Crypto Evolution Series, Issue 5 | OKX Ventures, LongHash & Anagram: The Future of Web3 Social and Consumer Sectors

Amid high volatility, it’s crucial to gain clearer insights into market cycles and identify emerging narrative trends for the future. As innovation storytellers, investment institutions are typically at the forefront with their keen sense of perception. With this in mind, OKX has launched Crypto Evolution, a series inviting leading global crypto investment institutions to discuss topics such as market cycles, the direction of new narratives, and trending niche sectors, offering their insights to spark further discussion.

The following is the fifth installment, where OKX Ventures, LongHash Ventures, and Anagram collectively explore the future development of the Web3 social and consumer sectors. We hope their insights and reflections will inspire you.

About OKX Ventures

OKX Ventures is the investment arm of leading crypto exchange and Web3 technology company OKX, with an initial capital commitment of USD 100 million. We focus on exploring the best blockchain projects on a global scale, supporting cutting-edge blockchain technology innovation. OKX Ventures also works to promote the healthy development of the global blockchain industry, and invest in long-term structural value.

Through our commitment to supporting entrepreneurs who contribute to the development of the blockchain industry, we’re helping to build innovative companies while bringing global resources and deep experience to blockchain projects.

About LongHash Ventures

LongHash Ventures specializes in bootstrapping Web3 ecosystems. Its venture funds invest in early-stage Web3 protocols, and the LongHashX Accelerator partners with ecosystems and protocols to accelerate early-stage founders.

About Anagram

Anagram is a modern institution for novel technology. The entity leverages human and financial capital to help bring the ownership economy to the masses.

How does the development of SocialFi in this cycle differ from the previous one?

OKX Ventures (Researcher)

We see that this round of SocialFi focuses on memecoin trading and the development of casual games based on high-distribution protocols (like TON). This differs from the previous cycle that focused on NFTs, which emphasized tools for consumers and creators. Many major brands (such as LVMH and Nike) attempted to explore narratives in the crypto space but ultimately couldn’t adapt to the hyper-financial culture of the crypto community.

However, with the success of memecoin trading and so-called casino-type decentralized applications (DApps) like Polymarket, we've seen how crypto DApps tailored to hyper-financialized applications can achieve positive outcomes. Other trends include the following.

From content monetization to social monetization

Early SocialFi projects, like Steemit and Mirror, incentivized content production, but it was difficult to control quality, leading to an influx of low-quality content. This cycle introduced new experiments, most notably friend.tech, which monetized social relationships. Each user becomes a "Key" asset, creating a new form of asset through social identity, making everyone a potential investment.

Pump.fun builds on the liquidity-focused innovations of friend.tech, pushing forward the narrative of low-liquidity AMM models and effectively linking onchain assets between DEX and CEX. Compared to friend.tech, Pump.fun focuses more on combining liquidity models with social interaction, tightly binding asset liquidity with social activities.

Meanwhile, UXLINK innovates through its Link to Earn model. Here, users earn rewards by contributing their social network data, addressing the shortcomings of content-only models. The project also emphasizes the value conversion of social relationships, avoiding the pitfalls of short-term financial incentives.

Balancing decentralization and financialization

Projects are becoming more flexible in their degree of decentralization. For example, social platforms like Farcaster emphasize user ownership of social relationships and content, but they’re not fully decentralized right away. Their innovation lies in allowing users to control their social data while leaving room for future onchain operations. Their focus is more on community-driven initiatives.

Meanwhile, TON and Telegram take a pragmatic, Web2.5 approach. The projects integrate mini-games and other embedded applications into everyday social experiences, enhancing the financial aspect of social identity. This method gradually introduces onchain activities, reducing the transition cost to Web3 while leveraging existing platforms to boost user trust and experience.

Additionally, there's a trend of intellectual property (IP) being transferred onchain, driven by the rise of user-generated and AI-generated content.

LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui)

In this cycle, the infrastructure is ready to support mass adoption.

