVS. EigenLayer is poised to attract the majority of ETH (native or staked), as users seek additional yield. The protocol already holds over 4.5 million ETH (around $12 billion), with its strength lying in expanding design space via economically secured restaking. EigenDA, its first deployed AVS, already provides cost-effective, high-throughput data availability for rollups.
More vertical-specific AVS are emerging—network scaling (e.g., ZK light clients, prover networks), coordination layers (e.g., DePIN infrastructure for compute exchange), and advanced areas like MEV management. As these services create strong use cases and drive protocol growth, demand for AVS will increase. Any protocol can create a restaking and shared security system, but ultimately, the services built on top define the protocol and fuel the restaking economy.
5. How do you view TON’s explosive growth and its challenges?
OKX Ventures Researcher:
The short-cycle nature of hyper-casual games makes TON and Telegram effective gateways for users to access crypto. In the attention economy, a healthy ecosystem, solid user base, and smooth onboarding are exactly what developers seek. When users don’t need to switch apps or learn complex blockchain concepts, crypto becomes “invisible”—lowering the barrier to entry.
The launch of TON Space, a self-custody wallet, broke down liquidity and usage barriers. Native stablecoin integration enabled its DEX to reach $600 million in liquidity within a short period. Moreover, TON’s off-chain scaling and Lightning Network-inspired design support native high-frequency, low-cost micropayments and off-chain channels, solving scalability at the foundational level. Even before TON’s ecosystem heated up, Telegram-based trading bots like UniBot and Banana Gun already met Web3 users’ needs for fast on-chain trades, operating directly via custodial wallets. These cater to Web3 users—but if project teams can find products meeting Web2 user needs, wallets become traffic and payment conduits, possibly without needing complex smart contracts—making commerce simpler.
While TON offers new opportunities and revenue models for developers and entrepreneurs—leveraging Telegram’s mature user base and token use cases to rapidly deploy and monetize social products—most current apps, especially games and social mini-programs, remain focused on meme culture and entertainment speculation, often simple ports of WeChat-style mini-games. Their core appeal doesn’t yet fully utilize crypto’s unique advantages—such as blockchain’s secure, transparent financial data management—like financial services or payments. That said, TON is accelerating along a proven path. Opportunities in ad monetization and in-app purchases remain underexplored. By opening its infrastructure and offering entrepreneurs “mini-stores,” TON can support new products with traffic and revenue. For example, in payments, TON could expand into e-commerce, social commerce, and offline event payments; on the supply side, integrating electronics, event tickets, and e-commerce goods could build a full-stack consumer experience.
While guiding users and developers toward richer gamified ecosystems, the team must continuously explore ways to link everyday user needs with the on-chain world to build a stable ecosystem. For instance, for Web3 payments to scale, a key incubation scenario—akin to e-commerce for internet payments—is needed. When real-world payment demand matures, TON’s crypto payments and financial services will explode. Additionally, TON’s integration with TG faces challenges in non-Asian markets regarding user education and mindset shifts, especially in transforming a messaging tool into a multi-functional platform.
LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui):
The TON team aims to build a super app akin to WeChat, integrating instant messaging, social networking, DeFi, and e-commerce—all powered by TON blockchain technology. Their vision is to make it a Web3 gateway for hundreds of millions of users, achieving billions of transactions within Telegram’s seamless, user-friendly environment by leveraging its massive existing user base. The goal is to gradually introduce and familiarize Telegram’s loyal audience with on-chain workflows through TON’s established distribution channels.
Although replicating WeChat’s success is challenging—given its unique context of government support, integration with nearly all domestic banks, and early-stage lack of competition—we believe the TON ecosystem is gaining momentum and could become the largest Web3 onboarding channel in the short to medium term. We’ve published a detailed research article on TON’s growth and potential risks.
ANAGRAM (David Shuttleworth):
TON has seen remarkable growth over the past year—the $TON token market cap rising from $2–4 billion in 2023 to $8 billion in 2024, with network users and activity hitting record highs. Backed by Telegram’s 900+ million users and expanding feature set, TON’s potential surpasses other blockchains.
However, despite rising adoption, the TON ecosystem lacks meaningful applications—users mainly speculate on the base token. Developer incentives are weak; unlike other chains offering millions in grants to attract builders and strong apps, TON lacks such mechanisms. Additionally, TON lacks a native USD-pegged stablecoin, limiting user options and forcing reliance on bridged ERC-20 tokens (e.g., jUSDT) from Ethereum. Poor UX severely hampers end-user liquidity and complicates app deployment.
This began to change in early 2024, driven by two key factors: proper ecosystem incentives and native Tether launch. The TON Foundation launched the Open League, distributing $30 million in TON to incentivize developers and users, giving strong motivation to deploy robust apps and compete for attention. With limited high-quality builders, this turned into a competitive race—developers competing against each other, and ecosystems competing for top talent. Without strong incentive frameworks, sufficient liquidity, and user demand, networks cannot gain meaningful traction.
In April, Tether’s USDT integration brought the first dollar-denominated stablecoin to TON. Deploying such stablecoins (e.g., USDT, USDC) is critical to network success. Since the launch, user activity surged—daily transactions hit new highs exceeding 3.7 million, a 530% increase. Daily active users also rose sharply, surpassing 1 million in September and reaching 1.1 million recently—an increase of 752% since April.
With improved liquidity and incentive systems, the next step is deploying new applications. Although much of TON’s growth is recent and further improvements (e.g., better dev tools) are needed, it is now poised for expansion. If strong apps join, TON can meaningfully leverage its distribution power. Otherwise, it may face significant resistance—declining incentives could push top-tier apps elsewhere, users may chase the next opportunity, and inter-ecosystem competition will intensify.
OKX Ventures Disclaimer, please read https://www.okx.com/zh-hans/learn/okx-disclaimer.
Risk Warning and Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent OKX or the aforementioned organizations. This article does not constitute (i) investment advice or recommendations; (ii) an offer or solicitation to buy, sell, or hold digital assets; or (iii) financial, accounting, legal, or tax advice. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of the information provided. Holding digital assets (including stablecoins and NFTs) involves high risk and may experience significant price volatility. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital assets is suitable for you based on your financial situation. For your specific circumstances, please consult your legal/tax/investment professionals. You are solely responsible for understanding and complying with applicable local laws and regulations.
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