Unchained - Apps on the TON Blockchain Have Become Extremely Popular. Is It Sustainable? - Ep. 678

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

The Open Network, aka TON, has been on a tear since late February. TVL has skyrocketed 34x since the beginning of the year, reaching over $750 million as of the time of recording. The price of TON has more than tripled from about $2 to $7, and daily active addresses recently exceeded those of Ethereum in May and June. Games with fun names like Hamster Kombat and Catizen are gaining traction, and Pantera Capital, an OG crypto investor, is making its largest investments yet in TON.  In this episode, Alena Shmalko and Jack Booth from the TON Foundation discuss how TON has managed to garner this traction, especially after a rocky start when the SEC went after the original founder, Telegram. Show highlights: 00:00 Intro 02:13 Alena’s and Jack’s backgrounds and how they ended up at TON 05:35 How TON evolved from its origins with Telegram to its current status and how it began getting traction this year, according to Jack 11:21 How The Open League helped TON grow its TVL and other important metrics 15:40 How Telegram's collaboration with TON has evolved through time and how much they work together 24:47 Whether there are plans for TON to integrate with apps beyond Telegram 30:15 What in TON’s architecture allows it to be extremely scalable 33:20 The mechanics of Notcoin and why it has been so successful 36:49 Whether the rise of games like Notcoin and Hamster Kombat can be sustainable 46:05 The importance of USDT in Ton 51:53 When might a Bitcoin trustless bridge be deployed and why it could be significant 54:43 Whether TON is being used by criminals and what could be done to combat it 58:59 What strategies will lead TON to have $1 billion in TVL by the end of the year Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! Polkadot Guests: Alena Shmalko, Ecosystem Lead at the TON Foundation Jack Booth, Director of Marketing at the TON Foundation Links Previous coverage on Unchained of TON: Could Telegram-Associated TON Blockchain Be the 'Next Solana' and Challenge Ethereum? Layer 2 Networks Are Arriving on the Telegram-Associated TON Blockchain  TON Blockchain's Stablecoin Transfer Volume Reaches Record $299 Million on US Independence Day  What Is Telegram's Ads Network on TON And How Will It Impact Advertisers & Creators? History & Structure TON roadmap CoinDesk:  Telegram Abandons TON Blockchain Project After Court Fight With SEC Telegram Agrees to Pay $18.5M Penalty in SEC Settlement Over Failed TON Offering Messaging App Telegram Gives Endorsement to TON Project; Token Surges Cointelegraph: Telegram ad platform to launch via TON blockchain Notcoin: Decrypt: What's Next for Notcoin? Becoming the 'Netflix of Social, Viral Games' Notcoin, a Free Telegram Game Based on the TON Blockchain, Surges in Popularity Hamster Kombat Cointelegraph: Hamster Kombat destined for Guinness World Record?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bet mode activated. The Scorebet app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do. Is that because you don't have any knees?

Or... The score bet. Trusted sports content, seamless sports betting. Download today. 19 plus, Ontario only. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to conicsonterio.ca. Viral mechanics and incentives are the name of the game with Telegram Mini Apps.

If you can introduce those and you can do them in a simple, fun way that keeps people engaged, keeps people coming back every single day, then your app will reach millions of users. It's as simple as that and has been proven literally more than 10, 15 times now by different projects. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto nine years ago, and as a senior editor, Lorbs was the first Main Tree Meteorporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the July 23rd, 2024 episode of Unchained. Pocodot is the original and leading layer zero blockchain with over 2000 plus developers, and the Pocodot 2.0 upgrade will be a massive accelerator for the ecosystem, making it faster, more secure, and adaptable. Perfect for GameFi and DFI to build, grow, and scale.

Join the community at Pocodot.network slash ecosystem slash community. Today's topic is the recent rise of TUN, or the Open Network. Here to discuss are Elena Schmalko, ecosystem lead at the Tund Foundation, and Jack Booth, Director of Marketing at the Tund Foundation. Welcome, Alina and Jack. Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having us, Laura.

Yeah, exactly. The Open Network, also known as TUN, has recently been on a tear since late February. It's TVL has 34X'd, and we have seen that the, yeah, TVL is at about $750 million. The price has more than tripled. from about $2 to about $7 at the time of recording. Daily active actresses recently exceeded those of Ethereum in May and June.

And there's a plethora of fun games with names like Hamster Combat and Kadazin that have been gaining traction. And Pantera Capital, which is an OG crypto VC firm, has been making what it calls its largest investments yet in ton. But before we dive into all these latest happenings, why don't we just start with? with your background. So Elena, why don't you tell us about your role and how you came to work a ton and then we'll move to Jack. Yeah, sure, with pleasure. First of all, thank you very much for having us. It's a great pleasure. So talking about me, I have a few years in crypto, starting with a few startups where I was involved in some operational roles. And then I started running my own accelerator for Web3 startups. And this is exactly where I, let's say, get familiarized

myself with Ton as such because I had a chance to have a very, you know, like broad and higher perspective overview of crypto as such, being in touch with different blockchains and different ecosystems. And so I picked Ton because it has, it had to my mind the largest potential across all other L1s and L2s. And this is exactly how I joined the ecosystem being now ecosystem lead overseeing support towards startups building on Tom. And Jack, how about you? So I'm the CMO at the Tom Foundation. Yeah, my history and story has really,

I've been in marketing for many, many years now. I was working for a UK startup in 2020 when obviously COVID happened, lost my job and was rewarded with a government grant. which I then put into Bitcoin. And I had the amazing experience of going down the rabbit hole with crypto after that, that small investment at the time, where it doubled in a few months. And I thought, what is this crazy little world that I've got myself into?