Looking at scalability, technologies including rollups, alt Layer-1s, and data availability layers have reduced the cost of onchain activities to just a few cents or less. Innovative rollups like zkSync use state differences to optimize data costs further through aggregation.

Meanwhile, protocols like chain abstraction and intent-based protocols allow assets and credentials to be easily recognized or used across chains, supporting interoperability. For example, to send tips on SocialFi, the Particle Network can be used to aggregate assets across multiple chains and send them seamlessly in one step.

The user experience for accounts is another influential factor seen this cycle. Features like account abstraction, multi-party computation, and social logins enable users to interact with Web3 without managing private keys or gas fees. Today, the Safe protocol has secured billions of assets, rivaling traditional banks like Binance and Robinhood, with a peak value of over $120 billion. With account abstraction, users can log into SocialFi apps with session keys and authorize multiple onchain interactions without logging into their wallets each time.

Anagram (David Shuttleworth)

The SocialFi space has undergone significant changes since the last cycle. In particular, the amount of raw experimentation and novel mechanism design taking place. During the last cycle, builders were generally focused on replacing existing legacy systems. Lens, for example, was launched to function fundamentally as the decentralized version of the X social platform. Other applications like Farcaster followed a similar path. This cycle, however, many projects, including Lens and Farcaster, expanded beyond simply replacing existing structures and began to implement more engaging features, such as Farcaster’s Frames.

Much of this was enabled by advances in the underlying blockchain technology being used. For example, Lens used ZKsync to launch the Lens network, further building out its capacity to fundamentally shift the way social networks operate. Ethereum rollups have given the network and the protocols building on it the ability to scale more optimally and handle millions of transactions in a cost-efficient way. This type of unlock was largely not available during the last cycle, and was underexplored until now.

Meanwhile, features like Farcaster Frames allow users to instantly and seamlessly interact with various applications that run directly on the Farcaster feed. It’s also given developers a way to distribute their applications in a “one-click” way. Again, this sort of innovation and user experience wasn’t available during the last cycle.

Shifting towards a more broader application, Solana recently launched Actions and Blinks, which in short connect Solana to the entire internet. The technology allows users to perform a variety of actions such as swaps and payments on any website or application (such as X or Reddit). At a high level, these are new primitives that transform onchain actions into shareable links. Overall, the design space has become wide open — much more so than in the previous cycle.

Another interesting area of innovation seen within SocialFi is the blending of social with speculation. Friend.tech and Fantasy.top are two prime examples of this. Both applications created a social element along with a certain layer of connectivity and engagement with their user base where they could speculate on many different parameters, such as the popularity of a post on X. Friend.tech, for instance, enabled users to monetize their community and trade “Keys” which unlocked different functions, such as exclusive in-app chat rooms.

Meanwhile, Fantasy.top lets users collect and trade NFTs linked to certain crypto personalities on X. While many prominent projects in this vertical struggled to sustain user activity, experiments such as this weren’t seen during the last cycle, and provide a useful guide for what lies ahead.

What’s the current state of development in the Consumer Apps space, and where do they intersect with social applications?

OKX Ventures (Researcher)

The market is transitioning from a traditional trust-based model to a smart contract-driven one focused on contract execution. This shift is making the consumer apps space more inclusive, moving away from being dominated by large players (known as whales) and appealing to a broader audience.

Users are now seeking more than just platforms for quick gains — they want consumer applications that meet everyday needs. Previously, complex blockchain operations and difficult interfaces were barriers. Developers have simplified these processes, realizing that users don't need to understand blockchain technology as long as they experience smooth usability.

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are becoming a new distribution channel for crypto apps, providing an intuitive, Web2-like experience while avoiding the 30% fees imposed by traditional app stores.

In payments, crypto payment experiences are becoming more mainstream, as seen with partnerships between Venmo, PayPal, and ENS, as well as EtherFi's own credit card being compatible with Apple Pay. The development of Web3-native devices, such as Solana's Saga and the release of Seeker, represent advancements in mobile wallets with features like seamless crypto payments and built-in seed vaults. The combination of hardware, payments, and distribution helps solve complexity issues and accelerates user participation in the network, easing the transition of crypto apps into the mainstream.

