Telegram, the messaging app, has nearly 900 million users. It launched The Open Network (aka TON Network), its own blockchain along with the TON token, in 2018. Both have experienced ups and downs, especially last year. On August 24, 2024, French authorities arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov. On the other hand, the TON Network experienced a tenfold increase in users, as it worked to attract Telegram ‘normies’ into the world of crypto.
Jack Booth, co-founder of TON Society, told DigFin that the TON Network is on track to become a vehicle of mass adoption for crypto. “Our objective is to make TON the gateway to crypto for real-world uses through the Telegram app,” he said.
That means creating real-world use cases for holders of TON. For TON backers, that means leveraging Telegram’s users to create a huge, liquid ecosystem for all manner of decentralized apps.
Messenger apps
Telegram’s users are mainly in emerging markets. It is popular in Russia and Ukraine and other former Soviet states; in South and Southeast Asia; in the Middle East, Brazil, and Nigeria. It’s become the leading messaging app for the Global South.
Telegram’s appeal is not just in messaging, but in social-media qualities embedded in its functionality – making it resemble Tencent’s WeChat or Kakao Messenger in Korea more than Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp (all owned by Meta).
The TON development community is trying to embed a WeChat-like payments capability, but built on blockchain. If it can get enough users to embrace payments storage and transactions with the TON coin, it can foster an ecosystem of commercial uses, as WeChat does across gaming, entertainment, shopping, dining, delivery, e-commerce, and financial services.
“We will be the Web3 superapp – the WeChat of Web3 globally,” Booth said. “Users will be able to use us as a bank.”
Telegram and TON
Who is ‘we’ and ‘us’ gets a little fuzzy with decentralized projects. Telegram is one company, with servers and data centers worldwide, but a headquarters in Dubai and registration as a company in the British Virgin Islands. But the core team of developers and the co-founders have a reputation for secrecy and moving around, ostensibly to prevent governments obtaining user data; unlike WhatsApp, though, Telegram does not deploy end-to-end encryption.
Telegram was founded in 2013. To monetize it without introducing advertizing, the core developers (“TON Labs”) introduced TON Network in 2017, funded by the likes of Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. Pavel Durov’s brother Nikolai developed the codebase. The TON crypto token raised $1.7 billion from US venture capital firms and individuals; it was initially branded Everscale.
The ambition then was similar to today’s. But the project was shut down by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, citing early distribution of tokens as an unregistered securities offering; a court upheld the SEC’s case and Telegram was forced to pay a fine and return most of the $1.7 billion raised from investors. Telegram had to pivot and seek financing by selling bonds to sovereign wealth funds in the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and elsewhere.
To salvage the crypto project, the Durovs stepped back. The developers set up the TON Foundation as a non-profit separate from Telegram to lead the project. Everscale rebranded as TON, though, so there remains a clear link to the messaging app.
Arrested development
TON was also impacted last summer when Pavel Durov was arrested over allegations that Telegram’s lack of moderating had allowed the messenger app/social media platform to become a hotbed for child pornography, money laundering, drug trafficking, and hosting an arms bazaar.
Telegram’s supporters contest this portrayal of Telegram: the app has also been upheld as an enabler of free speech and political independence. Its widespread use by both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers is another paradox in Telegram’s story.
Nonetheless the arrest had an immediate impact on TON. Its price fell 17 percent the following week and the total-value locked (TVL) on the TON chain plummeted, with one day seeing TVL fall more than 60 percent.
(TVL measures the US dollar value of digital assets locked, or staked, through DeFi applications on a blockchain network; it is regarded as a way to determine investor and developer support.)
According to DefiLlama, TON’s TVL saw a huge upsurge in 2024 that was cut short after the arrest. After bumbling along at less than $10 million, it surged from April to a high of about $780 million on August 2, then crashed. It’s continued to decline and is at $261 million as of January 21, 2025.
That is a pittance compared to Ethereum’s $65 billion TVL; CoinGecko ranks TON as 22nd, with about 0.22 percent of all tokenized real-world assets staked.
Marketing moves
Jack Booth co-founded TON Society in September. Booth has been involved in various digital-asset marketing businesses since 2021, and is based in London. The society is meant to be an independent, decentralized autonomous organization (a DAO) that runs events and manages TON community channels. It is not responsible for software or funding, but coordinates marketing and other activities for a disparate, globally distributed set of teams.
Booth says Telegram is not involved in TON Society. Its activities are aligned, however informally. The Society coordinates developer priorities, such as DeFi and other infrastructure development, designing dapps, and pushing Telegram users to try the TON wallet.
He says the Durov arrest is not affecting the TON growth story. He says Pavel is now cooperating by moderating content and banning illegal activities on Telegram. The co-founder was released on bail but remains barred from leaving the country. “The Telegram active user base is growing,” Booth said. “It’s got nothing to do with these crazy charges that are specific to France.”
How then is TON’s ambitions to become a crypto payments giant?
TON’s prospects
The picture is mixed. On the plus side, the TON chain enjoyed massive growth in 2024. It gained lots of new users, enjoyed for a time a surge in transaction value and TVL, and higher volumes of TON trading on various DeFi exchanges. Developers have built more than a thousand dapps. The ecosystem has a reputation for clever airdrops to the Telegram user base, driving adoption, albeit gradually.