And so decided to pursue a career in crypto from 2020, got in at Oasis Protocol first, and then later down the line a few years, later now I've moved on to Ton. So very, very happy to be at Ton and very happy of where the ecosystem's gone because what we're seeing right now is with these, the tap to earn games, is we're seeing a lot of games putting crypto into new users' pockets for the first time ever. And so it's very, very relevant to exactly the feeling that I had when I first got into crypto when I first bought that bit of Bitcoin in 2020, where when you first get that

first bit of crypto, you start to understand what it means. You start to understand why it's important and you start to understand why it's an interesting thing. So it's not something that you can really tell people. And I think this is where Ton and our ecosystem is doing really the good work for the whole the whole space is by giving people a small bit of crypto to get started, they're getting interested and they're getting excited. They're finding out what ownership on the blockchain really, truly means. And that's exciting for me, and it's exciting for actually millions of other people,

which are now playing these games on Ton. So that's a little bit about my background and why I'm very excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Laura. So let's talk a little bit more about the origin story, O-Ton, because it started with the company behind the messaging app, Telegram, which did a $1.7 billion ICO in 2018. However, most people listening to my show probably know the story that in 2019, the SEC secured a temporary restraining order to keep Telegram from selling or distributing what were to be called Graham tokens initially.

And then later court dealings with the SEC did not go in Telegram's favor. And so what eventually ended up happening was, you know, telegram split from this blockchain, but a group of developers decided in March of 2020 to launch the blockchain themselves. So can you fill us in on what happened with that effort and how we got to where Ton is today? Yeah, absolutely. So the group of developers actually, there was a couple of them. They won a competition to, to get the keys to the open source software that at the time was telegram open network. It's a complete different network from the state it's in today.

So those developers are able to develop it now to a state, which is obviously the high capacity, the high scalability that it has. It didn't have that when it was taken over. Basically, those developers, those initial two guys, they formed a loose kind of a loose organization called New Jersey. ton and they were kind of bringing other developers, getting them excited about building ton and becoming core developers. And then in in in 2022, the Tom Foundation was was officially formed. And that's where the kind of growth period and has has kind of started. So since then,

and since the Tom Foundation has kind of kicked off, we've then had this partnership and collaboration with Telegram, where they've decided to continue building on Ton because of the excellent work that the core developers have made. And that really has been the catalyst for Ton's growth. Our integration with the wallet inside of Telegram means that you can send crypto to anyone just as simple as sending a text message in DMs. You can send Ton, you can send Bitcoin, You can send USDT and now Notcoin as well, instantly for free using wallet in Telegram, which is the integrated wallet, which comes in Telegram's settings menu. The wallet has now been rolled out globally outside of the US to all of the countries where

telegram is present. And the rollout will mean that the wallet is placed inside of the settings menu for all of those people. So basically, most telegram users over the next few years will have a ton wallet in their telegram menu. And this is really the key collaboration, which is game changing for us and game changing for the ecosystem and the space in general. So that was kind of the first milestone. The second milestone that we had was not going launch, end of beginning of this year. in January, Notcorn launched in an amazing fashion on New Year's Eve around the world and quickly grew, I think in the first month, it was 20 million users. And this was when we really understood.

And I think the whole market really understood, actually telegrams distribution is real. Actually, it works. The integration is something to pay attention to. It actually brings millions of people and millions of users into not exactly crypto because at that point the mining phase of not coin it wasn't really crypto but it got people interested in this concept of like earning something through a simple mechanism and with a potential payoff down the line so so i guess the third milestone that that i want to mention and and i guess elana can also add to this one would be on the launch of the Open League in March. This Open League launch was kind of the major catalyst for all of our on-chain metric growth. It is a competition between the best projects on Ton,

that rewards projects for gaining new users and rewards users for using those projects. So it's a great competition. It's something that me and Elena have worked very, very closely on over the last last six months. And yeah, it's, it kind of makes up about 60% of the daily active wallets on Ton at the moment. So it's a massive contributor to the growth that we've had on chain. Okay. And Elena, is there anything you'd want to add on that? Yeah, sure, like several things. So summarizing like the role of Ton Foundation right now is basically to support this growth and to support particularly the founders and the builders that we have in the ecosystem, right? So from that core team of developers that Jack has told us about,

we grew to a team, including different people from the business side, like marketing team, etc., also responsible for promoting the brand of the chain itself and so on and so forth. But definitely our main mission is to once again enhance and support this growth through different tools and programs and initiatives that we launch for teams building on our chain. And so talking about the Open League, as Jack mentioned, it is really a major initiative in the ecosystem right now, once again, contributing by around like 60% talking about on-chain users and then about 10% or even more now, I think, around 15% if we take TVL off the chain, which Laura, as you mentioned, has grown like immensely.

So the Open League is an open battle for Tone teams. And the cool thing about it is that you don't have to develop on TAN for years. You can come build a TALGRAM mini app on TAN, like implement some on-chain mechanics immediately, join the leaderboard and win large prices. We distribute these prices to teams directly on a seasonal basis. So one season usually is around from two to four weeks long. And so at the end of the season, teams get these prizes. It's kind of a grant that they can use for like marketing purposes, for product development,

for an air drop for their community, which is absolutely amazing and that we have not seen in any other ecosystem out there, just because these are rewards for being, you know, main contributors to the growth of the ecosystem. And it definitely always comes from projects that are building along with us, along with our support. And apart from that, we also have a program, like an incentive program for liquidity providers on Dexas, on Stonefine D-Dust, our two major decentralized exchanges in the ecosystem. So liquidity providers of JETNs, which is an ERC-20 standard on Tone. And Tone coin are rewarded for putting their liquidity into pools.

And also we've had an amazing initiative that followed the launch of native Eusty on TON, which basically accounts for the largest proportion of the TVL growth. So yeah, it's been about it. I think Jack clarified the milestones properly. But yeah, I mean, we're very much excited about further growth. And now it's our mission to sustain it and to direct this flow of value and liquidity into different initiatives and, yeah, programs. Yeah, I mean, clearly things have gelled.