Whether entertainment-based or finance-oriented, consumer apps eventually intersect with financialization. Once ownership elements (such as NFTs or tokens) are introduced, the financial aspect of an application should become clearer. Entertainment-focused apps, like casual games and memecoin trading, attract large-scale participation through speculation, while serious DeFi applications usually emphasize asset growth and preservation.

The fusion of consumer and social applications goes beyond buying and selling crypto assets on social platforms. Many crypto apps now focus on social elements. Projects like Polymarket and Pump.fun demonstrate that community interaction and social engagement play a crucial role. The power of social elements binds users to platforms, as people naturally enjoy interaction and sharing their opinions on events.

Imagine memecoins not just as speculative assets but as reflections of social dynamics and societal trends. People engage with memes around specific events or topics. This is also crucial for DeFi. Many past DeFi applications relied on whale trading volumes to attract users, whereas socialized applications now rely on interactions and community-driven liquidity and participation.

Many agree that successful applications must integrate social elements — not just through social media platforms but by capturing user interactions at the front end to build network effects. Achieving this is relatively simple. Users must interact through a platform’s front end to generate revenue. Without a front end, competitors can use the same protocol to siphon away users. Familiarity, habits, and user dependencies form the moat for apps, while front end user networks drive everything. Just as financial liquidity is essential for launching a protocol, user liquidity is key for launching an app.

Crypto's composability allows smart contracts to be called from anywhere, making protocols extensible and interoperable. This flexibility means embedded apps can directly interact with onchain functionalities. Imagine prediction markets appearing in spaces where people discuss news? Meanwhile, SocialFi mini-apps could enable users to stake tokens, follow trades, or purchase fan tokens. And, governance mini-apps might allow members to propose, collaborate, and vote — all relying on a "proxy front end." Onchain financial transactions can be integrated into familiar social structures, making them engaging and interactive. That could involve messaging traders on a DEX, or competing with friends’ portfolios.

Generally, there are two main paths for the adoption of consumer apps: optimizing existing products or creating new demand. The first involves refining the user experience to elevate products beyond others in the market. This involves using underlying technologies for incremental improvements and adopting tokens to influence community behavior and experiences. The latter focuses on identifying unmet user needs and creating new market spaces, similar to what Twitter (now X) did when it redefined social media. Although the latter holds higher alpha potential, the former is equally essential. If users today experience long wait times or cumbersome processes, it prevents the emergence of entirely new demand-driven applications like X.

Conversely, products like collateralized lending can develop on existing demand — even if operations are complex, those in need will proactively overcome challenges. However, for demand-creating apps, users won’t fill in the gaps themselves. As a result, focusing all efforts prematurely on UI or UX may not be the best choice. Finding the target users will naturally lead to appropriate suppliers or partners (such as underwriters) to optimize product services.

LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui)

Consumer apps, as a B2C use case, can be defined as any application developed for end users. From this perspective, social applications can also be considered consumer apps. By enhancing the user experience, social applications have lowered the barriers to creating seamless consumer apps. Outside the Web3 ecosystem, Telegram has also become an important distribution channel. With 950 million users, Telegram is the most popular instant messaging app in the crypto space, and bypasses Android Apps and Apple App Store approval processes and fees.

Both consumer and social apps have strong incentives to attract new users by creating seamless user experiences and accumulating value through real-world consumer behaviors. For example, Catizen has 34 million users and generates over $25 million in revenue. Leading gaming ecosystems like Ronin and YGG also have millions of users actively spending time and money on Web3.

