Toncoin’s Epic Rise | Bankless

TONs of Utility? Toncoin (TON) has continued to layer on gains this month, establishing itself as one of crypto’s top 10 coins by market capitalization after surging 50% off its April lows to obliterate prior all-time highs! What catalysts are driving TON outperformance?

Originally created by the popular messaging app Telegram in 2018 and intended to be a competitor to Ethereum, The Open Network (TON) was abandoned by its founders in 2020 after the SEC brought a lawsuit against the firm for raising $1.7B from the private sale of TON, arguing that it was an unregistered security.

A collective of independent developers subsequently established NewTON, now called the TON Foundation, and acquired control of the project’s domain and code repository in 2021 before launching The Open Network and distributing TON later that same year.

While TON languished against a crypto market in up-only mode since September, with the token’s relatively stagnant performance causing its value declining by 70% against BTC, TON played catch up in March, ripping by over 170% in the past five weeks alone!

TON enjoyed a brief period of strength before bleeding out last September after Telegram announced that they were developing a crypto wallet on The Open Network, but the implications of this partnership hadn’t been digested in earnest by market participants until last month.

On March 31, Telegram published that it would enable users to purchase advertisements using Toncoins, doubling down on their February decision to share 50% of the advertisement revenue from monetized channels back with their creators via TON distributions. 

 Alongside Telegram’s attempts to imbue Toncoin utility within their application have come efforts from the decentralized TON Foundation to promote usage of the chain itself.

Their Open League campaign began on April 1 and will distribute 30M TON – worth $204M at current prices – to applications and users, with an additional 1M TON being levied to incentivize users to onboard to HumanCode, the chain’s leading proof-of-personhood primitive.

The net effect on all of these programs has been highly positive not only for price, but also for a variety of onchain metrics; the number of wallets on The Open Network doubled and TVL has increased by 6x from the beginning of March!

Despite the juvenile state of TON’s onchain application scene in comparison to more mature EVM chains and alt L1 leaders like Solana, the market is comfortable pricing the chain for success, acknowledging that the close connection to Telegram and the real-world utility behind Toncoin distinguishes this asset from other crypto investments.