The Open Network (TON) is emerging as a potential powerhouse

With the crypto market recovering from its 2022-2023 slump, The Open Network (TON) is emerging as a potential powerhouse

Crypto Briefing attended TOKEN 2049 in Singapore, meeting with executives from Bitget, a leading crypto exchange, to discuss the latest trends in the crypto market.

During the event, Bitget announced a $30 million investment in TON tokens, through its partnership with Foresight Ventures, a Web3 investment firm. This investment will support the growth of the TON ecosystem and the development of new projects on the network.

“We deeply believe in TON’s success and possibilities,” shares Vugar Usi Zade, Chief Operations Officer at Bitget, in an exclusive interview with Crypto Briefing.

“TON has established a strong foothold among users in regions such as the CIS, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Brazil, and Nigeria,” Zade added, highlighting the growing adoption of the network in emerging markets.

According to Bitget Research, the TON ecosystem now boasts over 1,100 decentralized applications (dApps), with leading projects emerging across sectors like decentralized finance (DeFi), GameFi, and utility tools.

The TON blockchain recently crossed the 1 billion transactions mark, and a key factor driving this rapid growth has been the innovative user acquisition models, particularly in the gaming sector.

“Tap-to-Earn” games like Notcoin and Hamster Kombat have attracted millions of users, many interacting with blockchain technology for the first time, and with standards such as gasless transactions being introduced to such a wide user base.

“I love to call it the IKEA effect,” Usi Zade said with a chuckle, drawing a parallel to the furniture retailer. “When you buy something from IKEA, you bring it home, you build it, you think that you achieve something. Now with Tap-to-Earn games, you feel like you are earning or doing something.”

These games have proven remarkably effective at onboarding new users. Notcoin, for example, has seen over 30 million participants since its January 2024 launch, with 5 million daily active users at its peak.

The Open Network (TON) is emerging as a potential powerhouse in the crypto market, leveraging its Telegram roots while also seeking independence. As the network gains traction and expands its ecosystem, industry experts are keeping a close eye on how this kind of ‘balancing act’ will propel TON to new heights or leave it vulnerable to regulatory scrutiny.

After being acquired by Telegram in 2023, following a legal battle over the rights to the TON name and technology, a group of former TON developers decided to continue working on the project independently.

This led to the launch of a community-driven version of TON in 2023, which has since seen rapid growth and adoption among crypto users, especially in emerging markets.

The original Telegram-backed version of TON is expected to launch later in 2025.

“The narrative around mass adoption has largely changed,” shares Usi Zade, reflecting on the shifting narrative in the crypto industry over the past few years.

“Back in 2016, when I started working in crypto, the narrative was that this technology is ‘revolutionizing’ and that people will come to Web3. But after six or so years, we noticed that people don’t come to Web3, we have to go to the people,” Zade said, highlighting a crucial aspect that is also inherent in Telegram.

With over a billion users and counting, Telegram represents the ‘realistic case’ of onboarding the next billion users, especially considering other attempts by Web2 giants to enter the Web3 space.

For instance, Facebook recently launched its Threads app, but despite having a huge user base, they could only onboard a small fraction of users to the new platform.

“They could onboard hundreds of millions of users to that platform because they already had a huge user base,” Zade observed, reflecting on the challenges of user acquisition in the crypto industry.

“I believe in leveraging these aspects so that people, users, could benefit from the projects, tools, and resources within TON’s ecosystem,” Zade added.

Zade sees practical utility and mass adoption as core challenges to how TON could reach retail users, a problem which he notes is also prevalent in the crypto industry, hence the prospects of chain abstraction and the push towards greater accessibility for crypto UX.

At this point, we asked Zade what he thinks about the term “de-Telegrammization” and what its lateral effects could be across the industry.

According to Zade, there is a huge potential for Telegram to become a “core access point” for users, working as an acquisition channel, but not the only channel.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that users should, or would choose to always stay there,” Zade opined, noting that the need to build beyond the initial Telegram audience would become more apparent.