And just to, you know, before we get into more, you know, into the details of what's been happening these last few months, I did also want to dive into details at the foundation. Like, who are the main players and how did they all come to be in their positions at the Tund Foundation? The main players are Steve, who's, Steve Ewan, who's the president of the foundation. He was actually one of the original community members of Ton even before the SEC problems and issues.

So he's been around from the very, very start. And he was the kind of driving force between creating an official non-profit foundation that kind of brought together the core developers and then began to hire in the growth side of things, which was, you know, from the Elena's team, ecosystem development, dev relations, from my side, the marketing side, and the BED side. So there's a, there's about, there's about, there's five directors now, me being one of them,

on the marketing side. And yeah, we're tasked with achieving the Tons ecosystem goals, which is putting crypto in every pocket. And there's a big, hairy, audacious goal of 500 million telegram users on chain by 2028. And that's the thing that we're all working towards as an ecosystem and as a community. And the current number of telegram users is what? 500 million monthly.

900 million? Okay. Monthly, yeah. So we want to convert 30% of telegrams, monthly active users to Tons users. by 2028. I mean, expecting the growth of monthly active users of Telegram as well. Right, yeah. Oh, right.

Okay. Yeah. Well, so I wanted to ask a little bit more about this relationship with Telegram. So obviously, as we just mentioned, it started with Telegram. Then because of the SEC action, Tone developed on its own. However, last September, Telegram chose Tone as the exclusive crypto network that would be built into the app. So how did that come about? Well, Telegram was already building on Ton before this.

They bought Fragment.com, which is one of the kind of major use cases for Tong that we have. It's totally unique to Ton in that it's the first ever place you can buy a social media handle as an NFT and actually own it and use it. So Fragment.com is where you can buy your own Telegram username as an NFT on Tom blockchain. So they'd already built that and they saw the success of that launch in the netted them, you know, not telling them it wasn't at the time of revenue producing business. And all of a sudden it netted them $150 million in NFT sales selling the usernames. Right. So it was an extremely successful program for them.

And it was then natural after that launch to start to collaborate more with Ton Foundation. and Tom blockchain and try to build a very close relationship that's helpful to both, right? Because for Telegram, it's helpful for them because we're helping grow the Mini Apps ecosystem, which Telegram has an open mini apps third-party mini-ups program, where anyone can come on and build a Telegram Mini-Ap. And on our side, it helps with the distribution of our projects, because now with our projects or building Telegram Mini Apps,

those are now distributed to Telegram's user base on a massive, massive scale. And actually, Pavel Dirov just announced, didn't tell us about it. We knew nothing about it, but it just announced in this channel a few days ago that they're going to create a app store inside of Telegram,

and they'll be promoting Tons, web three applications inside of the app store. So we're super excited for that to happen. And it'll be in the main user interface, I guess. We don't know any details of it as yet. But I guess it will become part of the main user interface that you can go and find applications, mini apps, and start using them just within telegram.

So the collaboration is just improving all the time. It's a natural progression from where we first started. obviously Nikolai Duroff and Pavel Dureoff were the creators of the original Tom White Paper. The technology has come a long way since then. They used it to launch the fragment application, which was a massive success for them, revenue-wise. And then they integrated the wallet, which made sense to them at the time. And now they're continuing this collaboration, trying to integrate more ways for blockchain

to actually interface with the telegram app. The telegram also uses Ton for its payouts, creator payouts. So you can actually advertise in Telegram by paying in Toncoin. And then the creator of the channel, the owner of that Telegram channel also gets paid in Toncoin as well, 50% of the revenue that Telegram makes from the ads. So, yeah, there's so many ways that Telegram is looking to collaborate with Ton.

we're not a party to how they want to collaborate. They are third party developers, so to speak. Really, only the wallet integration is the one thing that we've really properly collaborated on with how that was going to look and how that was going to work. Well, one other way that you're tied, though, is I believe that the ton coin, I think I saw, makes up the greatest asset on Telegram's balance sheet. what percentage of 10 coin do they have? Pavel and Nikolai Duraev.

I couldn't comment or answer that one. I'm not too sure exactly the amount that they hold. Wouldn't want to say, in case I got it wrong. Okay. But I just wondered, like, in this particular situation where even though you're working on this decentralized network, since it is focused on this one particular app, you said that really you're only working on the wallet, but there's no other points of kind of integration,

or integration is maybe not the right word, but collaboration, it feels like there must be like pretty regular communication and collaboration. I actually know. Yeah, and I would learn like the majority of news just as anyone else from Doerf's channel, right, Jack? so we just follow his channel and learn something new. Yeah, literally, you know, the whole announcement about them using Toncoin for the advertising platform,

I heard, I didn't hear about that until Pavel announced it in his channel. And that was like a huge announcement for us because we had no idea about that. And no one did. So actually they don't, they don't talk to us at all. about anything. In fact, they only really talk to the wallet team because the wallet is the only real integration they have. And so that's not our team at all. That's a total different company called Top, the Open Platform, who actually, they run wallet, they run the decks on Ton called one of the decks is on Ton called StomFi. So, and a whole load of other kind of good, really,

really good ton projects are venture builded by ton by top sorry so yeah in terms of the the foundation and what we get from from telegram we don't really get that much information to be honest we didn't even know about paville's announcement of when he when he came onto stage at token 2049 and he announced us d t with with paolo we knew that was going to happen but we didn't know that he was going to make the announcements of like telegram stickers going to be on Tom blockchain and all of these other things that he's talked about there. So, so yeah, the collaboration is there, but it's probably more with wallet side than us at the foundation. And they're a third party builder, I guess, is what I try and say position as. Okay. Sorry, Laurie, just to add one point on top. I was actually

even counting the number of times that Pavel mentioned torn at the station. at Token 2049, which also came as a complete surprise. Because, I mean, yes, we did know about the to be appearance of Eucity on Ton, but then all the other news came as a complete surprise. And also, Jack mentioned that Baville announced the upcoming App Store, right? We don't have any details about it yet. And there's also an independent party and independent team that is building Telegram App Center.

