Telegram has roughly 950 million monthly active users, making it one of the three largest messaging platforms in the world. The Open Network (TON) is the blockchain built into it. By any measure of distribution potential, TON should be winning. The gap between that potential and what the on-chain data actually shows is the more interesting story.
The Origin and the Rebuild
TON was originally developed by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai as Telegram’s native blockchain. The SEC sued Telegram in 2019 over its GRAM token sale, arguing the offering constituted an unregistered securities offering. Telegram settled in 2020, paid $18.5 million in penalties, and returned $1.2 billion to investors. The project was officially abandoned.
The TON Foundation, a separate community organization, picked up the open-source code and continued building without Telegram’s direct involvement. Over the following three years, it rebuilt the ecosystem and negotiated a formal partnership with Telegram that resulted in TON becoming the chain natively integrated into the app.
That integration is what makes TON structurally different from every other L1 competing for users. TON Space, a self-custodial wallet, is built into Telegram. Users can receive and send TONCOIN or USDT without leaving the app. Fragment, a Telegram username marketplace, runs on TON. Mini-apps, a feature that lets developers build lightweight applications inside Telegram chats, can interact directly with TON wallets.
What Notcoin and Hamster Kombat Actually Proved
In 2024, two Telegram-native games produced user numbers that the broader crypto space struggled to contextualize.
Notcoin, a simple tap-to-earn game, accumulated over 35 million players before its NOT token launched on TON in May 2024. Hamster Kombat, a virtual crypto exchange game, claimed over 300 million users by mid-2024 before its HMSTR token launch in September 2024.
These were genuine distribution events. Both tokens launched with massive airdrop-driven initial user bases and significant initial trading volume. They demonstrated that Telegram’s infrastructure could onboard users to crypto interactions at a scale no other platform had achieved.
What they did not demonstrate is durable on-chain activity. Both tokens fell sharply after launch as airdrop recipients sold. The games themselves did not generate sustained DeFi usage, protocol revenue, or meaningful developer ecosystem growth. They were viral moments, not infrastructure proofs.
The distinction matters. Viral games show that Telegram users will engage with a crypto token if it’s handed to them inside an app they already use. They don’t show that those users will seek out DeFi protocols, manage wallets, or pay transaction fees for non-trivial applications. Those are different behaviors, and they require different friction reduction.
Where the Gap Shows Up
TON’s on-chain metrics reflect this tension. The chain has high peaks of transaction volume around token launches and game events, followed by significant compression. Daily active addresses, protocol TVL relative to the chain’s market cap, and developer activity outside of gaming have all lagged the user count narrative.
By comparison, Solana and Base, both of which have far smaller potential user bases from a distribution standpoint, generate consistently higher DeFi volumes and protocol revenue. The difference is primarily product. Solana has Jupiter, Raydium, and a mature DeFi stack. Base has Coinbase’s retail user funnel and Aerodrome. TON’s DeFi layer, while growing, has not yet produced a breakout protocol that converts casual Telegram users into active DeFi participants.
STON.fi and DeDust are the dominant DEXes on TON. Both function but neither has achieved the liquidity depth or trading volume that would make TON a serious destination for capital looking for yield or leverage.
The Durov Factor
In August 2024, Pavel Durov was arrested at Le Bourget airport in France on charges related to Telegram’s alleged facilitation of criminal activity on the platform. He was released on bail, but the legal proceedings have continued into 2026.
Durov’s legal situation matters for TON in two ways. First, any outcome that limits Telegram’s ability to operate in Europe would directly affect TON’s distribution advantage, since Telegram and TON’s integration is the chain’s primary moat. Second, the arrest accelerated scrutiny of Telegram as a platform, which has put pressure on the company to moderate content more aggressively. More aggressive moderation may conflict with the pseudonymous, permissionless ethos that crypto users expect.
Neither risk has materialized into a direct impact on TON’s technical development, but they represent a structural dependency that most other L1s don’t share: TON’s value proposition is largely inseparable from one company’s continued operation and one man’s legal standing.
What Would Change the Calculus
TON’s distribution advantage is real and durable as long as Telegram remains operational and the wallet integration stays in place. The question is whether the ecosystem can build the DeFi stack and developer tooling that converts distribution into genuine economic activity.
Three developments would meaningfully improve TON’s position: a breakout DeFi protocol with genuine liquidity depth, a major stablecoin issuer (beyond USDT on TON, which is already present) deploying yield-generating products inside the Telegram interface, and a developer incentive program that attracts teams building financial applications rather than games.
The games showed the ceiling. The infrastructure isn’t there yet to reach it.
What to watch: TON DeFi TVL growth relative to overall market cap, whether any established DeFi protocol deploys on TON in 2026, and the outcome of French proceedings against Durov, which remains the single largest external risk to the chain’s distribution moat.