TON blockchain bursts into 2025 with an ambitious technical development plan. The team plans to launch the major Accelerator mainnet upgrade, restart works on Payment Network, a.k.a. TON's Lightning Network, and introduce new developer and UX features.
Last year was a breakthrough year for the TON blockchain. At its peak in 2023, TON had around 200,000 monthly active wallets. By 2024, the number of monthly active wallets grew to 16 million, placing it second only to Solana. Additionally, $TON ranks among the top 20 largest cryptocurrency projects, bolstered by direct support from Telegram and its nearly 1 billion monthly active users.
With the increase in users, TON has significantly expanded its ecosystem. TON DeFi TVL grew 55x, rising from $13.5 million to $776 million at its peak. The project has also onboarded Tether’s USDT stablecoin to its ecosystem. In fact, due to the demand, USDT on TON recorded the fastest emission speed in Tether’s history.
However, what really made the TON ecosystem stand out among others was the launch of Telegram Mini Apps. Blockchain Mini Apps that are directly integrated into Telegram, with the potential reach of hundreds of millions of users, can become a game changer for TON adoption.
In 2024, Telegram Mini Apps surpassed 200 million total users, and with further development of that ecosystem, the possibilities of adoption here are beyond anything we can imagine.
If the exclusive partnership between TON and Telegram bears fruit, one should expect enormous shifts for both projects. While TON is getting users, Telegram is getting an ecosystem that transforms it from being just a messaging app to a super app where users can communicate, game, trade, place bets, take loans, and do many other things that would not be possible without TON.
In preparing for the change, the TON team has published its technical roadmap with goals for the first half of 2025. It is aimed at enhancing network performance and scalability, allowing smoother integration into the Telegram ecosystem as the network expands.
Scalability and stability will be key focus areas. The team plans to further optimize its sharding mechanism by dropping the requirement that every node checks all transactions.
As the second main improvement in the Accelerator upgrade, TON has introduced a two-tier validator system, where the collators propose blocks and validators verify them. Similar setups exist in Ethereum, Solana, and Polkadot blockchains.
Additionally, the team plans to improve developer tooling, APIs, and User Experience (UX) features such as human-readable commands. The 2025 roadmap also includes the release of a new version of TON’s smart contract language, TOLK.
In its original whitepaper, the TON team envisioned a payment channels-based fast money transfer infrastructure similar to Bitcoin's Lightning Network. The 2025 H1 plan includes testing the current prototype of the Payment Network and implementing several features.
Although TON Layer 1 focuses on scalability and decentralization, Layer 1 blockchains are not designed for and cannot handle high-frequency transactions. Payment Network L2 is designed to fill that gap and meet the needs of high-frequency traders and gamers who need instant response in Web3 games.
All of these improvements should help the TON blockchain handle the enormous growth it experienced in 2024 and continue to expand, delivering “the ultimate blockchain architecture” described in the TON whitepaper.
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