They've been doing it for quite a while more than a year now. And it's now the main catalog. of Ton apps, and not only Web3 apps, by the way, Web2 apps as well. So for now, it still remains like the major point of discoverability, let's say, of different applications on Ton. We definitely highly recommend exploring it. And then just to add one more point on top of what Jack has already shared about the use cases.

So Telger Mini apps remain the major use case for using different Web3 elements at the Messenger And then we also learned about Telegram Stars as the new way of making in-app purchases inside Telgram Mini Apps. And the cool thing is that web to developers will now be able to learn more about crypto through actually withdrawing their revenue in Toncoin. So they ask their users to pay in Telegram Stars, but then they withdraw this revenue in Toncoin, which is by the same to. As Jack mentioned, the revenue sharing for community creators and owners of channels. It's just the same way to onboard more people into crypto, not end users here, but developers. And this is also something we're very much excited about. Yeah, hearing you speak, it sort of makes me think of Ethereum and then like consensus.

But the only difference is it's almost like you're more like a cosmos. and then there's all these like app chains or something. I don't know. It's like hard to explain. But anyway, one question that I was wondering is, you know, as of this moment, the 10 blockchain is very focused on Telegram as a platform. But do you have any plans to integrate with any other apps? It's a good question.

And how I'd answer it and what I'd say is, do other chains have any plans to integrate into anything other than Google Chrome extensions? Like, what's the difference there? telegram is an open platform with millions of users. Google Chrome is an open platform with millions of users. And so we choose to have, we have chosen and pursued a strategy of putting the front end of our applications inside of a messaging app. And it's a messaging app that will be around forever, we hope.

Telegram will continue to grow. Just like every other chain has relied on Google Chrome and Google Chrome. extensions as that third-party platform to put their front ends, right? So I would say it's more similar to that kind of relationship in that we want to put our apps in something that can be easily shared that make the apps incredibly viral and easy get started. And in Telegram with the mini-apps platform, they have made that very, very easy to do. and so that's why we encourage projects to launch there as like the primary surface to interface with the blockchain in a telegram mini app.

But that doesn't stop them from creating websites as well. In fact, the decks the dexes that we have now Stonfire, D-Dust, they have mini apps, but they also have a working website that you can navigate to from any web browser. So I guess it's it's more of a. platform choice versus versus like, I wouldn't say it centralizes Ton to be reliant on telegram because of that reason. Like it's just another surface which you can display your application in. And it makes it easier for application developers because they don't have to develop a whole app themselves that people then have to download.

Instead, you just hit one button in Telegram, boom. Mini app pops out and you can start using it immediately. no need to download anything, no need to navigate away from Telegram app itself. So we made those choices and those strategic design decisions because of the onboarding dilemma that crypto faces, right? It's just so difficult to get people to go set up an exchange account, fund that account from their bank account, then go and install a Chrome extension, then fund their wallet from from the exchange account, then start participating on the blockchain and learning all of

these little different steps and intricacies of each different chain. That just doesn't exist on ton, right? You get started with any of the apps. They don't require anything to get started, actually. And then later down the line, they're educated and taken step by step into creating a wallet, which is so simple in Telegram. is actually one touch, two taps into creating the wallet in telegram. And then once you've got that, it then lives in your settings menu forever.

And then most people will actually already have that by the end of this year. Maybe, maybe, yeah, should be by the end of this year. Most people on the planet with Telegram will already have the wallet in their settings menu. So it just makes onboarding a breeze. It adds virality to all of the applications. and that's why we're seeing so many users adopting ton applications now inside a telegram because it's a better design decision. Yeah, yeah, clearly there's like an ease of use advantage doing it this way.

And yes, even though I am in the US, I was able to access some of these features. Oh, good. One of the lucky ones. In a moment, we will talk more about the blockchain and some of its features and these mini-ups, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Pocodot is the original and largest layer zero blockchain with over 2,000 plus developers, and the anticipated Pocodot 2.0 upgrade will be a massive accelerator for the ecosystem, upgrading the infrastructure with eight times higher transaction throughput and twice as fast block times,

perfectly tailored core time for the needs of every protocol, trustless bridges internally and into Ethereum, Cosmos, Near, finance smart chain, and revised tokenomics and the implementation of a token burn to reduce inflation. Perfect for GameFi and Defi to build, grow, and scale with one of the most active crypto communities in the space. Pocodot recently announced a partnership with mythical games, bringing top games like NFT rivals with over 650,000 players and 43 million transactions, to pave the way for GameFi and the Pocod ecosystem. Get your Web3 ideas to market fast with economics that work for you. Think big, builds bigger with Pocodot.

Join the community at Pocodot.network slash ecosystem slash community. Back to my conversation with Elena and Jack. So let's talk about the ton blockchain. What would you say are the features that set apart this blockchain from some of the others? I think it's very, very clear. And once again, we've talked about it today as well already. And it's the distribution, of course. Like, yes, Tone is very, like, scalable.

thanks to it inherent architecture and then very fast because we've set the record for the speed. It was last year, last autumn. Can you give a few more details on the architecture and the speed? Yeah, so thanks to sharding technology, which is basically the main element of the architecture, like Donn blockchain is deemed one of the most scalable. And then we're definitely working on improving the scalability further on. And last autumn, I think it was something like October or in a. November, we set a record for the fastest, like being the fastest blockchain, achieving the

speed of 100,000 transaction per second. Jack, correct me if I'm wrong. So 104,700 transactions per second, it got to. Yeah. There was in an isolated environment, right? So we still need to definitely improve it, like for real life conditions. And this is something that, like, a lot of teams are working. on right now. But then the distribution, as Jack was saying, like, you cannot find any other place where so many people sit at the same time. So like 900 million monthly active users all in one single place, let's say ready to be onboarded into crypto. And this is exactly something we're focusing on. And then I just wanted to make a step back, Laurie, your question