TON has showcased how blockchain can offer new opportunities for monetization, engagement, and innovation by supporting small and medium Web2 game developers. By introducing tokenized economies, they create incentive systems for content creation and consumption, fostering participation through digital ownership. The integration of Web3 consumer products with Web2 platforms like social media and casual games presents challenges, mainly in simplifying the Web3 experience for Web2 users. While Web2 excels in user-friendly interfaces, minimizing the complexity of Web3 is crucial to encouraging adoption. Another potential lies in decentralized governance models, where platforms and games grow through community input, fostering user loyalty and democratized ownership.

Anagram (David Shuttleworth)

Consumer and social applications are becoming more robust and are starting to provide users with real utility. Today, these applications come in many different forms. This includes everything from prediction markets like Polymarket and token launchers like Pump.fun, to social platforms like Farcaster. If executed correctly, these applications can be a powerful driver of adoption and revenue.

Over the past year, consumer applications have generated increasingly significant fees for the protocol itself as well as their underlying network. These applications also serve as beacons to attract new users, increase liquidity, and drive demand for blockspace. They can also have a pronounced effect on a network’s broader DeFi ecosystem. For example, Pump.fun has generated over $260M in fees since March. This alone places it as one of the more profitable protocols in the entire space. Perhaps just as interestingly, consumer apps have been a boon for other DeFi applications on Solana such as Raydium (Pump.fun’s adjacent DEX), which has gone on to experience all-time levels of activity, handling $28.7B of monthly volume in July during the height of Pump.fun’s popularity.

This is also partially where consumer applications converge with social. Pump.fun aims to make it easy and fun to launch a token and build mememics around it. In several cases, this has translated into real demand for the token itself. While the accompanying outcomes of the protocol are heavily contested as being extractive of the ecosystem, many consider it an interesting experiment into how consumer and social adoption can impact user behavior and network outcomes. In fact, the ephemeral nature of applications has become a new trend itself this cycle.

Taking a step back, much of this success can arguably be attributed to improvements in network scaling, better user experiences, and the increase in stablecoins. On the infrastructure side, blockchains have become more affordable to use, and are becoming more performant over time. We expect this to continue to improve, especially with the arrival of Firedancer on Solana and the emergence of ultra-performant chains like MegaETH and Monad.

For user experience, the years of building out network infrastructure has made interacting with different chains more seamless. Now, users can easily be onboarded to essentially any given consumer application on any given chain with a few clicks, and often without ever leaving their wallet. The in-wallet experience itself has improved notably, and as the wallet moves from custodial and transactional to super application, a host of new primitives are unlocked, from simple user messaging and content distribution (such as holding a concert ticket), to DeFi applications built on top of them. While the overall user experience is far from complete at this point, it stands in contrast to how it functioned just a few years ago.

Meanwhile, fiat-backed stablecoins have become ubiquitous. Users now have access to many robust options without bridging and without leaving their home chain. Additionally, stronger applications from the PayFi space let users seamlessly on-ramp fiat, send cross-border payments instantly, and perform a host of other everyday activities onchain. This has led to meeting users where they are and brings all the necessary components of a well-functioning application together, underneath the hood. Users can now click a Solana Blink on X or a Frame on Warpcast and instantly connect with an application. This is where consumer and social can further converge — and it’s truly just the beginning. There’s also the growing development of integrating DeFi features into consumer applications. For example, prediction market positions can be tokenized, allowing users to not only trade their bets but also to earn yield while holding them.

As transactions become cheaper and faster, payments could function more like their Web2 counterparts. Meanwhile, consumer and social applications could offer greater capacity and more design freedom to build around and support their use cases. Part of the power of these Web3 applications is that they enable novel types of interaction and coordination, alongside new economic and societal norms.

Where’s the tipping point for the explosion of Web3 social and consumer applications?

OKX Ventures (Researcher)

Social applications are essentially a subset of consumer apps. If consumer-oriented projects, such as Pump.fun, are designed to handle high transaction volumes, these ecosystems will continue to expand. While they may currently lack large-scale DeFi components like leverage trading or shorting, these features will gradually be developed. For casual gaming communities, the key lies in finding the most sustainable business model and considering whether issuing tokens is a suitable choice.

