On April 19, The Open Network (TON) blockchain team, with the participation of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, made a number of announcements, including the release of USDT on their network and cryptocurrency payments to content creators. Durov called it a "real scenario of using Toncoin" for 900 million messenger users.
However, shortly after the announcement, the price of the TON token plummeted by almost 10%, according to CoinGecko. At the time of writing, the asset is trading at $6.4.
In a conversation with experts, ForkLog tried to understand the reasons for such a movement of quotations and the prospects of the TON ecosystem.
A huge boost for the ecosystem...
Telegram is the main channel for personal and corporate communication for a large part of the crypto community. However, until recently, payments inside the messenger were not convenient, the co-founder noted Allbridge.io Andrew the Great.
In his opinion, the launch of USDT on TON will be a "huge boost for the ecosystem", integrating an equally popular stablecoin into a popular messenger. This will also potentially free users from the need to use a variety of bots that crutchily add payment functionality inside Telegram.
"In general, Tether has strengthened its position, TON receives "legitimacy", since it is no longer just a project with founders from Russia, but a hub for transferring transfers to companies with American roots, which essentially control the stablecoin market," Veliky noted.
Roman Nekrasov, co-founder of the ENCRY Foundation, expects a huge influx of liquidity into the ecosystem and an increase in demand for the native coin, since it will charge a commission when conducting transactions in USDT on the TON blockchain.
The expert predicts the emergence and launch of decentralized protocols, staking protocols that will use the new stablecoin.
"Given the cooperation between TON and Telegram, we are talking about hundreds of millions of users who will receive convenient and in—demand tools for interacting with crypto assets," Nekrasov believes.
...or is there nothing conceptually new?
The concept of content monetization always contributes to the development of the social media ecosystem. This is rather a plus for the media component of the business, specifically TON will not benefit from such a function, Nikita Zuborev, an analyst at the BestChange aggregator, told ForkLog:
"Digital tipping is not such a huge market to affect the balance of supply and demand. Moreover, they have been implemented before — in fact, they are the same checks /vouchers in Wallet."
Similarly, the concept of paid channels has also existed for a long time. Forcibly transferring users from fiat to cryptocurrency will only create unnecessary inconveniences, the analyst notes.
In addition, USDT was present in the ecosystem before the official announcement of Tether in the form of a wrapped jUSDT token.
So the TON team did not offer anything conceptually new in the framework of the announcements that took place. Tokenization of stickers, according to Zuborev, is clearly not enough for \"investors to euphorically buy up the native token of the ecosystem\".
"Due to the lack of real success of TON, investors, overheated with expectations, reacted quite naturally," the expert summarizes.
Unloading of Large Toncoin Holders
All the announced positive news has already been included in the price, since they were talked about on the sidelines two weeks ago, explains trader Vladimir Cohen. He recalled the rule of buy the rumor, sell the news, calling the whole situation around the TON ecosystem in recent days "a huge HYPE."
\"It was discussed from all the irons that the TON token would cost $10-20. Clients asked me about this — I said that you need to sell on the news," the expert added.
There is a parallel here with the recent launches of USDT on the Selo and Algorand blockchain, which also did not lead to an increase in demand for tokens. In addition, Toncoin payments to content creators, on the contrary, will put pressure on the price, because sales will increase. Do not forget about the huge reserves of coins from the founders and the first miners.
"In a month, the price of Toncoin has almost tripled — from $2 in early March to $7.5 (up to $8 on some exchanges) in April. 300% growth in a month — naturally, this is an overheated market and in preparation for this news, major players were unloading into the crowd. This has always happened, and it happened this time," Cohen added.
Earlier, the TON developers presented a roadmap for 2024. It includes the introduction of gas-free transactions, the upgrade of Wallet 5.0 and the development of a new Teleport cross-chain technology. The team also announced plans to expand into the Asian market.