about why we're focusing so much on telegram. Like, definitely we do not require every team in the tonne ecosystem to focus on a telegram mini app exclusively. That can be seen as an onboarding tool essentially, right? So developers can build a Telgram mini app to onboard people from Telegram and then direct them to the web app in the original sense. Because all our DFAP protocols, major defaerat protocols, including DECs, they started with the web app essentially, and they continue working on it just because people are used to getting

involved into Defi using their browsers, right, not a telegramini app. So, and there is one new case, which is Bloom, a hybrid exchange that is building, I mean, they're building a cross-chain, a multi-chain product, focusing on Ton majorly. But how they are onboarding the users now is through a very simple clicker game. There is no corporate. functionality in the app yet, right? But they're already onboarding like millions of users into the mini app through very, very simple, very easy mechanics. And then they're going to educate these people and onboard them into something more complex, like making transactions on chain, making cross-chain swaps, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So let's now talk about these

mini apps, or really the games, honestly, because that's what, you know, all the buzzes about. out on Telegram. So first, you know, I mean, you kind of gave a small overview, but, you know, you just mentioned that the first game that really took off on Telegram was Not Coin. And it's a clicker game, click to earn. But just for people who aren't super familiar, just explain, especially like in the U.S., you know, I'm sure you're aware, we don't have like full access to everything. So explain how not coin game works and why you think it took.

off. So it's one of my favorite topics to talk about because Notcoin was just so, so incredible at doing it. The reasons it very simply took off, viral mechanics, so they had a referral system from the very start and incentives. These two concepts, if you can master these as an application in Telegram, you will find millions of users and you'll find them quick. It's been proven multiple times now. I've no doubt in saying this. It's all due to the referral mechanics in Telegram in the Notcoin. It was this simple to refer.

I would go into the app. I would go to my friends tab. I would click Share with Friends. And then I could highlight my entire contact list. They would then be pinged a referral link, which would then earn me, not coins. at the time. It's something that every single one of the projects, tapped to one projects, has now copied that referral mechanic.

And it's incredibly powerful because that friend that receives that link just taps once and just straight into the gameplay. No need to mess around with a wallet. No need to set up anything. No need to download a new app. It's there open straight away. So viral mechanics is the first thing. And then incentives, obviously, with the,

Notcoin, it's not coins with another one which has grown even bigger than Notcoin, which is called Hamster Combat. It's Hamster token where you're acting as a CEO of your own crypto exchange and different to Notcoin instead of just tapping to earn. Now they include tap to earn, but then you can use those coins to buy things that make you profit per hour. And so the actual air drop of the hamster token is going to be based on the profit per hour, which is interesting because it's like, it's more of an engagement thing. How engaged are you in the game? Your profit per hour basically suggests that.

So, yeah, viral mechanics and incentives are the name of the game with Telegram mini apps. If you can introduce those and you can do them in a simple, fun way that keeps people engaged, keeps people coming back every single day, then your app will reach millions of users. It's as simple as that. And has been proven literally more than 10, 15 times now by different projects. So I did want to ask, though, just what you thought the quality of these users was. So honestly, the viral aspect where you were for your friends, like that reminded me of

Farmville back in the day on Facebook. Like, I don't know how old you guys are, but, you know, games. I used to play Farmville. Right. Like games took off on Facebook at a certain point. And it was very much a similar mechanism. But in this kind of instance, it seems like Notcoin could rack up a bunch of users who weren't necessarily going to stick around or who didn't really play on a regular basis.

And same with Hamster Combat. So Hamster Combat got 200 million users in the first three months, which the team is going to try to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for. It's YouTube channel gained over 10 million subscribers in one week. It's currently at 34 million subscribers. But as far as I understand, a lot of this is just because to earn some of the coin, you have to like go and watch these videos. So I feel like it's raising that question that we keep seeing over and over again of whether the users are the mercenaries or the missionaries.

And if they'll just go away the second, like a better incentive comes along somewhere else. So what do you think of that? What do you think is going to happen? I could answer, Elaine, at one point and then I'll let you take it away. But the projects have kind of two choices. They can launch and then they can expect users to come to their project or they can build a community and then work to convert that community and retain them to stay. Tom projects choose the latter, whereas most projects in Web3

have tried and chosen the former and not been necessarily as successful at onboarding a mass audience. It's a different strategy. It's building a community around the incentives first. And it takes a different tact from other airdrops in the past, where, as I've said, all of those steps that you needed to take in order to even start beginning to qualify for anirdrop, right, to get on chain, right? You needed to do all of those things, fund the accounts, to get the Chrome extension, all that stuff. It removes all of that.

You go straight into just doing some things of value for the project. Hampstead Combat, for instance, is a great example, because what has Hamster Combat done? Well, they've designed a system which sends people to subscribe to them on YouTube. What does that do for them? Well, it's obviously hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in ad revenue from YouTube, right? So there is an incredible thing going on here

in that the communities are being built first. They're getting incredibly excited and interested in the project and what they're going to do after the mining phase. The mining phase is just the one part of the launch. And instead of it being, there's been this massive thing in crypto, isn't there, like high, high, FDV, low flow situation with lots of these projects, like this has been a major meme of this cycle, right?

This is the opposite of that. There's no, this is like most of the tokens is getting airdrop to the community straight off the bat and it's up to the community to stay around and see if they like the token and like the project after the mining phase has happened.

