Can TON become the next major player in blockchain? The perfect storm of technology, ecosystem, and massive user base

Have you ever wondered why, after so many years of blockchain development, ordinary people still can’t use it? Bitcoin processes 7 transactions per second, Ethereum handles 15-30 transactions per second, while modern applications often process thousands of transactions per second. This is why projects like TON (The Open Network) are gaining attention—they promise not just faster speeds, but a complete redefinition of how blockchain interacts with the real world.

Core Pain Point: Why is TON Worth Paying Attention To

Blockchain technology has fallen into a classic trilemma: to achieve high speed, you must sacrifice security; to be sufficiently secure, you must sacrifice decentralization. As a result, most chains struggle between these three goals.

TON takes a completely different approach. It adopts an infinite sharding architecture, allowing the entire network to dynamically adjust its processing capacity. Simply put, it automatically scales based on user demand—expanding when demand is high by adding more shards, contracting when demand drops. In theory, TON can process millions of transactions per second, while maintaining confirmation times in seconds and near-zero fees.

What does this capability mean for the real world? It means you can use blockchain for real-time payments, small cross-border transfers, and instant settlements for content creators—things that are simply impossible on Ethereum (where high fees eat up most of your earnings).

Why Telegram’s 900 Million Users Changed the Game

This is where TON truly shines.

TON is Telegram’s official Web3 infrastructure since 2023. Imagine: Telegram has 900 million monthly active users. These users are already socializing, paying, and doing business on this app. If blockchain transactions could be as simple as sending a message—using human-readable names instead of a string of gibberish addresses—the barrier to adoption would be drastically lowered.

In fact, TON is already doing this:

• Payments in Telegram Premium are settled with TON
• Fragment.com handles username auctions with TON, each auction reaching millions of dollars
• Users can send transfers and make payments directly within Telegram

This is not “possible,” it’s “already happening.”

How Special Is TON’s Underlying Technology?

Infinite Sharding and Instant Cross-Chain Messaging

TON’s sharding isn’t just horizontal scaling. A single work chain can split into 2^32 shard chains, each of which can further split into 2^60 sub-shards—an essentially unlimited theoretical expansion space. More importantly, hypercube routing allows messages between different shards to arrive within a single block cycle (about 5 seconds), with the routing automatically finding the optimal path.

This means: no matter which shard you are on, you can interact with other users at lightning speed, without creating new intermediary settlement layers (like Polygon or Arbitrum).

Self-Healing Vertical Blockchain

Each block in TON is itself a micro-blockchain. If invalid blocks are produced, the system can correct this by extending the vertical chain, without requiring hard forks. This is a very elegant fault-tolerance mechanism.

Flexible Virtual Machine

TON’s virtual machine supports 64-bit, 128-bit, and 256-bit operations. Each “cell” (the smallest data unit) can store 128 bytes of data plus 4 pointers. This design is especially friendly for handling complex data structures, giving smart contract developers greater flexibility.

What Is the Ecosystem Already Doing with TON

This is not future speculation—it’s happening now:

DeFi: STON.fi, as a leading decentralized exchange, has processed hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume, with fees and confirmation speeds far surpassing Ethereum.

Gaming and NFTs: Thanks to TON’s high speed and low fees, blockchain games and NFT applications can offer truly smooth experiences (not bogged down by exorbitant fees).

Domains and Identity: TON DNS has registered over 50,000 .ton domains, allowing users to trade with “alice.ton” instead of “0x742d35Cc6634C0532925a3b844Bc9e7595f42bE.”

Infrastructure: TON Storage offers decentralized storage, and TON Proxy provides privacy network access—TON aims to build a complete Web3 stack, not just transfers.

Token Economics: How Well Is It Designed?

Supply: Max supply of 515 million TON tokens, with about 242 million in circulation (circulating rate 46.94%).

Price and Market Cap: As of the latest data, TON is priced at $1.76, down 4.97% in 24 hours, with a circulating market cap of $4.25 billion.

Inflation Mechanism: New TON tokens are issued as validator rewards, with an annual inflation rate around 2%. Validators need to stake large amounts of TON to participate in block production, earning approximately 20% annualized returns. If validators act maliciously (sign invalid blocks or go offline), their staked tokens are partially burned—creating a strong economic security model.

Storage Fee Innovation: Unlike Ethereum, TON charges ongoing storage fees for on-chain data. This incentivizes efficient programming and prevents blockchain bloat from junk data. Accounts with insufficient balance to pay storage fees will be frozen or deleted.

TON vs Other L1s: Are They Really That Different?

vs Ethereum: 15-30 TPS vs theoretical millions of TPS, fees from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars vs a few cents. But Ethereum’s ecosystem and security remain industry-leading.

vs Solana: Solana can do 65,000 TPS but has experienced multiple outages and centralization concerns. TON’s design emphasizes true decentralization.

vs Other Competitors (Polkadot, Cosmos, Aptos): They are all quite clever but need to start from zero to build their user bases. TON directly taps into a 900 million-user social network. This distribution advantage cannot be fully compensated by technology alone.

TON’s Ambition: Connecting 500 Million Web3 Users by 2028

The TON Foundation’s clear goal is to onboard 500 million people into Web3 by 2028. To achieve this:

• Develop new smart contract languages to attract more developers (Java-style, Haskell-style, etc.)
• Build cross-chain bridges to make TON a multi-chain hub
• Promote fiat on-ramps and local partnerships in emerging markets
• Drive innovation through Telegram ecosystem grants for thousands of new applications

In many developing countries, people lack easy access to traditional banking services. If TON can truly make “transferring money as easy as sending a message,” its potential in these markets is enormous.

Where Are the Future Bets?

TON’s success depends on several factors:

1. Technical Delivery: Can sharding and cross-chain optimizations truly achieve the theoretical TPS?
2. Developer Ecosystem: Can it attract enough builders to create useful applications?
3. Regulation: Telegram’s own regulatory stance will directly impact TON’s development space.
4. Competitive Pressure: Other chains are also improving; how long can TON maintain its lead?

But purely from a condition standpoint, TON has advantages that previous generations of blockchains lacked: a massive, active user base already accustomed to handling multiple transaction types within a single app, combined with advanced technology that makes blockchain virtually invisible to these users—they don’t even need to know they’re using blockchain.

This is what large-scale adoption should look like.