2024 was a good year for crypto in general, with bullish market conditions elevating all blockchain ecosystems to new heights. But it was a particularly good 12 months for The Open Network (TON), whose breakthrough year saw new benchmarks set for active wallets, onchain activity, TVL, and much more.
If you faded TON this year due to lack of time or juggling too many other ecosystems, the good news is that it’s not too late: all signs point towards TON building on its remarkable progress and pushing on to even greater heights in 2025 with the wind at its back and a host of leading players propelling it forwards. Here’s just a selection of TON’s best moments in 2024 and a taster of where it’s headed next.
TON Broke All Records This Year
When you’re slugging it out in the crypto trenches, trading tokens, collecting memecoins, and earning yield, it can be hard to get a handle on the bigger picture: the seismic shifts that denote a network coming of age and achieving real product-market fit. Which is why annual reviews are so valuable in highlighting the benchmarks that attest to the state of play, from capital flows to growing onchain verticals.
In its end-of-year summary of TON’s growth, DWF Ventures, which has invested heavily in the TON ecosystem, has created a useful Dune dashboard that captures much of this activity. TVL grew from a mere $15M at the start of the year to an impressive $275M by year end, and now boasts around 750K daily users. More than 4M TON transactions are completed on any given day, with over 100K DEX trades completed every 24 hours. The TON token, meanwhile, is up a credible 158% for the year to date.
TON Finds Its Place in the Multichain Landscape
In 2024, The Open Network demonstrated its capacity to evolve from a promising blockchain to a robust ecosystem shaping the future of decentralized applications and retail entertainment. Originally conceptualized by Telegram, TON has become an independent force within the blockchain space, while benefiting from native integration of its mini-apps within the Telegram messenger.
From infrastructure improvements to adoption milestones, TON has leveraged its unique architecture and close ties with Telegram’s massive user base to drive adoption and innovation. TON’s layered design, including its shard chains and TON DNS, has proven instrumental in its scalability and efficiency. It’s also been helped by the maturation of sophisticated tooling that’s presented the best TON has to offer on a plate for web3 users, as embodied by Tonkeeper, the leading non-custodial wallet that has become the de facto gateway to all things TON.
The network was built to handle high throughput, and in 2024, it delivered on this promise. Its focus on minimizing transaction fees and confirmation times made it an attractive option for both developers and users. These efficiencies became a selling point for projects looking to onboard millions of users without encountering the congestion and high fees that have impaired other blockchains.
This year, TON also implemented several updates aimed at enhancing developer tools and smart contract functionality, further solidifying its appeal to builders. The integration of TON DNS, which allows for human-readable wallet addresses, simplified user onboarding and interaction with decentralized applications.
Adoption Metrics and Key Integrations
One of the standout developments of 2024 was the integration of USDT (Tether) as a native stablecoin on the network. Launched in May, USDT on TON reached a staggering supply of 1.43 billion within just seven months, cementing its role as a cornerstone of the network’s trading activity. By the end of the year, USDT accounted for over 25% of decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volumes on TON. This stablecoin adoption was critical for boosting transaction volume, user engagement, and liquidity across TON-based applications.
Telegram’s direct integration of the TON wallet into its app also played a pivotal role in the blockchain’s growth. With Telegram’s active user base exceeding 800 million, this move allowed TON to onboard users seamlessly, significantly lowering the barriers to entry for web3. By mid-2024, TON’s wallet downloads had crossed the 50 million mark, showcasing its appeal to a global audience.
Remarkable Growth in DeFi and dApps
TON’s DeFi ecosystem expanded significantly in 2024 with the growth of decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and liquidity pools. The inclusion of stablecoins like USDT fueled trading activity and provided the foundational infrastructure for more complex DeFi instruments. This trend was further bolstered by TON’s commitment to interoperability, allowing developers to create applications that interact with other chains while leveraging TON’s speed and cost-efficiency.
Additionally, TON witnessed a rise in decentralized applications focused on gaming and social finance. Leveraging its Telegram integration, developers introduced dapps that seamlessly blended social interactions with decentralized functionalities, enabling new user experiences that bridged web2 and web3. Of the $270M in TVL on TON at present, the lion’s share of all value is locked into such protocols as Tonstakers and the popular STON.fi DEX.
Key Goals in 2025
While TON’s performance in 2024 was impressive, there’s still work to be done. The multichain landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, and TON must continue to innovate to stay ahead. For instance, enhancing developer support and ensuring that tooling is on par with more established ecosystems like Ethereum will be critical.
Despite its impressive progress, TON’s ecosystem still lags behind some of its peers in terms of diversity and maturity of dapps. While gaming and DeFi have shown promise, further growth in NFT marketplaces, enterprise solutions, and data storage applications will be necessary to establish TON as a truly versatile network that caters to users of all stripes.
With plans to expand its ecosystem, attract more developers, and strengthen its DeFi offerings, 2025 should see TON achieve new KPIs. Its close alignment with Telegram remains a powerful differentiator, offering unparalleled access to a vast, global user base.
If TON can capitalize on its technical strengths and the continued adoption of its ecosystem, it has the potential to become one of the most widely used and recognized blockchains in the industry. While its TVL currently stands at 18x that of January, it’s down from its mid-summer peak of $740M. But with Telegram remaining the nerve center of crypto, and the conduit through which the bulk of all communication and trading flows, it has a USP that other chains can’t match.
The success of leading TON memecoins such as Notcoin and DOGS has shown that it can hold its own against other retail-friendly chains such as Solana. The onus is now on TON to build on this momentum and reach new heights in the coming year. No longer a sleeping giant, it’s a chain that’s discovered its place in the multichain world. And with Telegram’s unrivaled user base just a click away, you wouldn’t bet against TON becoming top dog in 2025.
