TON Growth Plan
The TON Foundation plays a critical role in overseeing the ecosystem and driving development. As a non-profit organization, its mission is to foster innovation for the benefit of the entire TON ecosystem. Since 2022, the foundation has secured a $90 million ecosystem fund and established a new 30 million $TON community rewards program (currently valued at around $228 million). Several investments and grants have already been made to promote the growth of native dApps within TON.
Their accelerator program has gained significant attention since March. Out of the 82 proposals approved on Questbook, 17 are related to gaming or gaming infrastructure, making GameFi one of the best-represented sectors. TON recently announced a new $5 million TONX Accelerator program to further advance its aggressive growth strategy.
Additionally, the TON community recently announced an eight-week “Open League Hackathon” held in 13 real-life (IRL) locations. Global teams will have the opportunity to participate, compete for up to $500,000 in project rewards, and interact with TON experts, learn, and showcase their skills. Over $2 million in total prizes will be awarded to participating teams, providing significant incentives for participants.
Community incentives are a key part of TON’s long-term growth strategy. Most programs last 2-4 weeks and are designed to be highly accessible, attracting the maximum number of participants. So far, more than $40 million in TON has been distributed, with many more programs underway or planned. A total of $22.4 million has been distributed in airdrop rewards, liquidity boosts, and Open League battle rewards, with 17% ($3.9 million) allocated to games.
Gaming Success and Market Domination
Games within TON have achieved remarkable success, dominating the App Battle Leaderboard. TAP Fantasy secured second place in the Beta season and won in the subsequent first season. Seasons two and three were won by Catizen, a game developed by a Chinese team with prior experience in WeChat mini-games. Catizen is currently aiming for its third consecutive victory, followed by Yescoin and SquidTG, completing the top three games on the leaderboard.
Gaming is one of the primary ways TON attracts meaningful and sustainable users. Teams like Catizen have generated over $10 million in revenue through in-game purchases over the past three months, proving that teams with monetization expertise can convert hype-driven user metrics into meaningful revenue streams.
While Catizen quietly builds its empire, Hamster Kombat and Notcoin have been in the spotlight in recent weeks. Hamster Kombat has garnered over 9.9 million followers, with each post averaging more than 2 million impressions, and has expanded to 14.2 million users in just 77 days. Meanwhile, Notcoin launched its token through Binance’s Launchpool in early May, boasting a fully diluted value of $14.5 billion, 2.44 million on-chain holders, and 40 million activated users.
Despite these impressive figures, teams developing on TON need to demonstrate their ability to run successful live operations and convert free users into paying users rather than relying on an endlessly inflated token rewards strategy. Attracting users is the first critical step, but retaining them requires regularly providing fresh content, especially in an attention economy like Web3.
Additionally, while bot operations are cost-efficient, they could quickly become a problem. Without effective countermeasures, the prospect of financial rewards may attract a flood of bots, diluting player rewards and creating additional sell pressure.
Gaming and User Acquisition (UA)
For any mobile game studio, user acquisition (UA) has become a key metric. In a highly competitive industry with thin profit margins, expanding the user base is crucial for sustainable success. According to CNBC, the gaming industry’s operating profit margin is slightly below 6%, forcing companies to cut costs in every possible way.
There are over 300,000 game apps on PlayStore and over 225,000 on the AppStore. With around 2.2 billion mobile gamers globally, competing against such a massive number of games has led to a sharp rise in user acquisition costs. In 2018, the cost per install (CPI) was about $1.24 for iOS and $0.53 for Android. Just six years later, these costs have risen to $2-5 for iOS and $1.5-4 for Android.
According to Sensor Tower, in 2020, 28,000 mobile game publishers earned less than $1 million in revenue, collectively accounting for $834 million (2%) of the total AppStore gaming revenue. In contrast, 940 studios that earned more than $1 million contributed $3.4 billion (98%). This shows the industry’s “winner-takes-all” nature, putting small studios at a significant disadvantage if they cannot afford large-scale user acquisition budgets. Considering that around 60% of gaming time flows to games that have been around for over six years, it’s no surprise that 83% of mobile games fail within three years of launch. For new mobile studios hoping to enter the industry sustainably, an efficient user acquisition strategy has become a matter of survival.
Telegram’s Stars and TON’s Gaming Ecosystem
To assist developers in the increasingly competitive mobile gaming market and improve the transition from Web2 to Web3, Telegram recently introduced Stars, a native in-app purchase currency that can be easily integrated into bots and mini-games. Users can now buy items from their favorite games using Stars, compliant with AppStore requirements, unlocking deeper player spending and more stable revenue streams for developers, who receive 70% of the in-app purchase (IAP) revenue.
By subsidizing ad costs for Stars purchases, Telegram enables teams to reduce their customer acquisition costs effectively, making Telegram and its Web3-friendly user base an ideal platform for Web3 marketing. Moreover, Stars can be converted into $TON, effectively connecting them to broader liquid markets. As long as TON tokens remain healthy, this should ensure stable and efficient payments for developers.
Given the rising costs of mobile game user acquisition and Telegram’s vast open crypto-friendly user base, TON has the potential to become a major gateway for Web3 games seeking to onboard new users into their ecosystems. Although the tech stack limits the scope of games developers can build for Telegram, the large user base, low platform development costs, and frictionless environment for users make it a strong complementary component in the Web3 gaming ecosystem.
We can expect established game projects to utilize this gateway in the near future. Telegram’s unique position makes it an attractive platform for top mobile game user acquisition. By building experiences on TON that can be accessed with minimal friction and low player engagement costs, teams can cast a wide net for users. Distributing small rewards within games that offer real utility can effectively introduce and expose new potential players to their ecosystems.