Original Author: Eric, Foresight News

Core Thesis: In May 2025, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced he would lead the development of the TON blockchain, triggering a strong market reaction. This move marks Telegram's official return to dominating TON after the regulatory conflict in 2020, with the core goal of turning TON into the payment and interaction infrastructure for the ecosystem of Mini Apps, AI tools, and more on Telegram.

Key Points:

a. Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced he would replace the TON Foundation as the core driving force of TON and become its largest validator. Following this news, TON's price rose from around $1.35 to $1.85 within two days, a gain of over 37%.

b. In 2020, the SEC charged that TON's Gram token was an unregistered security. Telegram was forced to abandon the project, which was then taken over by community developers and eventually evolved into the independent TON Foundation.

c. In 2024, TON exploded in popularity thanks to Telegram mini-games (such as Notcoin), with user numbers surging. At that time, the token's price broke $8, and its market cap exceeded $26 billion.

d. In April 2025, Pavel Durov announced that TON had completed the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade, increasing block generation efficiency by 6 times and reducing transaction confirmation time to about 1 second.

e. In early May 2025, TON's base fee was reduced to approximately $0.0005, and a new node implemented in Rust was adopted to improve operational efficiency and security.

On the night of May 4, Beijing time, Telegram founder Pavel Durov suddenly tweeted that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and become its largest validator. Notably, Durov had only mentioned TON in 7 tweets throughout the entire year of 2025, so this sudden announcement to "take over" TON caught many by surprise.

The ton.org website is also currently under maintenance, displaying only one sentence: "ton.org is now controlled by MTONGA (Make TON Great Again)."

As a result of this news, TON's price rose from around $1.35 to $1.85 within two days, a gain of over 37%.

In 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged that the Gram token, issued by the Telegram Open Network via an ICO in 2018, was an unregistered security. Telegram was forced to abandon the project, refund investors, and publicly announced it would cease participation after open-sourcing the code. Subsequently, two developers who had met at a Telegram programming competition, Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko, took over the project. They launched the community-driven project NewTON, inheriting the original TON code, maintaining nodes and the testnet, and gradually advancing the mainnet.

In 2021, the NewTON community upgraded the testnet to the mainnet and formally transitioned to the TON Foundation. The foundation was officially registered as a non-profit organization in Switzerland in 2023, supported by community contributors.

So, it has been six years since Telegram was forced to abandon TON due to regulatory pressure, until now when the Telegram founder voluntarily announced he would invest time and effort to drive TON's development. Over these six years, TON has experienced a complete cycle of ups and downs.

In April 2022, while the entire market was immersed in uncertainty, the TONcoin Fund, backed by investors such as Huobi Incubator, Kucoin Ventures, and MEXC Pioneer Fund, suddenly announced the launch of a $250 million ecosystem fund to support projects on TON. The TON Foundation soon followed suit with a $1 billion ecosystem fund to promote TON ecosystem development.

Following this, the TON ecosystem experienced a small explosion, with infrastructure like domain names, storage, and DeFi gradually being set up. However, it never generated much buzz until the emergence of Telegram mini-games.

In fact, from the early stages of TON's ecosystem development, it had already begun establishing connections with Telegram. Both official and third-party projects launched Mini Apps for cryptocurrency transfers or payments within Telegram. Their ties gradually tightened, and mini-games took this integration to a higher level. Prior to this, many on-chain games declined due to poor user experience, complex gameplay, and difficulties in promotion. In contrast, TON mini-games leveraged Telegram's user base of over one billion and spread virally through simple gameplay mechanics similar to "Match 3" or "Sheep Got Sheep."

During the mini-game boom, many teams' games accumulated millions of users within days. The most popular were Tap-to-Earn games like Notcoin. Tokens of numerous game projects surged wildly in a short period, creating many wealth opportunities. Meanwhile, the price of TON tokens broke $8 in mid-2024, with its total market cap exceeding $26 billion.

But this wave came fast and went just as quickly. As the mini-game frenzy gradually faded, TON lacked a second strong catalyst to sustain attention. Additionally, the founder's arrest by French authorities on charges of failing to effectively control illegal activities on the platform fueled concerns about TON's prospects, causing on-chain activity to plummet almost overnight.

Recently, TON returned to the market's attention, again starting with a tweet from Pavel Durov. On April 9, Pavel Durov posted that TON had completed an upgrade, becoming 10 times faster, with block generation efficiency improved by 6 times and transactions able to complete within one second. However, this was merely the first step in MTONGA's seven-step plan. The next step would reduce the already low transaction fees by another 6 times.

The improvement in chain performance came from the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade completed in April. TON's new consensus mechanism introduced a "streaming layer" to push state updates, replacing the previous polling mechanism. This reduced block production time to approximately 400 milliseconds, with transaction finality confirmed in about 1 second. The fee reduction Pavel Durov mentioned was also completed in early May, and TON's base fee has now been lowered to about $0.0005.

Furthermore, TON optimized its infrastructure in the first quarter of this year, adopting a new node implemented in Rust that significantly simplifies operations. It is suitable for institutional-level and large-scale deployment, offering greater security and modularity. The developer tool Builders Portal also launched version 2.0, with version 3.0 expected to be released in the second quarter.

Although the ultimate purpose of these changes has not been explicitly stated, it is clear that Pavel Durov aims to leverage Telegram as a traffic gateway, making TON the payment and interaction portal to support the development of Mini Apps, AI tools, and more on Telegram. Especially in the AI field, many "lobster lords" currently choose to control AI agents via Telegram to execute tasks. In the future, Telegram may not only be a tool for human-to-human communication but also a crucial human-machine interaction tool. Supporting low-cost, high-frequency transactions is the essential infrastructure needed to realize these visions.