But, as the fall in TVL shows, TON lags behind in key areas. According to crypto exchange Bitget, which invested $30 million in TON, the blockchain lags in infrastructure, technical specs, and DeFi maturity – with Telegram’s regulatory problems a long-term challenge. All of these problems came to a head on October 28 when the network experienced a six-hour outage. (Bitget’s report did note however that the network demonstrated resilience in the wake of the Durov arrest.)
Some of the most popular dapps are games in the play-to-earn space. Similar to Axie Infinity in the Philippines, these are attracting users in places like Russia, India, and Nigeria, with free token rewards. But the Axie comparison is a warning, given how it flamed out (and was hacked to boot) after an initial surge of interest.
These games exist as gateways to get Telegram users to access the TON wallet through a mini-app on Telegram Messenger. The challenge is to give them a reason to stay in crypto.
One way is through stablecoins: TON is one of the biggest issuers of Tether, aka USDT. During TON’s recent heyday (that is, August), it issued $7.8 billion of Tether, more than any other blockchain except Ethereum and Solana. Tether is also launching a dhiram stablecoin on TON for users in the UAE; and TON Foundation’s wallets team is seeking a digital-asset license from Dubai regulators.
The adoption of payments through Tether is one way to transform TON Network into a fintech, but instead of a Revolut or Wise moving payments among commercial banks, TON can move payments around various DeFi protocols, games, or other functions.
Real world: WeChat
This is all however still within the world of digital assets. “We need real-world use cases for crypto,” Booth said, noting that most new customers onboarded from Telegram are holding onto crypto assets, NFTs, or memecoins.
“This is our focus for 2025,” Booth said, including building out DeFi programs, yield-bearing assets, and simple savings products. The labs are also working on a TON/Bitcoin bridge so users can swap their bitcoin for use on the TON chain – a page taken from Coinbase’s book. The goal is to generate liquidity, which begets liquidity.
Booth acknowledges this is still all crypto-native activity. TON Foundation is also trying to figure out how to connect its token to ride hailing, food delivery, and other everyday things – just as in China, WeChat users can use the app to pay for all kinds of goods and services. It was the advent of WeChat Pay that made the app so ubiquitous in China.
The difference is that WeChat uses renminbi, not a crypto token. Booth says TON’s developers include people who used to work for Tencent’s Web3 gaming team (which is based in Singapore and builds for users outside of mainland China). They are mimicking Tencent’s dapps and plugging them into TON.
“If you had success with making a WeChat app, you can do the same for us,” Booth said. “Add Web3 features, enable payments, NFTs, launch a token.”
He says it’s very early days but believes this could lead to an explosion in usage.
Real world: AI agents
Another real-world opportunity is with everyday necessities such as ride hailing and food delivery. The likes of Uber or Deliveroo would be convinced to integrate their apps in order to access Telegram’s huge userbase.
Booth says TON programmers are working on seamless integrations, so that one click within Telegram could also summon a ride or a meal.
The teams are working on artificial-intelligence agents to make this a reality.
“AI agents would be a step change for mass adoption,” Booth said. A user inside Telegram could order a service and let the AI handle everything, with a crypto payment sent to the driver (or whomever) and exchanged into fiat currency on their end. “You don’t need to open an Uber app,” Booth said.
AI agents, he says, will represent the advancement in user interface that, to date, has been ungainly throughout the crypto world. AI agents can rely on natural voice commands, so there’s little fussing with apps on screens.
Of course, whether the Ubers of this world regard this as worth not having users operate within their app – and sacrificing that relationship with the customer, data included – remains to be seen.
Degens versus normies
Booth says the biggest challenge for TON today is balancing the needs of crypto-native users with the growing ranks of “normies” inbound from Telegram.
“The user vase is massive, but it’s not crypto native,” he said. “We need to onboard them while keeping the natives happy. Degens want memecoins and DeFi, but that creates an unsafe environment for others.” The adoption of AI agents could be one way to mitigate this.
Booth says TON’s only peer competitor is Coinbase, because it too has a large userbase that is using various app integrations to get passive crypto holders to use their assets in the Web3 world, including experimenting with AI agents. In October Coinbase launched a tool called Based Agent as a template to help users build AI agents in their crypto wallets in just a few minutes. The agents can help with onchain trading and staking, and potentially build and operate their own wallets. But it’s not yet being connected to the physical world of commerce.
“They’re more ‘West’ and we are ‘East’,” Booth said of Coinbase. He added, however: “But we are looking to expand to the US too.”
That may sound strange, but in 2023 the US was the third largest market for Telegram app downloads, with 35 million new users, after India and Russia. It doesn’t have a lot of active users there – US traffic accounted for under 4 percent, according to Bitget.
Existential question
But with the new Trump administration deeply involved in crypto (if only as predatory pump-and-dump schemes), the US is set to become the industry’s epicenter. The old concerns about Telegram, the Durovs, and TON probably won’t trouble the tech bros and MAGA ideologues running policy in Washington.
The question for TON is more fundamental than Telegram’s optics or TON’s infrastructure issues: is WeChat the right model for crypto payments? Tencent had already built out very popular games and other services before it introduced payments, pushed by its digital red packets (a brilliant cultural tie-in). Telegram has a popular global messenger and social-media functionality, which is more than most of its competitors can say. Messenger dominance paved the way for Tencent’s WeBank or Kakao’s digital bank.
But TONs’ games and other services are nascent at best; even in the crypto world, TON isn’t a major player. Revolut and Wise grew big by enabling fiat-currency transfers to support tourism or other cross-border activities. Focusing on Tether and yield is a classic crypto move that forgets that finance evolved to serve the real economy – not the other way around.
