Apps on the TON Blockchain Have Become Extremely Popular. Is It Sustainable?

This year, games on TON have taken off, garnering hundreds of millions of users in a few months. TON Foundation’s Alena Shmalko and Jack Booth share their insights on how TON, after Telegram had run-ins with the SEC, got here.

Listen or watch all the new CoinDesk podcast episodes wherever you want.

ABOUT

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

The Open Network, aka TON, has been on a tear since late February. TVL has skyrocketed 34x since the beginning of the year, reaching over $750 million as of the time of recording. The price of TON has more than tripled from about $2 to $7, and daily active addresses recently exceeded those of Ethereum in May and June. Games with fun names like Hamster Kombat and Catizen are gaining traction, and Pantera Capital, an OG crypto investor, is making its largest investments yet in TON.

In this episode, Alena Shmalko and Jack Booth from the TON Foundation discuss how TON has managed to garner this traction, especially after a rocky start when the SEC went after the original founder, Telegram.

Show highlights:

Alena’s and Jack’s backgrounds and how they ended up at TON
How TON evolved from its origins with Telegram to its current status, and how it began getting traction this year, according to Jack
How The Open League helped TON grow its TVL and other important metrics
How Telegram's collaboration with TON has evolved through time and how much they work together
Whether there are plans for TON to integrate with apps beyond Telegram
What in TON’s architecture allows it to be extremely scalable
The mechanics of Notcoin and why it has been so successful
Whether the rise of games like Notcoin and Hamster Kombat can be sustainable
The importance of USDT in Ton
When might a Bitcoin trustless bridge be deployed and why it could be significant
Whether TON is being used by criminals and what could be done to combat it
What strategies will lead TON to have $1 billion in TVL by the end of the year

Visit Unchained for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com

Thank you to our sponsors!

Polkadot

Guests:

Alena Shmalko, Ecosystem Lead at the TON Foundation
Jack Booth, Director of Marketing at the TON Foundation

Links

Previous coverage on Unchained of TON:
undefined

Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk.

HOST

Laura Shin

Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, host of the Unchained podcast, and author of “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (Public Affairs, 2022). Formerly a senior editor at Forbes, she was the first mainstream journalist to cover crypto full-time, and her podcasts and videos have had more than 15 million downloads and views. Shin has spoken about cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund, Singularity University and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and has a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.