The TON Foundation has announced an initiative through which it will award 115 million dollars in Toncoin prizes, Telegram’s cryptocurrency.
The initiative has been called The Open League, and its first season will be launched starting from April 1, 2024.
This is a competition based on KPI that allows TON projects to win a share of about 15 million dollars in Toncoin, and users to earn about 100 million dollars in Toncoin rewards by using TON projects.
Summary
Telegram: $115 million in prizes in the TON crypto
The Open League is an initiative that aims to revolutionize the community engagement landscape on Telegram, and it serves to introduce Web3 to the over 900 million monthly active users on the platform.
The winners of the Open League will have full autonomy to use their winnings for the growth of their own project, or to share them with their community.
The projects that will rank at the bottom of the standings will be relegated to the minor league in the following season, and will therefore receive fewer increases and incentives in the liquidity pool.
However, the league is open to all projects with real traction: any crypto project from any chain can participate in season 1 of the Open League, migrating their product and community to TON.
A pilot season of this initiative has already been held, which has been very successful with a 370% increase in daily active wallets.
The first season will introduce newcomers to onboarding platforms, also known as missions, which will offer participants an easy entry into on-chain projects within the TON ecosystem. This specific initiative will offer prizes worth a total of 22 million dollars in TON (Toncoin).
Another initiative will be dedicated to cryptocurrency veterans: The Open League will introduce liquidity pool increases that will offer scalable rewards supported by 40 million dollars in Toncoin.
In total, The Open League will offer 30 million Toncoins, whose current value is over 115 million dollars.
Other initiatives
These rewards will be distributed through four systems aimed at different levels of familiarity with cryptocurrencies: missions, liquidity pool increases, but also The League and mining.
In fact, other token mining mechanisms have already successfully introduced new users to the world of cryptocurrencies through Telegram. For example, Notcoin, based on TON, has reached over 30 million users since January 1, 2024.
The growth of Notcoin has highlighted two fundamental concepts for projects to be successful on TON and Telegram: simple incentives and referral programs.
The Open League projects will therefore be encouraged to create simple mechanisms to present their tokens to new crypto users on Telegram, and that is why 22 million dollars in Toncoin will be allocated to airdrops to incentivize missions.
In addition to the 40 million dollars in Toncoin for the increase in liquidity pool (LP) rewards, the remaining 38 million dollars in Toncoin will be reserved for incentives for users of upcoming project launches on TON.
Telegram’s cryptocurrency: Toncoin (TON)
TON stands for “The Open Network” nowadays, but when the project was launched in 2018, the cryptocurrency was called GRAM and the project was simply called Telegram ICO.
Indeed, this project started with a record ICO of 1.7 billion dollars, which however in 2020 was fined by the SEC for not complying with regulations.
Since then, the project has changed a lot, ceasing to be Telegram’s crypto project, and becoming an open, open source and decentralized crypto project promoted by Telegram.
The role of Telegram within the project, however, continues to be central, both because the cryptocurrency TON is actually used within Telegram, and because on the homepage of the TON Foundation website they openly declare that the technical development is entrusted to Telegram.
Therefore, although technically and formally TON is no longer Telegram’s cryptocurrency, in reality behind the TON project there is still primarily Telegram itself.
The pilot season
The pilot season of the TON Open League distributed 650,000 Toncoins (approximately 2.6 million dollars) through Liquidity Pool enhancements. It will also distribute another 550,000 Toncoins (2.2 million dollars) to the projects that win The League Pilot on March 31st.
In this regard, a real-time ranking is also published on the official website of the TON Foundation.
Thanks to this pilot project, TON has seen an increase of about 70% in TVL on its DEX, and an increase of about 370% in daily active wallets.
The comment
The marketing director of TON Foundation, Jack Booth, stated:
“The pilot season of the Open League has shown that our community is ready to have fun. Cryptocurrencies don’t have to be complex; they can and should be easy, fun, and highly rewarding. With The Open League, we are taking a different approach to growing the ecosystem, effectively putting cryptocurrencies in every pocket.”