So Notcoin has pivoted into now providing traffic to new projects so they can help, they can grow. And people, projects have to be, buy that traffic with knock coins. So now a knock coin has a utility in and of itself. And maybe projects will go down the traffic route. Maybe they'll go down a different route entirely. For instance, Bloom that Elena mentioned, Bloom is a different, different kettle of

fish entirely because they've already delivered the product roadmap. The tap to earn phase, they've already said that's a phase. And after that, we're going to be in exchange. So what they do and the utility they provide for the token is unclear as yet. But what they've chosen to do is build a fantastic community of now. I can't remember exactly the number of Bloom players, but I think it's like 30 million people. Probably more than 50. I mean, you see, we already lost count because there are so many of them

and so many of them have already reached like 50 million people. Exactly. And so they've chosen to go the route of. building the community first with exciting incentives and easy to use games. And then they're going to convert them into an exchange where they can then find value through the features of that exchange, right? So. Yeah, one question, though, is like a lot of people are surmising that some significant

percentage of these users are bots as well. So then in that case, you know, again, are you viewing that as like real activity or? I can take this one. So even judging from the real numbers, right, from like official statistics that, for example, the Notcoin team has released recently. So they announced that they had more than 30 million people playing the game, the off-chain game, the original one, right, before the TG and token listing, 35 million people, let's say. And then 11 million people claimed Notcoin, either on chain or on the off-chain accounts, like on centralized exchanges. And then, Notcoin now has more than 2.4 million on-chain holders.

So it's something around 6% of conversion rate from that off-chain player to an on-chain holder of not coin right now. I'm sorry, you said that was 6%. Yeah, if we count those like 2.4 million people who are holding not coin on chain now. Yeah, and then 11 million people claimed it overall. So it's one-third. Okay. I'm counting correctly.

Yeah, but we can stick to one-third, even like 30% conversion rate from off-chain. Or it's like 20% if it's from 11 to 2.4? No, no, wait. So 11 million out of 30, 35 million, that's one-third of people who claimed Notcoin, both on-chain and off-chain, because Not-Coin was launched on several centralized exchanges. and people could transfer it from the game to their account on centralized chain, right? So that's 11 million people. We can stick to one third.

That's quite a good conversion rate. And then we have another case, Katzen, one of the most successful and, like, I mean, popular play-to-airdrop games. They're not just a clicker game that basically implemented on-chain mechanics very early. So unlike Notcoin, that implemented on-chain only after the T-Gre. CETAZN was an on-chain game basically from almost the very start. And their conversion rate, according to one Condes article, is around from 6 to 7%, which is very high compared to the market average, which is once again a proof of what games on Taun can do even before the TG and the token launch.

right so if we judge from these numbers we're good definitely a lot of space for improvement but once again it's on the shoulders of the teams to you know create to set to design this complex roadmaps and to show their community that it's not over once the tg is over that they're going to continue building fun and entertaining games or i don't know launching trading bots or quest platforms or an e-commerce platform just as kattison plans to And from our side, from the side of Tom Foundation and other institutions in the ecosystem, we are committed to supporting them and the Open League is a case in point here, right? Just because we're rewarding their users to get involved into other products and protocols in the ecosystem. So for example, players of Notcoin or Gamy or Ketizen, they can now go to Dexas and earn like a lot of rewards and like points and money,

providing liquidity, for example, or getting involved into some activity on a landing protocol, Eva or on a perplex storm trade. And more and more activities are expected to appear very soon. So this is from our side. So this is definitely like a joint mission. It's very cool that we're attracting such a large audience that we have found this way of really making waves in the Wathaway space in terms of the numbers. But this is definitely on us to understand how to sustain this growth. And this is something we're working on right now. Yeah. So it's like you, you attract, you know, with these incentives and even if some percentage of them are bots, then, you know, from the real users that you get, you're working on creating incentives for them to keep going

and to like really build something from that base, even if the rest go away. Well, So, you know, as you mentioned earlier, USDT or Tether launched on TUN back in April. And already there's $730 million worth of Tether in use on that TAN blockchain. How is it being used here? So just before we touched on that, I wanted to just give the overview of the funnel here, because this is essentially what the whole thing is. It's a funnel. It's a conversion funnel for someone to be a Web 2 person, doesn't care about crypto,

to be a web three user cares and uses crypto, right? Like that's what I think most chains and most people in the space are here trying to do in their own ways. We're thinking about this from first principles in that if we have a bucket of 900 million users and we want to get them to do some kind of on-chain action, we can't force them to do it.

We need to show them the way. And so the tap-to-earn thing is an easy way to get people engaged, get them interested, put a little bit of crypto in their pocket through the airdrop. Then, as I said, right at the very top of the call, then you have this interesting thing when now I'm an owner of a token, an owner of a project. I'm interested and I'm excited about it.

Then we have the Open League, which is the next step. Or sorry, before the Open League, then we have USDT, which is now digital dollars. I think that I can send for free instantly to anyone in DMs globally, right? So this is a global product which I can now pay anyone using if I have their telegram. And when you say global, does that include the US or no? No, doesn't include the US because you... It's not, I mean, not through the wallet itself, not for the ad wallet in Telegram.

But you can definitely be like on-chain using any browser extension, Tonkeeper, MyTone wallet don't have all those self-custody wallets on the tonne day. Yeah, and just to make clear for listeners, hopefully most of them will know this if they've been listening to my show, but I'm assuming, and correct me if I'm wrong, that that's just because of what's been going on in the U.S. with regulatory issues, especially with the SEC. Is that, is that it? Like, if things were to change with the SEC, then would that block be lifted? Of course, yes.

The issue is that Telegram and Ton have been burned in the past by the SEC. No one has the desire for that to ever happen again. And so we're focused on the rest of the world for now. If the atmosphere and environment changes in the US, perhaps it would be reconsidered, yes. But for the moment, the wallet integration in Telegram is not available to US users by default and won't become so until there's a serious change in how the US is approaching regulations. there are more countries where like the wallet is not available, like it's not the US only. True.

There's a little sanction. It is as well like North Korea and others. Yeah, just to be 100% fair here. But a very important point here is that, Lori, you mentioned that like you being in the US, you cannot access some functionality. This only regards the wallet and this is important to mention, right? You can easily access any Telegram Mini app and to make, for example, purchases or get involved into some DFI stuff inside Telegram Mini.

apps, you can easily use any of the self-custody wallets on on-chain. Like once again, don't keep or not have my-ton wallet. It doesn't, I mean, you shouldn't avoid doing it. You should do it. This just works as with Metamask on Ethereum on any other chain. Yeah. Yeah. So, Jackie, we're finishing your final description.