Many onchain applications, in order to remain competitive, lower protocol fees to zero, which attracts short-term users and speculators. This forces developers to rely on increasing user activity and liquidity for revenue instead of creating long-term value, preventing these applications from growing into large-scale consumer platforms. It’s much easier to develop for whales than to meet the needs of the masses. By focusing fully onchain and taking advantage of opportunities like MEV (Miner Extractable Value), developers can easily maximize profits. Most application failures occur offchain, such as poor user experiences in areas like deposits and withdrawals or identity verification.

As a result, relying solely on existing onchain mechanisms can’t solve user retention problems. To break this bottleneck, Web3 social networks need to shift from finance-driven platforms to multifunctional user experience hubs centered on social consensus. These would seamlessly integrate NFT markets, DEXs, games, governance forums, and other areas, all connected to financial activities via wallets.

The tipping point for application growth will come from a combination of social consensus, speculative behavior, and tribalism. Blockchain's decentralized consensus mechanism naturally helps users coordinate around events, assets, and trends they care about, fostering trust in the system’s reliability.

Currently, many applications depend on short-term speculative activities like NFT investments and liquidity mining, leading users to engage in “fast-in, fast-out” operations. As the market matures, applications need to attract and retain users through content filtering, intelligent transaction processing, and community management.

Optimizing user data management and filtering for quality is key to ensuring the user experience isn’t disrupted by financialization. This makes interactions more natural and user-friendly while reducing reliance on speculative capital. A lasting sense of community, brand loyalty, and belonging, as well as a strong user base, could determine the success of applications and protocols. For example, Monad encourages users to become community stewards, driving tribal behavior and offering incentive rewards. This community-driven model could be poised to become a long-term growth point.

Future social networks must also separate social data layers from financial layers. Users don’t want every interaction to be accompanied by complex financial transactions. Platforms should intelligently manage these interactions, hiding financial transactions in the background, and providing more valuable user experiences through AI-driven smart filtering and quality standards.

The key growth areas could focus on enhancing user trust and experience through decentralized identity verification, proof of activity, and privacy protections. Platforms can efficiently manage and reward users who genuinely contribute to the community, not just speculators. With advancements in ZK technology and scaling solutions, users can enjoy more efficient and secure decentralized interaction networks, especially in areas like private messaging and social privacy.

LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui)

SocialFi and consumer applications powered by blockchain may become core drivers of the crypto economy because they integrate blockchain into familiar user scenarios, offering new monetization opportunities, greater user ownership, and broader adoption of crypto technologies. The shift in ownership and financial incentives will encourage more everyday participation in consumer apps, expanding the crypto economy. By combining DeFi with social and consumer applications, new financial opportunities can be created for users. Features like staking or decentralized lending can be embedded into daily digital activities, blurring the lines between financial and social products to further expand the crypto space.

Alongside simplifying wallet management and security complexities, transparency and user trust could be crucial for the long-term success of applications. We’re seeing more applications aimed at driving new users, new assets, and new onchain activities. Breakthrough applications are often hard to categorize, but the ones that stand out are likely to leverage the benefits of new infrastructure, emerging vertical trends, and the speculative potential of cryptocurrencies.

AI-driven, Telegram-based conversational consumption and gaming experiences stand out. Telegram provides a seamless user experience, with AI agent companions creating personalized, on-demand experiences. Purchases, such as collectibles or in-game assets, become natural expenditure channels, easily executed onchain or within AI agents. Key examples include protocols like Wayfinder, Virtuals Protocol, and Theoriq, which allow AI agents to autonomously execute transactions onchain. Particularly, Virtuals has introduced AI avatars that engage with users on Telegram, with users able to interact after watching Twitch livestreams.

