DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, May 22, 2023 10:00 AM UTC – The Open Network (TON), a revolutionary technology to unite all blockchains and Web2 internet into one open network, has unveiled the launch of the TON Accelerator Program, which will this year funnel up to $25 million into projects poised to make a sizeable impact in the growing TON ecosystem.

The funding, which is provided by TONcoin Fund, a $250 million ecosystem fund dedicated to supporting founders building on TON, will funnel investment into key projects in a variety of fields, with a particular focus on decentralized finance (DeFi). Each investment will be from $50,000 to $250,000 per project.

Funding will accompany partnership and mentorship among accelerator partners that include: Gotbit, hedge-fund and Market-Making company, a provider of trading and risk management solutions, Web3port, a developer of tools connecting Web3.0 startups and contributors to accelerate innovation, Tonstarter, the primary fundraising platform on TON, TEB, an incubator for Web3 developers based in South Korea, and Cypher Capital, a multi-strategy crypto investment firm based in the United Arab Emirates.

The pool of TON Accelerator Program partners is poised to grow still further as TON Foundation continues to set up strategic partnerships with major accelerators in the web3 space.

“We are delighted to unveil the TON Accelerator program as our ecosystem continues to evolve and attract new talent,” said Justin Hyun, Head of Incubation and Growth at TON Foundation. “This is the beginning of many different incubators which will be supported in the future. Funding forms part of our local hubs rollout strategy and our ecosystem will work to attract new developers as well as successful repeat founders, based across a variety of key global locations.”

“This is a program that is unique within the web3 universe today,” said Bill Qian, Chairman of Cypher Capital. "What the TON Accelerator program is doing is taking the incubator principle made famous within the Web2 ecosystem and refining it and evolving it using the best of Web3 protocols and ways of working. We are delighted to play our part in this next generation program.”

The initial pool of projects for the funding round will be geared towards projects that participated in Hack-a-TONx DoraHacks, a 2-month long virtual hackathon staged in collaboration with DoraHacks, a global leading hacker organization that acts as a bridge, connecting hackers to enterprise challenges and entrepreneurial ideas. Submissions are currently open: Projects must build on TON (i.e.support TVM & TON smart-contract language). In addition, projects should be MVP ready while requiring support in marketing, business and technology (proof-of-concept or prototype teams that require greater technical support should apply for earlier-stage grants).

Projects interested in participating in funding rounds can complete this form.

About The Open Network

The Open Network (TON) is a revolutionary technology to unite all blockchains and Web2 internet into one open network. It was born to empower billions of Telegram users with genuine Web3. Originally introduced by the Telegram team inheriting its freedom and openness ethos, it has been run as an open-source community project since 2020. TON’s layer-1 architecture is designed to scale up to 2 to the power of 32 workchains, each of which can be subdivided into up to 2 to the power of 60 shardchains. It can support millions of transactions per second near-instantly. Telegram has helped people stay connected. TON will transform the communities into economies. Learn more: https://www.ton.org