• TON’s Alena Shmalko discloses that the ecosystem is on a mission to record 500 million users in the next four years. 

• According to her, TON’s main challenge is that it is a non-EVM blockchain, forcing developers to learn other programming languages. 

TON Ecosystem Lead Alena Shmalko has disclosed in the latest interview that the ecosystem is on a long-term mission of onboarding 500 million users on-chain by 2028. According to her, this could be achieved through the continued implementation of The Open League – an initiative for both TON users and builders.

Speaking on projects and partnerships, Alena stated emphatically that the ecosystem is currently booming with the Total Value Locked (TVL) recording an impressive surge of 2,000% in recent months.  

One of the main cornerstones that is bolstering its partnerships is Telegram. Also, several independent products are being created within Telegram with the launch of Tether’s USDT on TON set to seal the significant drive of mass adoption. According to her, the ongoing strategic partnership with Web3 heavyweights such as Animoca Brands, Fireblocks, and HashKey Group would validate the technological advancement of TON, boosting its credibility and appealing to a wider audience. 

We’re aligned on the growth and development of Web3 elements within the Telegram ecosystem. As a result, we’ve seen the introduction of a wallet created by an independent team, which is now being rolled out as a native feature inside the messenger across various regions. Additionally, other independent products are being developed within Telegram, such as the Telegram App Center, which aggregates all decentralized applications launched on TON in the form of mini-apps as well as Web2 Telegram mini-apps.

According to Alena, both the TON Foundation and TON Society focus on community engagement through the organization of hackathons, workshops, online courses, and webinars. The Open League, which is one of its major initiatives commenced with the participation of 18 projects. Currently, it has grown to 40 TON applications, 57 tokens, and 22 NFT collections. So far, $45 million in rewards has been allocated by the Foundation with about $150 million allocated in total. 

Alena Speaks on the Gaming Sector and Challenges of TON

On the potential of the gaming sector within the ecosystem, Alena disclosed that Web3 gaming offers immense new opportunities for value exchange, true ownership, and financial benefits for gamers.

Web3 gaming empowers gamers to do things that they can’t currently do, offering a better form of value exchange, true ownership and attractive financial opportunities. People can now access fun, simple and viral games in their favourite messenger, without the need to set up a separate Web3 wallet and leave the interface.

For now, other product areas such as SocialFi, e-commerce, onboarding, education tools, and DeFi are being explored by TON. In the future, projects such as “Future developments may include RWA tokenization, supply chain management, decentralized identity (DID), decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), and AI” could be Integrated. According to Alena, one of the primary hurdles of TON is that it is a non-EVM blockchain. For this reason, developers have to learn new programming languages like Tact and Fun-C.

We are constantly improving our documentation and offering support to help developers transition smoothly into our ecosystem. Given that they need to learn new languages, we provide very comprehensive documentation in multiple languages. Now we’re translating it to Mandarin because we have a very strong focus on Asia. The Arabic as well. We have documentation for CIS regions, of course, and obviously for English speakers.

At press time, TON is trading at $7.2 after surging by 4% in the last 24 hours.