TON Network Aims to Become a Crypto Payments Giant, Mimicking WeChat's Success

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

Telegram, the popular 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 pitt