TON has been gaining traction lately, as the coin has been the primary outperformer among large-cap tokens in these markets. The TON ecosystem itself has seen quite a lot of growth, with total TVL shooting up 6x in just the past 3 months, despite the lackluster crypto activity during this time. This is off the back of a native USDT deployment, among other announcements made by Founder Pavel Durov during Token 2049. This includes telegram domain name NFT trading, creator monetization via channel ads, and more. With all these new offerings, it’s easy to forget TON’s initial connection to Telegram, which began as a communications app. It has since grown into a super app with 800M MAU, having found massive adoption outside of the western world, specifically in Russia and India, two massive growing markets
Apps like Wechat in China, and LINE in South East Asia (SEA) have become dominant, serving primarily as communication apps. However, offerings of these widely adopted apps have expanded, with QR codes at restaurants, shops, and other establishments being the method to access a given establishment’s digital offerings. These can include digital menus and e-shops, delivery services, and more. WeChat specifically has even become a social media platform of sorts and is widely used for payments, perhaps the most widely used method of payment in China. The opportunity for Telegram to take a similar route but use crypto instead of centralized rails is clear. The team continues to expand on these offerings, even recently launching an integration to allow for government dues in the Philippines to be paid in USDT on the TON network. What’s more, TON and Telegram itself have very strong libertarian and independent backgrounds that align with crypto, making TON a prime candidate to provide the convenience of digital payment processing while still maintaining the decentralization of blockchains.
As mentioned above, the TON Ecosystem has seen tremendous TVL growth. Telegram has 300 miniapps which can be accessed on Telegram. And while some of the games are indeed very early-stage, there are some DeFi opportunities to be found, allowing those who wish to have TON exposure to earn some yield and incentives in the process.In today’s edition, we’ll go over a few of the top dApps in the nascent ecosystem, which include some incentives as part of the TON Open League initiative.
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PlayFi hopes to help solve the problem of a lack of exciting games in Web3 by building out blockchain infrastructure to connect to existing popular games.
Notcoin
Notcoin stands out as the elephant in the room of sorts in the TON ecosystem. Despite a relatively simplistic offering, this project, or game, has seen its native token NOT recently climb into the top 100 shortly after its launch. This may be because the native DeFi apps lack an investable token, and there’s a lot of demand for TON beta, considering the TON token itself holds a massive market cap of nearly $20B, and an FDV around double that.
Notcoin’s premise is simple enough to understand; users simply click an animated coin on the Notion app to slowly begin earning this token. The app is pretty similar to basic games that gained some popularity when touchscreen mobile devices first rose in popularity. Like its predecessors, Notcoin allows users to upgrade their ability to earn with boosts as they gain experience and accrue time played. Notcoin can also be earned by inviting friends and onboarding more user, helping to keep the network effects alive and establish the project as a pivotal piece in a very young blockchain ecosystem. This game, app, or whatever you want to call it, is interesting, to say the least; whether the native token makes for a good play remains to be seen.
STON.fi
STON.fi is one of the leading DEXs on TON, self-proclaiming itself as the #1 DEX on the chain, providing the best rates for spot Toncoin swaps. Users can also find a wide range of options to provide liquidity. The project was founded in 2022, specifically looking to capitalize on Telegram’s large audience and TON’s growth with a friendly UX. The DEX references the underlying TON blockchain’s use of sharing and asynchronous nature as compelling attributes that allow STON.fi to limit front-running.
The main selling point of STON.fi is its place as a home for TON-native liquidity. The team aims to onboard net-new users into crypto, which can explains why the protocol’s TVL has increase from $57M to $257M in under 3 months. STON.fi doesn’t need concentrated liquidity, limit orders, etc. because TON simply isn’t a chain for cutting edge DeFi innovation or experimentation. Perhaps some parallels can be drawn with the Katana DEX on Ronin; some might consider the Katana DEX primitive, but considering its use case for servicing Web3 gaming users, simple may be better. STON.fi can be accessed from multiple Telegram wallets, and even from the built-in wallet within the Telegram app itself. With the Open League incentives program, users can even earn sub-100% APR by LPing a TON-sTON pair, not to mention any benefits that might come from interacting with STON.fi itself.
Tonstakers
Tonstakers is the leading LST protocol on TON. While Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, and other chains might be fully focused on LRTs and restocking, there’s a large market for liquid staking of TON still, considering its massive multi-billion dollar marketcap. Depositors can expect a 3.37% APR at this time. With over $250M in TVL and nearly 66,000 stakers, the protocol has seen quite a bit of growth. It functions as a normal liquid staking protocol; users can participate in delegated validation through asset pooling (dubbed the ‘Jetton Pool’), retaining a liquid receipt token which increases in redemption value in return.
Tonstakers shines in that it’s a highly liquid, composable, and decentralized protocol. The protocol was also built in alliance with the TON Core developers, as well as other integral protocols within the ecosystem, including OKX, a leading TON wallet in Tonkeeper, and more.
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