杜罗夫亲自下场：TON时隔六年重回Telegram怀抱

Original by Eric, Foresight News

On the night of May 4, Beijing time, Telegram founder Pavel Durov unexpectedly tweeted that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation to become the driving force behind TON and its largest validator. Notably, Durov had only mentioned TON in 7 tweets throughout 2025, making this sudden announcement to "take over" TON quite surprising.

The ton.org website is also currently in maintenance mode, displaying only one sentence: ton.org is now controlled by MTONGA (Make TON Great Again).

Following this news, TON's price surged from around $1.35 to $1.85 within two days, an increase of over 37%.

In 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Telegram Open Network of conducting an unregistered securities offering through the sale of Gram tokens via an ICO in 2018. Telegram was forced to abandon the project, return funds, and publicly announced its withdrawal from the project after open-sourcing the code. Subsequently, developers Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko, who met at a Telegram programming competition, took over the project. They launched the community-driven project NewTON, inheriting the original TON code, maintaining nodes and the testnet, and gradually advancing towards the mainnet.

In 2021, the NewTON community upgraded the testnet to the mainnet and formally transitioned to the TON Foundation, which was officially registered as a non-profit organization in Switzerland in 2023, supported by community contributors.

Counting from when Telegram was forced to abandon TON due to regulatory pressure to when the Telegram founder proactively announced he would dedicate time and energy to driving TON's development, six years have passed. In these six years, TON has experienced a complete cycle of ups and downs.

In April 2022, amidst a prevailing market atmosphere of uncertainty, the TONcoin Fund, backed by investors including Huobi Incubator, KuCoin Ventures, and MEXC Pioneer Fund, unexpectedly announced the launch of a $250 million ecosystem fund to support projects on TON. Shortly after, the TON Foundation also launched a $1 billion ecosystem fund to promote TON ecosystem development.

Following this, the TON ecosystem experienced a small boom, gradually building out infrastructure from domains and storage to DeFi. However, it failed to create significant buzz until the advent of Telegram mini-games.

In fact, from the early stages of TON's ecosystem development, it began establishing connections with Telegram. Both official and third-party projects launched Mini Apps on Telegram for cryptocurrency transfers or payments. The connection between the two gradually tightened, and mini-games elevated the level of integration. Before this, numerous on-chain games declined due to poor user experience, complex gameplay, and marketing difficulties. However, TON mini-games, leveraging Telegram's hundreds of millions of users and simple viral gameplay mechanics similar to "Candy Crush" or "Sheep Got Sheep," spread rapidly across the platform.

At the peak of the mini-game craze, many teams' games accumulated millions of users within days. None were more popular than Tap-to-Earn games like Notcoin. The tokens of numerous game projects surged wildly in a short period, creating many wealth opportunities. Concurrently, TON's token price broke through $8 in mid-2024, reaching a total market capitalization exceeding $26 billion.

However, this craze came and went quickly. As the mini-game hype gradually faded, TON lacked a compelling second act to sustain attention. Coupled with its founder's arrest by French authorities on charges of failing to effectively control illegal activities on the platform, concerns about TON's future led to a rapid decline in on-chain activity, practically dying down overnight.

Recently, TON re-entered the market's spotlight, prompted once again by a tweet from Pavel Durov. On April 9, Pavel Durov posted that TON had completed an upgrade, increasing speed tenfold, improving block generation efficiency sixfold, and enabling transaction completion within one second. However, this is just the first step of MTONGA's seven-step plan. The next step will further reduce the already low transaction fees by a factor of six.

The performance improvement came from the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade completed in April. TON's new consensus mechanism introduces a "streaming layer" for pushing state updates, replacing the previous polling mechanism. This has shortened block production time to approximately 400 milliseconds, with transaction finality confirmation taking only about 1 second. The fee reduction mentioned by Pavel Durov was also completed in early May, with TON's base fee now reduced to approximately $0.0005.

Beyond this, TON underwent a round of infrastructure optimization in the first quarter of this year, adopting a new node implemented in Rust. This significantly simplifies operations and maintenance, making it suitable for institutional and large-scale deployment, offering enhanced security and modularity. The developer tool Builders Portal also launched version 2.0, with version 3.0 expected in the second quarter.

While the ultimate purpose of these changes wasn't explicitly stated, it's clear that Pavel Durov hopes to leverage Telegram's user traffic to make TON a payment and interaction gateway supporting Mini Apps, AI tools, and more on Telegram. Particularly in the AI sector, numerous "lobster lords" (a colloquial term for AI bot operators) currently choose to control AI agents via Telegram. In the future, Telegram may not just be a tool for human-to-human communication but a crucial tool for human-machine interaction. Supporting low-cost, high-frequency transactions is the necessary infrastructure to realize these visions.