Anagram (David Shuttleworth)

The next wave of adoption will likely be driven by stablecoins, RWAs (real-world assets), and payment innovations, alongside improvements in crypto-economic security. As the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates and global rates decrease, users might seek new opportunities beyond traditional finance. Stablecoins provide a pathway to lower-risk gains and accumulate value through protocol fees, unlocking new monetary layers for developers. Stablecoins backed by idle capital (such as Bitcoin reserves) create unique value spaces. Similarly, RWAs enable users to access a variety of financial instruments without permission. Meanwhile, developers can use RWA-backed infrastructure such as the stablecoin supported by BlackRock’s BUIDL.

Payments are evolving beyond just cross-border transactions. Stronger developers are creating applications with fully onchain, self-sovereign banking capabilities, including traditional savings accounts, ZK payments, and DeFi primitives like onchain lending, staking, and market-making. Users can also easily make P2P payments from their non-custodial wallets.

Additionally, the demand for shared security and re-staking will grow as more functionally-significant AVS (Application Validated Services) are introduced, helping applications build new core functions without redeploying everything from scratch. As protocols begin to explore the different possibilities from restaking protocols like Eigenlayer, the demand for restaking may increase substantially. And as new services are built on top of shared security models, the demand for shared security could drive restaking yield.

Users have an ever-expanding set of choices to lend, borrow, stake, restake, leverage, and perform a host of other basic and sophisticated financial activities onchain. This marks a significant improvement compared to two years ago.

At the time of writing, the combined monthly trading volume of major DEXs like Uniswap, Pancakeswap, and Orca exceeds $135 billion. Perpetual contract platforms like Hyperliquid and dYdX achieve a daily trading volume of $12 billion. Liquid staking protocols such as Lido have generated over $511 million in cumulative fees, while re-staking protocols like EigenLayer manage over $12 billion in assets. Lending protocols like Aave oversee $19 billion in assets, and stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle now generate over $500 million in monthly revenue.

However, beyond DeFi, the activities that ordinary users can participate in are relatively limited, and most non-DeFi-related behaviors are still primarily tied to financial speculation. Social and consumer applications hold promise for bringing the next wave of users into the crypto space.

While DeFi applications will continue to evolve, future versions may face diminishing returns, with improvements becoming increasingly marginal. On the other hand, the social and consumer sectors still offer vast opportunities for innovation, where even small advancements can lead to significant breakthroughs. So, the opportunity to have a deep impact is available.

The products that we’ve seen up to this point are still highly experimental. Many social and consumer applications also require enterprise-grade infrastructure to function correctly. This is still a work in progress, but it’s coming. Users also need an easy way to access them and in ways that are familiar. Technology will continue to evolve, and barriers to entry will be abstracted away. Social and consumer applications now have the opportunity to accomplish a feat that has yet to be done: attract new types of users who aren’t solely focused on speculation or monetary gain.

PayFi and the payment sector could become one of the initial breakthroughs across all chains. Fiat onchain processes are becoming smoother, cross-border payments are nearly instantaneous and free, and users can achieve meaningful integrations, such as linking MetaMask with a Mastercard debit card to spend cryptocurrency directly from self-custody wallets. Payments could become one of the most practical applications. Similarly, applications that create traditional banking experiences onchain are crucial. These self-sovereign banks allow users to have traditional savings accounts, borrow funds in DeFi, and participate in other onchain activities like staking, all without intermediaries.

The growing prevalence of stablecoins and their underlying utility advancements are also worth watching. The ongoing evolution of digital dollars means they’re no longer just for storing value or serving as a medium of exchange. Stablecoins can now act as an infrastructure layer, enabling developers to build more applications on top of them. New protocols are standardizing and making stablecoins more interoperable, offering new ways to accumulate value. This includes sharing protocol fees with users, potentially making the added utility of holding stablecoins more appealing than ever before and possibly even more appealing than holding traditional fiat.

Verifiable computation is another area with potentially profound implications. It allows developers to move various processes offchain and verify them publicly onchain without re-executing the entire process. This improves performance, reduces the cost of onchain logic, and lowers the attack surface and dependency on centralization. Potential uses include verifiable oracles — performing price updates and inputs offchain and publishing updated proofs onchain to scale traditional oracle architectures. Cross-chain proof systems could provide verifiable proofs of activity on one chain (like Ethereum) to trigger corresponding actions on another chain (like Solana), such as rebalancing liquidity pools after a cross-chain swap.

