TON: Historical Burdens and the Path of Reconstruction

In the past two years, the TON network has undergone an astonishing transformation from silence to explosion. Relying on Telegram's massive user base, TON quickly established a strong presence in the cryptocurrency community. The gamified ecosystem, bot economy, payment systems, and other narratives once drew significant attention. However, with price fluctuations, market capitalization decline, and decreased activity, TON has also exposed deep-seated structural issues, including chip concentration, ecological homogenization, and weak infrastructure.

This article will systematically sort out the chip distribution, token economy, user and capital flow, development ecology, and other aspects of TON, exploring whether the structure behind TON's short-term prosperity supports long-term value.

TON Chips Are Extremely Concentrated: The Chasm Between Whales and Retail Investors

The start of TON was not smooth, facing issues such as massive chip concentration and historical miner lock-ups from the very beginning. According to data, there are 12 whale addresses that hold more than 1% of the total supply, of which 6 are low activity addresses. Approximately 52% of TON is locked until October 2025.

The distribution of TON tokens is severely uneven, with users holding less than 100 TON accounting for nearly 99.9%. Starting from March 2024, retail investors began to flood in, but the number of large holders has decreased as enthusiasm waned. This polarized token structure presents unique development challenges for TON.

TON valuation has declined, but there is still room for upward movement.

In the past year, the TON token has dropped over 50% from its highs, and its market value has significantly shrunk. At the same time, the total locked value of the TON ecosystem, ( TVL ), has plummeted from a peak of $770 million to $140 million, a decrease of nearly 80%.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of market capitalization, TON still has room for a comeback. Currently, the market cap of TON is approximately $864 million, down 65.65% from its peak of $2.517 billion in mid-2024, indicating significant upside potential. The key lies in whether the ecological enthusiasm can be transformed into long-term value.

TON inflation is controllable, and application scenarios are yet to be expanded

The initial supply of TON tokens is 5 billion, with an annual growth rate of approximately 0.6%. The use cases for the tokens include paying transaction fees, staking, governance, etc.

Currently, TON has launched a Telegram Stars transfer plan to comply with regulations and enhance user experience. This plan allows users to purchase Stars with credit cards for consumption within the ecosystem, while merchants must use TON for withdrawals. The official advertising placements and revenue withdrawals are all linked to TON, creating a closed loop for its ecosystem.

The Reality After the TON Traffic Decline: Growing Pains of Ecological Transformation

The TON track is currently crowded, and the officials are no longer focusing on the gaming ecosystem but instead prioritizing the development of the payment sector. Apart from games and memes, other track products are relatively simple and basic.

On-chain activity continues to decline, revealing a deterioration in the economic vitality within the ecosystem. This dilemma stems from multiple factors: failure to effectively retain early users, a singular ecological narrative, and a unique architecture that is not friendly to developers.

If we cannot break free from the path dependency on short-term hype and expand practical application scenarios, TON will find it difficult to solidify into a sustainable on-chain value.

TON User and Developer Ecosystem

The number of TON users is growing rapidly, currently reaching 1.5 million. However, the number of active addresses has significantly decreased as the ecosystem's heat has diminished, with approximately 2 million monthly active users and 30,000 daily active users, a significant drop from over 10 million monthly active users by the end of 2024.

On the developer side, there are about 30 full-time developers for TON, with over 150 active developers each month, a decline compared to the end of 2024. The number of validators is only 400, which is relatively low compared to other public chains and may lead to a certain degree of centralization issues.

TON presents the characteristic of "user first", but also exposes issues such as an unstable ecological foundation and insufficient developer support.

The Future of TON: Towards Compatibility and Connectivity

To overcome the barriers of incompatibility with the EVM ecosystem, TON is building a bridge to EVM applications through the TAC project. TAC, as an independent EVM public chain, supports the complete execution of EVM smart contracts and achieves interoperability with TON through cross-chain communication.

This architecture opens up a compatible path for TON. Whether it can connect to the mainstream EVM world, build a robust developer ecosystem, and break through the bottlenecks in application scenarios will determine whether TON can truly emerge from platform dividends into its own development paradigm.

After the traffic dividend fades, what can truly be retained is the self-sustaining ability of public chains. The future of TON still has many uncertainties and is at a critical crossroads of development.