TON chain announced its roadmap for the first half of 2025, with a focus on smoother transactions with no bottlenecks. The chain announced the changes, as it tries to spread more widely among US-based traders, gamers, and crypto users.
TON chain announced its roadmap for the first half of 2025, focusing on more scalability and overcoming bottlenecks. The announcement arrived just days after the TON chain became the go-to network for the Telegram chat app, with the TON token being the main payment tool. The changes mostly affect TON’s relationship with developers, aiming to revive the chain. In the last few months, TON lagged in terms of code commits and engaged core developers, as seen on data from Token Terminal.
Despite being a high-speed network, TON will explore the creation of L2 for payments, as well as sidechain research. TON has shown it can be overwhelmed by token activity, such as airdrops or attempts at high-speed trading. The H1 roadmap will plan to deal with those bottlenecks while retaining the core features of TON.
The TON Core team is bringing BIG updates in H1 2025! Here’s a sneak peek:
🔹 Huge "Accelerator" Kernel update on Mainnet
🔹New tools for validators
🔹Revamped Toncenter API (Actions, Pending, Emulation, Domains)
🔹 UX improvements + collab with top community products
🔹 Payment… pic.twitter.com/vDtg6w6HVn— TON 💎 (@ton_blockchain) January 27, 2025
Following the news, TON recovered slightly to $4.93, closer to its usual range. TON is mostly used for passive staking, expecting higher demand after becoming the main payment tool for the Telegram advertisement economy. TON’s open interest recovered to $161M after the latest market correction, with a 70% dominance of long positions.
The first big change will be the Accelerator upgrade, which will contain mostly changes for validators and nodes, splitting the network load more efficiently. TON will also upgrade its TOLK 1.0 programming language for improved smart contract interfaces.
The third main goal for H1 would be a TON BTC bridging mechanism, which would allow moving coins onto the new network with minimal friction. The feature is developed by RSquad, a third-party team and partner to TON.
TON to develop Payment Network as a L2 chain
The TON chain is already working to handle stablecoin and TON token payments. The Payment Network is one of the earlier ideas for the development of the chain, serving as a scalable L2. Payment Network can be used for micro-commissions between users and simple asset swaps.
Currently, TON has Payment Network in Beta, with more testing, expected to add jettons and more swap opportunities. The TON main L1 has not yet decided on its scalable technology, so side chains and L2 are still in the testing stage, with the intention of easy bridging to any part of the TON ecosystem.
Most other upgrades will be targeted toward developers, including a competition series. Other upgrades will involve the TON wallet, with improved mnemonics account creation. The TON Foundation also plans to hold a series of workshops for validators, despite most of them being anonymous, to train them better in the new technical solutions for the network.
TON aims for sustainable growth after the age of airdrops
TON has achieved a baseline of around 2M weekly active users while producing over $2M in fees for the last quarter of 2024. For TON, the season of airdrops and tap-to-earn was the time of the biggest fees, exceeding $6M.
TON continues to have expenses of over $12M, in the form of incentives to nodes and validators.
The chain also carries peak liquidity in native stablecoins, with over 1.41B minted. Otherwise, the DeFi sector on TON is small, with just $292M in total value locked. Even after the end of airdrops, TON reached a record number of users, growing to over 113M in January. TON reaches a fraction of Telegram users but plans to expand its presence with more utility as a payment chain.
The TON chain carries its own economy of meme tokens and more recently, TON-based versions of top AI agents. The chain adds several thousand new tokens each day, tracking the trends from other networks. For now, most meme tokens last only a short time, while the TON ecosystem still relies on NOT, DOGS, HMSTR, and other tokens from the peak airdrop season.
TON remains closely tied to Telegram channels, especially those tied to crypto trading. Hamster Kombat remains the top channel with 45M subscribers, while the Zoo Family crypto channel has been the fastest-growing in the past month.
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