Oh, thank you. Thanks for reminding me. So, yeah, so the wallet, the wallet and telegram, is like this amazing user experience. Like it's incredible to use. It pops up in Telegram. You can store your Bitcoin, you're not coin, your USDT there, and you can send all of that instantly for free to your friends globally.

So it's an incredible first use case for anyone to start using crypto, right? So when you go from a tap to earn and you don't necessarily want to get into some complex defy stuff, the wallet in Telegram serves as this initial first. step to get people interested in, oh, now I can send money to my friends in Telegram. And that's super easy to do. And that's the first initial step. And then we have the Open League, which is introduced to people very, very easily. It's actually inside of the self-custodial wallet inside of Telegram as well. So you can actually access the Open League pools. You can start getting involved in providing liquidity to some of the projects in the Open League

very easily through an Open League bot. And that's the last step, right? That's the, that's the DGEN step. So we've got the tap to earns for everyone. Then a portion of those people can convert to sending crypto globally in DMs super easy for anyone to do. And then a portion of those people will begin to start to use. use the more complicated D5 products on Ton. And this is the whole setup. This is the whole system. This is what we're trying to build.

And this is what the strategy is really to help enable this to happen at the foundation. We see this as being the most efficient route. And we see the ways we can optimize this whole funnel. And we work with the community teams and contributors to make this happen. and we see it happening and it's working. So we're excited to progress down this route. Yeah. And one other aspect that I heard about was that there's a trustless bridge for users

to bridge their Bitcoin to the TEN network that's in the works. And I wondered when you expected that to launch. And I was curious, like, what you thought might happen once Bitcoin holders can do that. I actually don't know if I can say anything about the launch date. it's it's too it's too too soon but it's certainly coming very very soon i'm super excited about it because this for me will be the next usd t level asset and the next thing that goes into that that pool of that of those users after tap to earn now then you have usd t and you have bitcoin and we believe that bitcoin can be a similar asset to usd t in the time

ecosystem in that it can grow extremely rapidly fast and we'll be helping it to do that as best as we can. And it can be extremely valuable to the defy ecosystem inside of Ton because now all of a sudden you've got this Bitcoin asset back to 100% bias Bitcoin on the Bitcoin chain that's trustlessly bridged over that is basically effectively like a better version of wrapped Bitcoin. It's a trustless version of wrapped Bitcoin. It's a trustless version of wrapped Bitcoin. right it doesn't it doesn't actually have an intermediary in between the bitcoin network and the ton network it uses the validators of the ton network itself to actually validate the the the bitcoin ledger itself so so there's no one holding the the keys it's all done through smart contracts so it's a totally

trustless and transparent bridge which makes it very different to many of the other bridges out there today and effectively makes it as close to real bitcoin as possible, but on Ton chain. So where I'm so excited about this to actually happen is the Defy ecosystem in Ton and how we can incentivize and get people to really make better use of their Bitcoin on Ton through the lending protocols, through the dexas that we've got through the liquidity pools and maybe even more complex cases than that. So yeah, super excited about that launch.

I can say it's coming quite soon. Definitely, definitely this year. We'll be very excited to see that come about. Yeah, yeah. It seems like Bitcoin users have a lot to look forward to generally because even in their ecosystem, they're going to be new ways for them to use their Bitcoin. I did want to ask also about a Fortune article

that ran about a listed activity that takes place on Ton, in which channels can sell everything from guns to heroin to stolen stimulus checks. And there was a criminology professor who was quoted as saying, quote, creating a telegram account is easier than creating a Facebook account. And he also said, telegram now is the place for criminals. So I wondered, so, you know, as we discussed, there's this ad network. People can earn money for ads on their content. So the article pointed out that criminals,

on Telegram could earn money for the ads on their content. They could be paid in crypto. They could also be paid in crypto for their illicit goods via the ton wallet. And I wondered how the foundation was thinking about these issues and whether there was any way to prevent or mitigate the use of the ton network or the ton wallet for this illicit activity. Yeah, I think that's a reasonable question. And it's a reasonable issue that we're going to need to tackle.

some point. Our focus is really, as I say, it's on this funnel and how we bring Web 3 to the masses. That's where all of our team is focused. And in terms of illicit activity and things like that, that happens on every single chain. You know, it's part and parcel of what blockchain is possible to use, right? it's possible to use it for that, for that reason. And that's why we have great partners like Elliptic, who helped to do the kind of criminal transaction, AI stuff that searches for these types of wallets and helps bring them to the authorities

and works with the wallet team in Telegram to really, like, to rid the rhythm of that activity. So in terms of the foundation, like we work on a decentralized ecosystem. So we don't necessarily have control over what goes on in any transaction on Ton. Ton itself runs by itself. And these things that happen there, they are an issue. But it's up to the project that's actually enabling that to stop them from stop. illicit activity, right? So if it happens in wallet, it needs to be wallet that's the one

dealing with that problem. It needs to be wallet's compliance team. And that's exactly why Elena pointed out earlier, like there's other countries outside of the US that abandon wallet, like for instance, Iran and other sanctioned countries like North Korea, where those, where they don't have any services and you can't use wallet there. So those teams themselves, the centralized teams are the ones that are working to rid themselves of that activity. And for us at the foundation, we're just focused on enabling the Web3 ecosystem. Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to point out as well that it's like as always a joint effort of different independent teams like us as Tom Foundation and then Telegram, of course,

like playing a major role here. And by the way, Telegram has always been like not really accused, but people always point out that risk about Telegram, right, from the very beginning, from the very inception of the messenger as such. And then the wallet team, and for example, project teams, they can work with special, like, marketing and PR agencies to run their ads campaigns. And of course, like, the moderation team would never allow any ad about some illicit product to be run, right? And it's on the shoulders of each team. And this is exactly, you know, the good thing about it, just because there is no single player are responsible for making sure such an activity never takes place.

