The main events in The Open Network (TON) ecosystem in 2024

During the Token2049 conference in Dubai, representatives of TON Foundation and Telegram announced that TON plans to attract 500 million new users in the next five years. This is an extremely ambitious goal, but TON is on the right track: in 2024, it was on par with or even outpaced other popular layer-1 blockchains in key metrics such as growth in active wallets and the number of transactions. Let the numbers speak for themselves:

By the end of 2024, the TON wallet Ton Space is expected to become accessible from the main menu of Telegram for most users immediately upon installing the messenger. This is a significant step: essentially the first native integration of a crypto wallet into a popular social platform.

Now, even those unfamiliar with TON will likely become curious about the possibility of buying and transferring cryptocurrency directly within Telegram upon noticing the «Wallet» menu option. Additionally, Ton Space is a non-custodial wallet (unlike the standard bot wallet version in Telegram), providing users with extra security for their assets.

Another payment tool on TON that drew significant attention in 2024 is TON Payments, which we covered in the article «How TON Payments Enables Fee-Free Micropayments and Where to Use It» Initially developed as a way for regular users to send money to each other, TON Payments lost relevance with the spread of fast payments via the TON wallet within Telegram.

However, Telegram’s leadership implemented TON micropayments as the primary method of paying for ads on the Telegram Ads platform (replacing euros). Ad revenue is split evenly between content creators (channel owners where ads are placed) and Telegram itself.

For example, on March 31, 2024 — the day Telegram began accepting ad payments via TON Payments — 156,000 new wallets were activated on the TON blockchain, setting a record at the time.

2024 is undoubtedly the year of TMAs, or Telegram Mini Apps: 500 million Telegram users regularly interact with TMAs. Among them are hundreds of Web3 apps utilizing TON, including trading bots, wallets, games, and more.

If you're planning to create your own Web3 project but haven't yet decided on a blockchain or format, you should definitely consider TMAs and TON. Promoting a mini-app is much easier and cheaper than an app in the App Store, meaning you can reach profitability faster. Additionally, Web3-TMAs on TON have priority access to the Telegram Ads platform, allowing you to actively advertise projects across more than 17,000 crypto-related channels and communities.

Experts at MetaLamp recommend opting for turnkey TMA solutions rather than building from scratch. This approach is not only cheaper and faster but also safer. Moreover, developers specializing in smart contracts written in FunC and Tact (the programming languages used on TON) are easier to find through companies specializing in TON app development rather than on freelance platforms.

The large-scale airdrops of tapper games in 2024 exposed some architectural limitations of TON, particularly with its sharding technology — designed to ensure scalability. The issue lies in the fact that shards must exchange messages when a transaction on one shard impacts operations on another. During a sudden surge in transactions, shards struggle to exchange information in time, which can disrupt the entire system.

Read the detailed article about sharding on TON.

This problem first became evident during the DOGS game airdrop on August 27–28, when transaction volumes reached 20 million over 48 hours. As a result, the blockchain went down for a total of 10 hours — a situation comparable to the longest outages experienced by Solana.

Fortunately, TON developers quickly identified a solution (unlike Solana, where fixing downtime issues has proven more challenging): tokens that don’t require on-chain minting during airdrops. We’ll discuss these in the next section.

The Hamster Kombat airdrop became the largest in crypto history: 131 million players received $HMSTR tokens. An airdrop of this scale required the development of an entirely new token standard: the mintless jetton. We’ve covered it in detail in the article, «What Are Mintless Jettons on TON?»

As demonstrated by the $DOGS airdrop, a traditional airdrop on TON with millions of participants is highly likely to cause network congestion and can also be extremely costly for the project.

With mintless jettons, congestion is almost completely avoided because tokens are not minted on the blockchain during distribution. Instead, they are minted only when the user performs their first transaction with them (withdrawal, sale), preventing a sudden spike in transaction volumes. Additionally, the costs of a mintless jetton airdrop are significantly lower for the project.

TON is the first blockchain to implement this technology. So far, no new airdrops using this format have been announced, but if Tap-to-Earn games remain relevant in 2025, mintless jettons could become the new standard model for airdrops on TON.

If there’s one area where TON didn’t shine in 2024, it’s DeFi. In terms of TVL (Total Value Locked), TON ranks only 18th with $800 million, which is nearly six times less than Base ($4.6 billion) and three times less than Sui ($2.4 billion).

TON’s 24-hour trading volume on DEXs isn’t very impressive either, placing 17th with $36.3 million. By comparison, Base boasts $1.9 billion, while Sui reaches $145.6 million.

Why Didn’t the Rapid Growth in Active Users Lead to Similar Growth in DeFi Activity? The most likely reason is that airdrop recipients are eager to offload their tokens as quickly as possible, often preferring to do so on CEX, rather than on DEX.

Let’s not forget that many of them are new Web3 users, still unfamiliar with DeFi passive income tools such as liquidity pools and yield farms.

A clear example is the $HMSTR token: although it has over 11 million on-chain holders, that’s less than 10% of the original 131 million airdrop recipients. This means 90% of players sold their tokens. At the same time, the liquidity pool for $HMSTR/$TON on Ston.fi (the largest DEX in the ecosystem) holds just $100k, with daily trading volumes of less than $50k.

Even the new token from the game Major, launched on November 28, can only boast daily trading volumes of $2.8 million on Ston.fi. For comparison, the most popular meme coins on Pump.fun (Solana) can reach daily on-chain volumes of $60 million or more.

Will TON Be Able to Draw Public Attention to DeFi Protocols, NFTs, and Other Niches in the Near Future? It’s quite possible, as the TON Foundation recently allocated $24 million to develop the DeFi ecosystem. Stay tuned for expert analysis from MetaLamp in our next article, where we’ll provide a forecast for 2025.

By the end of 2024, TON remains one of the most attractive platforms for launching new projects for several reasons:

• A «warmed-up» audience of millions in nearly every country;
• Rapid growth rates;
• Excellent marketing ROI thanks to Telegram Ads, the TMA store, and the built-in TMA search in Telegram;
• Affordable costs for developing turnkey mini-app solutions;
• Convenient monetization (including through ad views);
• Great technology;
• Grant programs.

However, there are several factors to consider before building a dApp on TON. First of all, it’s not an EVM chain, meaning it’s incompatible with MetaMask and other Ethereum-based platforms like BNB Chain. Another point is that TON smart contracts are developed using a specialized language, FunC, which few developers are familiar with. Hence, our advice is to use turnkey solutions rather than writing code from scratch.

For more details on the pros and cons, check out our overview article, «What You Need to Know Before Launching a Project on TON.»