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26 May•
partners•12 min read

TON Partners Report, March & April 2024

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We are excited to share the key highlights and developments from TON Ecosystem for March and April 2024. Our ecosystem achieved major milestones, including announcements at the HK Web3 Festival and TOKEN2049 in Dubai, the successful completion of The Open League Season 1, and reaching a remarkable $200 million TVL. TON also became the fastest Layer 1 blockchain to achieve $100 million in native USDt issuance. With ongoing community engagement, innovative projects, and a strong focus on development, we look forward to achieving even greater things in the coming months.

Key Highlights:

  • Participated in the HK Web3 Festival with a series of announcements; you can watch the highlights here
  • Announced the launch of USDt-TON and new partnerships at TOKEN2049 in Dubai, featuring speeches from Pavel Durov, Andrew Rogozov, and Paolo Ardoino. TON also became the fastest Layer 1 blockchain to reach $100 million in native USDT issuance
  • Successfully completed The Open League Season 1, awarding over $3 million in TON to protocols that contributed to TON adoption
  • Reached a remarkable $200 million TVL milestone
  • TON Research was launched, the go-to forum for research within the TON Ecosystem
  • The ecosystem welcomed new backers: Mirana Ventures, Pantera, and Yolo Investments
  • STON.fi launched a Telegram Mini App
  • The newest TON Accelerator cohort was unveiled
  • TON Society partnered with HumanCode to bring DID to TON
  • Partnered with HashKey to list TON (TON/USD) on HashKey Exchange, effective May 9, 2024
  • TON was listed by DWF Liquid Markets
  • TON Memelandia was launched
  • TON network fees were reduced by 2.5x
  • Featured in Token Terminal research
  • Highlighted in Artemis Analyst of the Month
  • Announced $NOT token listings on ByBit (May 16), OKX Jumpstart (May 13), and Binance Launchpool (May 13)

Lightning Analysis:

On April 19, Telegram announced monetization of stickers and emoji NFT. Artists will receive 95% of the revenue.

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In response, we reached out to Fedor Skuratov, founder of Combot, a solution for turning Telegram groups into a full-fledged community. As part of the stack, Combot also has one of the largest collections of Telegram sticker packs.

Such independent catalogs currently serve as the best discoverability tool for sticker packs on Telegram, which are notoriously hard to discover (unless you are in a group chat where another party uses the stickers).

Given the Telegram announcement, we interviewed Fedor to get his thoughts about the future of sticker packs monetization:

Fedor, please introduce yourself to the community

A bit about me: I'm Fedor, often called Theo. For the past 15 years, I've been deeply involved with communities. In Russian-speaking regions, I'm recognized as a leading expert in community management. My colleagues and I also run an informal Association of Community Managers, which has been active for about 7 years, uniting 3500 top professionals. We're currently transitioning it into a formal NPO.

Since 2016, my partner Sergey Chernikov and I have been developing @combot service. Sergey now moves between Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Belgrade. Over the years, we've maintained our status as the top commercial chat moderation service, catering to significant clients ranging from Binance to individual protocols (including Doge chats). Currently, we serve 170,000 active communities. Our numbers might seem modest compared to free solutions, but it's understandable given our commercial orientation.

In our journey, we ventured into an advertising exchange model (which we wrapped up in 2018) and developed a chat top and stickers catalog without any commercial intent. Impressively, our sticker catalog now has about 310,000 unique visitors monthly, with 1.6 million views. Additionally, the chat top attracts 150,000 unique visitors and 300,000 views.

Now, due to personal and development reasons, we're overhauling Combot entirely. Our vision is to make it more community-centric, incorporating features like CRM and other essentials vital for advanced community management.

Since Combot is the biggest source of sticker packs discoverability, do you have any statistics around estimated current number of sticker packs in Telegram? What about any other statistics around users who come and download stick packs via Combot?

We are currently storing about 1.5 million sticker packs. Another directory (no traffic there, but while we were redesigning our top, we stopped collection) has 1.8 million.

These are all sticker packs seen in public chats. I think, taking into account those that have never been included in that context, I can estimate the total number at about 2-2.5 million.

Regarding our statistics, we had, as I said, about 150,000 users per month, mostly Russia and CIS, and 450,000 clicks on sticker packs in Telegram. I don't know what will happen now, we finally put the new catalog into production today (we cut down new features as much as possible, because we were working with SEO first of all, and the announcement of sticker monetization from Telegram was expected, so I didn't update the catalog with anything yet).

How do you think the sticker pack monetization at Telegram's level will impact potential issues around IP (for example, how can users distinguish between an official sticker pack from the Pudgy Penguins team versus a 3rd party artist)?

About the prospects of monetization. In online services, monetization usually affects no more than 10% of content creators, and there is a classic Pareto rule: 80% of monetization will be taken by the 20% of creators, of which 80% of profits will be taken by the 20% of the 20%. In the end, it will be mostly professional pack creators who will make money, not meme creators.