It's a joint effort and we're definitely working on it hard. All right. Well, a ton obviously has seen a ton of traction this year. And as we have been discussing, there are multiple ways that this kind of flywheel has already started going. So what's next? What are you looking at as the next milestones you'd like to hit? Yeah, so we actually have very clear and very exciting and impressive milestones ahead,

like to reach 1 billion in TBL by January of 2025 and then 100 million on-chain users, on-chain wallets by January 2025 as well. How are we going to do it? In terms of TBL, Laurie mentioned the number. we're currently at more than 740 mil, something like that, haven't checked today, but it should be somewhere there. The thing is that, as I mentioned, this growth is obviously incentivized by the rewards we were giving to liquidative providers on DeXES, especially after the launch of use to tea.

And because the yields were super attractive, we were working hard on that program and we're continuing actually going into phase two right now. so it literally started today. We are going to continue rewarding users for holding their liquidity on the chain. And then also, you know, finding and coming up with new ways of where to direct this liquidity once the major incentive program is over, because, I mean, nothing can last forever and definitely rewards and incentives are going to finish at some point. And our goal now is to create a very thriving and a very multi-sided defa-lenscape so that people can see more opportunities or where to direct their liquidity inside the ecosystem, like lending protocols, perplexes, dexes, dexes, yield farms, liquid staking, whatever.

Like, we're working very hard with different teams, like with those existing teams on TON that have shown great progress. and then with new teams, we've just literally finished the hackathon. We managed to attract more than one, one, Jack, what was the number? Like 1,000 applications, I think, right? 1,000 teams have joined the mission. There's over 1,200 applications to the hackathon. Yeah, and so a lot of complex defy products are coming because we're very good with fundamental, so we're well covered in terms of like dexes and pro-dexes and lending

protocol, but then we definitely need more use cases. So this is exactly where the Open League as the major initiative is headed. So we're going to continue giving rewards, but doing it very reasonably and also learning from the experience of other chains who also repeated this journey in terms of attracting a lot of liquidity and then experiencing a large drop as well. So the major effort is now directed towards that not happening on the ton chain. And then a lot of community activities, of course. Jack, you want to cover that point. Yep. So in terms of the community now, we have a ton society. So ton society is our, at the moment, it's like a grassroots movement kind of structure. similar to how like sport is run in the UK where you have like these kind of small small regional

teams that work to find and scout for for people to to be to be a sports person right the idea is that we want to incubate in regional areas and local areas and run events get people active and engaged in blockchain in local spaces and do that globally in in in multiple regions we have nine regions now across ton society and we're expanding to five more in the next six months and that'll that'll mean more local events coming to people's areas and um it it will also mean like more decentralization we hope like we hope that more leaders will will come up through ton society ranks and in the end start start their own projects or start to contribute independently towards tons ecosystem goals so um so yeah ton society is is is massive for us and it's will be a

core focus of of of what we'll will be spending a lot of time on over the next six months ton society also was the was the guys that ran the open league hackathon and boot camps and boot camps and hackathon in uh october actually haven't announced that yet so There's a little bit of an alpha for people that stayed until the end. But yeah, there'll be another round of hackathons, which it was just so successful last time. And it's just so nice to see all of these teams that have been contributing to the tonne ecosystem now actually on the live stream that we had actually last Friday, where 23 teams kind of prepared and presented their projects to the ecosystem. and are in the running to win $2 million from that, right?

So those teams will go straight from that hackathon into the Open League and begin earning rewards if they win in the Open League and start to get users from the Open League as well. So the Open League really is working to get users into new projects. And that's why it's really exciting for projects because we've seen. that the amount of token holders for the projects in the Open League has increased something like 13, 15 times from when we started in March, I think there was about 120,000 jeton holders. So jeton is the token standard on Ton, kind of like ERC 20. And now since then, we now have like over 1.6 million jeton holders just of Open League tokens. right so so the the the the open league is really the catalyst for people coming in becoming a user of a new project

and it's really exciting to see it do that and it's increasing competition in the ecosystem so these new teams that come from the ton society will then move into the open league become major projects on ton and we've got that pathway on the developer side as well so it's not just the user side that we're building out. It's also the developer side and how we're moving developers on from becoming a Web 2 developer into Web 3 on Ton.

And yeah, so that's a big focus for us on the community. Yeah, honestly, just through this conversation, I feel like so much of what you guys are doing is like gamifying so many aspects of just being part of this ecosystem. So, yeah, it's interesting to see. and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Well, thank you both so much.

Where can people learn more about each of you and ton? Yeah, so for me, it's Twitter probably. And then we have, oh, my God, so many. Do you want to give your handle? Yeah, actually, I always forget how it's written. It's like Alenka, W3. It's also downspaced somewhere. We'll need to check.

Okay, well, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, just search for Elena on Ton and I think you'll find her. Yeah, probably, probably. Yeah, and then we have so many official channels. What's how we're handle on Twitter? It's like Ton blockchain, as simple as that. Yep, Tom blockchain. You can find us on Telegram at Toncoin.

You can find the Open League at League. And you can find me as well on Twitter at JBFX. dot me. And yeah, I'm always posting a lot about how to get started on Ton and really focused on introducing people to Ton on my Twitter. So yeah, super, super great chat. Thank you so much, Laura, for this. Hope your listeners and viewers will learn something today about Tom.

That's our goal. Well, I know I did, so I'm sure they did too. Well, thank you both so much. It's been a pleasure having you. Thank you, Laura. Thanks, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about Elena and Jack and the Tone ecosystem. Check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with all from Matt Pilchard, Wanner Randovich, Megan Gavis, Pamajumdar, and Margaret Korea.

Thanks for listening. Unchained is now a part of the Coin Desk Podcast Network. For the latest in digital assets, check out markets daily, five days a week, with host Noel Atchison. Follow the CoinDesk Podcast Network for some of the best shows in crypto.