Verifiable computation also has many interesting applications in game theory and mechanism design. For example, allowing users to hide orders in dark pools to avoid slippage or use hidden-reveal functionality to verify a basket of goods' value while hiding specific content.

The gaming sector is also facing a potential breakthrough. New games don’t need to be AAA titles or the most advanced first-person shooters — they could be 8-bit or 16-bit low-resolution games focused on deep storytelling, engaging character development, and interesting gameplay mechanics. Given blockchain's permissionless nature and the increasingly competitive traditional gaming market, stronger developers might turn to new distribution methods, breaking away from the current gaming industry’s trajectory.

Finally, there’s AVS. EigenLayer is likely to attract a significant portion of ETH (both native and staked), with users looking to earn extra returns. The protocol has amassed over 4.5 million ETH in deposits. Its strength lies in expanding the design space using the economic security of re-staking. EigenDA, the first AVS implementation, already provides cost-effective and high-throughput data availability for rollups.

More AVSs are emerging and in many different verticals, including network scaling like ZK light clients and prover networks, coordination layers like DePIN infrastructure to orchestrate the exchange of computing power, and more cutting-edge areas like MEV management. As these services continue to create powerful use cases and impact the growth of the protocols using them, the corresponding demand for AVS could follow. Any protocol can create a system of restaking and shared cryptoeconomic security, but ultimately the services being built on top are what define the protocol and drive its restaking economy.

How do you view the popularity of the TON ecosystem and the challenges it faces?

Source: Artemis

OKX Ventures (Researcher)

The short lifecycle of hyper-casual games has made TON and Telegram an effective entry point for users to engage with crypto. In the attention economy, a healthy ecosystem, a solid user base, and a smooth onboarding experience are exactly what developers are looking for. Users don’t need to switch apps or understand complex blockchain technology. Making crypto “invisible” reduces the barrier to entry for these applications.

The launch of the TON Space self-custodial wallet has broken down barriers to fund liquidity and usage, with native stablecoin integration helping its DEX liquidity reach $600 million USDT in a short time. Furthermore, TON's offchain scalability and Lightning Network design support native, high-frequency, low-cost microtransactions and offchain payment channels, addressing scalability issues at a fundamental level.

Even before TON’s ecosystem gained significant traction, trading bots like UniBot and Banana Gun on Telegram channels were already catering to the demand for fast onchain transactions, operating directly through custodial wallets. These bots serve Web3 users' needs, and if projects can create products that meet Web2 user demands, wallets will act as traffic and payment channels, without requiring complex smart contracts, making business operations simpler.

Although TON offers new opportunities and revenue streams for developers and entrepreneurs — leveraging Telegram’s mature user base and token utility environment to drive rapid commercialization of social products — most current applications, especially games and social mini-programs, remain focused on meme culture and speculative entertainment. Many of these are simple ports of mini-games from platforms like WeChat, and their core appeal hasn’t fully capitalized on the unique advantages of cryptocurrency or blockchain’s secure and transparent financial data management capabilities.

However, this also indicates that TON is accelerating iterations along a proven path. Moreover, the opportunity for monetization through ads and in-app purchases hasn’t been fully explored. By opening its infrastructure and providing entrepreneurs with opportunities akin to “small shops,” TON could still support new products with traffic and in-app purchase revenue. For example, in the payment sector, TON could further develop services for online shopping, social e-commerce, and offline events. On the supply side, integrating ecosystems across electronic products, ticketing, and e-commerce could create a full-stack consumer experience.