How will users react, and will they buy packs "just for use"? I don't know. I'm not sure. As an NFT with the potential for a subsequent sale – yes. But as a digital commodity? We'll have to see.

Are there ways for 3rd party teams to also monetize and benefit from this monetization? For example, could Combot become an aggregator of sorts or a way for people to sell off their sticker packs in a lump-sum amount versus listing it on Fragment and then earning commissions on an ongoing basis?

Yes, we can. And yes, that's how we want to develop the catalog.

Are there any sticker packs you personally really like?

I personally enjoy how Telegram users make sticker packs like the one below. They're like a moodboard.

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Our analysis and thesis is that the sticker packs rev-share will be commission based. So, for example, if an artist makes a pack and then lists it on Fragment (if Telegram chooses to monetize sticker packs via Fragment), whoever buys the sticker pack for say 1 TON via Wallet, 0.95 TON (95%) will go to the creator.

However, the risk to the creator is that the sticker pack does not actually get popular (enough) and/or take off due to the artists' lack of fame. In theory, if the artist expects to make revenue for ~2 months post-launch (i.e., during the first 2 months of heavy promotion of their sticker or brand via Telegram Ads or social viral mechanics), and then subsequently it gets overshadowed by newer launches and nobody buys it anymore, it might actually be in the interests of the artist to sell it to a professional group that buys out the sticker pack in lump sum (with some forecasted cash flow which is discounted back) and take the up-front payment.

The professional group that holds thousands of such stickers can then use their marketing/KOL/X army to massively pump the meme/sticker and engage in social viral mechanics in order to derive revenue above and beyond what they paid to the artist in a lump sum.

It would also be very interesting if Fragment itself could develop an auction capability for artists to list their sticker packs and for regular users to be able to purchase the rights to the stickers and, therefore, the future revenue stream. Again, this could result in a robust marketplace dynamic where investors who have an eye for art can spot up-and-coming artists as well as their sticker packs and buy out their future revenue stream in return for an up-front lump sum investment.

It also remains to be seen how Telegram will work with issues of copyright and copycats especially for memes/brands that are already well-recognized (such as Azuki, Pudgy Penguins, etc.).

One thing is for sure: Telegram sticker packs are a blue ocean waiting to be explored.

USDt-TON

Here is a snapshot of where USDt on TON is available:

Telegram Wallet Updates

  • Monthly Active Users of Telegram Wallet now exceeds 6.6M
  • Monthly Active Users of TON Space now exceeds 6M

TON Ecosystem By The Numbers

Key Metrics

  • Total accounts: 16.9M (+62% MoM)
  • Total active on-chain wallets: 3.5M (+25% MoM)
  • TVL: $169M
  • Fees: $4.2M

DEXs on TON:

  • Ston.Fi
    • MAU (with on-chain interactions): 266K (+70% MoM)
    • DAU (with on-chain interactions): 24K (+76% MoM)
  • DeDust.io
    • MAU (with on-chain interactions): 130K

GameFi on TON:

  • Catizen
    • Total in-game users: 4M
    • DAU: 776K
    • On-chain transactions: 3.7M
  • Gatto
    • Total in-game users: 1.1M
    • MAU: 350K
    • DAU: 25K
  • The Pixels
    • Total in-game users: 2.5M
    • DAU: 450K
  • XPlus
    • Total in-game users (including iOS app): 1.3M
    • MAU: 600K
    • DAU: 300K
  • Maincard
    • Registered users: 270K
    • MAU: 30K

TON Society In the Wild

Over the two months, we hosted a ton of in-person events across the globe.

Highlights:

  • TON Society CIS
    • Moscow
    • St. Petersburg
  • TON Society Europe
    • Prague
    • Lisbon
  • TON Society Hong Kong
  • TON Society India
    • Bangalore
    • Delhi
  • TON Society Korea
  • TON Society London
  • TON Society Turkey
  • TON Society UAE
  • TON Syndicate
    • Belarus
    • Finland
    • Georgia
    • India
    • Nigeria
    • Serbia
    • Sri Lanka
    • Taiwan

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For our upcoming events, please see the new TON Society calendar.

TON Foundation New Hires

  • Pavel Lesyuk - QA Engineer (EcoDev)
  • Eugene Anisei (part-time to full-time) - TON Society Europe Lead (Growth)
  • Viktor Pjadkin - Content Manager (MarCom)
  • Aliaksandr Diakou - Developer (EcoDev)
  • Miron Puzanov - Ecosystem Manager (EcoDev)
  • Daniela Prokofieva - Campaign Manager (MarCom)
  • Harvey Kim - Korea Lead (Growth)

Developer Updates

Telegram Apps

Disclaimer

  • TON Partners Update, where applicable, strictly reflects authors’ own views, ideas and opinions. It is not a production of The Open Network Foundation, nor is it affiliated with any broker/dealer or registered investment advisor.
  • Conduct your own due diligence, or consult a licensed financial advisor or broker before making any and all investment decisions. Any investments, trades, speculations, or decisions made on the basis of any information found on this report, expressed or implied herein, are committed at your own risk, financial or otherwise.
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