Exploring the TON ecosystem (Part 1)

The TON blockchain ecosystem will be described.

Good morning.
This is mitsui from web3researcher.

Today's article, titled "Exploring the TON Ecosystem," describes the TON blockchain ecosystem.

The first part of this article will cover "Prerequisites," "DeFi," and "Other Important Topics," while the second part tomorrow will cover "Mini App," "Meme Tokens," and "Outlook. Please look forward to it.

🔵What is TON?
💰Why TON's DeFi TVL surge
👑DeFi Protocol TVL Top 10
📗Other important topics

🔵What is TON?

First, a brief review of the prerequisite TON blockchain.

The TON blockchain was developed as the Telegram Open Network, a blockchain project of Telegram, a messaging platform that raised $1.7 billion through two ICOs in 2018. However, a dispute with the SEC over an unregistered securities offering in 2020 led to the suspension of the mainnet launch; ICO funds had to be returned and fines had to be paid, and the company was forced to withdraw from the ICO and pay a $3.5 billion fine, which was later repaid in the form of a $3.5 billion investment.

Members of the community then formed the Ton Foundation, which changed its name from Telegram Open Network to The Open Network (TON). MainNet was launched in 2021 and is gradually increasing its market share as a chain similar to Telegram.

The consensus algorithm is PoS, which employs sharding and addresses scalability by building three levels of blockchain: master chain, work chain, and shard chain. (We will not delve into the technical details)

Here is a chaos map of such a TON ecosystem. Each of the major categories is present, right?

There are currently 792 applications. You can search by category in "TON App", so if you are interested, please check it out.

Here is the history of such TON token prices.

Clearly, there has been a steep increase since March 2024, which is also roughly in line with the rise in TVL for DeFi in DeFillama.

We will take a deep dive into what happened during this period, the reasons for TON's DeFi TVL rise, the key protocols that drove it, and several other major trends within the TON ecosystem, such as the Telegram Mini App and meme tokens, which we will also summarize.

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💰Why TON's DeFi TVL Surge

In conclusion, the most significant impact was made by TON's incentive program, The Open League. This is a long-term incentive program for TON users, projects, teams, and traders that aims to distribute 30,000,000 TON coins in 3 months.