Structural Issues and Future Outlook of the TON Ecosystem Development

In the past two years, the TON network has undergone a rapid transformation from dormancy to explosion. Leveraging Telegram's massive user base, TON quickly established a strong presence in the crypto community. Narratives such as gamified ecosystems, robot economies, and the Stars payment system once attracted significant attention. However, with price fluctuations, market cap declines, and reduced activity, TON has also exposed some deep-seated structural issues, such as a high concentration of chips, severe ecological homogeneity, and weak infrastructure.

Chip distribution is seriously uneven

The distribution of TON chips shows extreme polarization characteristics:

• Users holding less than 100 TON account for nearly 99.9%, with retail investors making up the vast majority.
• Most tokens are concentrated in the hands of a few early miners.
• 12 whale addresses hold more than 1% of the total supply of tokens, of which 6 are low activity addresses.
• 171 "frozen" early miner addresses locked up approximately 1.081 million TON

This extremely uneven distribution pattern poses challenges for the long-term development of TON.

Valuation has declined, but there is still room for upward movement.

The price of TON tokens has fallen over 50% from its peak of $8.25 in June 2024, and the market capitalization has shrunk from a peak of $2.517 billion to the current $864 million. The total locked amount in the ecosystem (TVL) has also significantly dropped from a high of $770 million to around $140 million.

Nevertheless, compared to other leading public chains, TON's market capitalization still has significant room for growth. The key lies in whether the ecological enthusiasm can be converted into long-term value.

Inflation is controllable, but application scenarios need to be expanded.

The supply of TON tokens grows at a rate of about 0.6% per year, with inflation being relatively controllable. However, the actual application scenarios for the tokens are still limited, mainly focusing on basic functions such as contract fees and staking.

The launch of the Telegram Stars transit plan provides new application scenarios for TON, linking advertising and fund transfers with the TON ecosystem. However, it remains to be seen whether this gradual web2 user conversion can succeed.

The Growing Pains of Transformation After the Ecological Heat Retreat

The TON ecosystem currently has the following problems:

• The project track is highly concentrated, mainly focusing on games and NFTs.
• There is a lack of other types of applications, especially in important infrastructures such as DeFi and payments.
• On-chain activity continues to decline, reflecting insufficient ecological momentum.
• The unique development architecture is unfriendly to developers and restricts innovation.

If it cannot get rid of the reliance on short-term popularity and expand more practical application scenarios, TON will find it difficult to establish long-term value.

Large user base but declining activity

The number of TON users has shown explosive growth, rapidly increasing from 20 million in May 2024 to the current 150 million. However, the number of active addresses has significantly decreased, dropping from tens of millions of monthly active users at the end of 2024 to around 2 million now.

This reflects the issues with TON in terms of user retention and value accumulation. After the traffic dividend wanes, how to enhance user activity has become a key challenge.

Developer Ecosystem Under Pressure

Compared to other mainstream public chains, the developer ecosystem of TON is relatively weak:

• The number of validators is only around 400, far lower than leading public chains like Ethereum.
• There are only 30 full-time developers, with around 150 active developers each month, which is far lower than other ecosystems.
• The download volume of development tools has significantly decreased from its peak.

Insufficient developer support may hinder the long-term development of the TON ecosystem.

TAC: A Future of Compatibility and Connectivity

In the face of the incompatibility issue with the EVM ecosystem, TON is seeking breakthroughs through the TAC project:

• TAC is an independent EVM-compatible public chain built using Cosmos SDK + Ethermint.
• Achieve cross-chain communication with the TON mainnet through a sorter network.
• Allows users to interact directly with EVM applications using TON wallet
• Developers can migrate EVM applications to the TON ecosystem without rewriting code.

TAC has opened the door for TON to the mainstream world of EVM, promising to help TON break through the current ecological bottleneck.

Conclusion

The development of TON is at a critical crossroads. It has a large potential user base, but at the same time faces structural issues such as chip concentration, a singular ecosystem, and weak infrastructure. Whether it can truly emerge from the platform dividend into its own development paradigm in the future will depend on its breakthroughs in developer support, application scenario expansion, and cross-chain interoperability. After the traffic dividend fades, what can truly remain is the self-sustaining ability of the public chain. The future path of TON still requires observation.