As the team guides users and developers in building a richer gamified ecosystem, they may want to explore how to connect everyday user needs with the onchain world to create a stable ecosystem. For instance, to achieve mass adoption of Web3 payments, a key incubation scenario is needed‌ — ‌similar to how e-commerce played a role in internet payment adoption. When real-world payment demands mature, TON's crypto payment and financial services could truly take off. Moreover, TON’s integration with Telegram faces challenges in expanding to non-Asian markets, particularly in educating users and changing perceptions, especially when transitioning a messaging tool into a multifunctional platform.

LongHash Ventures (Emma Cui)

The TON team is striving to build a super app similar to WeChat, integrating features such as instant messaging, social networking, DeFi, and e-commerce, all powered by TON blockchain technology. Their vision is to create a Web3 gateway that attracts hundreds of millions of users and supports billions of transactions in Telegram’s user-friendly and seamless environment, using its existing user base. The goal is to gradually introduce Telegram’s loyal audience to onchain workflows through TON's established distribution channels.

The ambition to emulate WeChat as a super app is a big challenge, considering WeChat’s unique growth environment — such as government support, integration with nearly all domestic banking systems, and early development with minimal competition. However, we believe the TON ecosystem is gaining momentum and may become the largest Web3 user onboarding channel in the short to medium term. We’ve previously written research articles on TON’s ecosystem growth and potential risks.

Anagram (David Shuttleworth)

TON experienced one of the more interesting shifts in growth this past year. ‌The marketcap of $TON surged from $2 billion to $4 billion in 2023, reaching $8 billion in 2024, with network users and activity achieving all-time highs. While TON operates independently of Telegram, it’s Telegram-adjacent, and so the prospect of integrating and accessing Telegram’s 900M+ users is a unique value proposition.

The problem, however, was that despite this uptick in adoption, there weren’t many meaningful applications on the network, meaning users were limited in what they could do, other than speculate on the underlying token.

From a developer perspective, some believed the ecosystem lacked strong incentives to build on the network. While other chains offered millions in financial incentives to attract builders and strong applications, TON didn’t have any such mechanism. What’s more, TON lacked a native dollar-pegged stablecoin. As a result, users had a limited choice set for stablecoins and generally relied on wrapped ERC-20 tokens like jUSDT that had to be bridged over from Ethereum. This limited the user experience and perhaps just as importantly, placed severe limitations on network liquidity for all end users, further compounding the difficulties of deploying applications on the network.

Nevertheless, this quickly began to shift in early 2024, largely in part to two key factors: a proper ecosystem incentive program and the launch of native Tether. In terms of the former, the TON Foundation became more proactive in bootstrapping developer activity and launched the Open League in April, a long-term ecosystem initiative aimed at distributing 30 million $TON to users and projects for their engagement with the network. Now, builders have a powerful incentive to begin deploying stronger applications on the network and competing for user attention.

The quality of builders throughout the entire space is already limited, creating a situation where developers not only compete among themselves, but ecosystems must compete against one another to attract the very best. Without a strong framework of incentives along with sufficient liquidity and user demand, a network will fail to gain meaningful attention.

The integration of Tether’s USDT back in April 2024 provided the network with its first native dollar-denominated stablecoin. The deployment of stablecoins like USDT or Circle’s USDC are absolutely integral to a network’s success and survival. The correlation between Tether’s launch and the growth of user activity has been quite significant. Daily transactions have reached record highs, recently surpassing 3.7 million and increasing by over 530% since April. Meanwhile, daily users have experienced a similar growth trajectory, surpassing 1 million for the first time ever in September and reaching 1.1 million at the time of writing. This represents a 752% increase since April.

As liquidity continues to improve and a proper system of builder grants and incentives are in place, the next step is for new applications to be deployed on the network. While much of the growth on TON has occurred quite recently and there’s more improvement on the way, including better developer tooling, the network is now well-positioned to expand its reach further and is beginning to attract the users and builders required to do so. If stronger applications come to the network, TON has a chance to truly leverage its distribution in a meaningful way. If not, it could face considerable headwinds as ecosystem incentives wane, stronger applications deploy elsewhere, users flow to the next opportunity, and competition between the broader ecosystem further intensifies.

Click here for the OKX disclaimer.