The $TON Bull Thesis Just Came Back to Life
For those of you who’ve followed me for a while, you know I was incredibly bullish on $TON in 2024.
Back then, it was trading between $5–7, and the logic was ironclad: Telegram was sitting on nearly 1 BILLION monthly active users, representing the largest pool of untapped retail in the world. They were the only major tech giant operating outside the traditional gatekeepers, and TON was the only chain natively woven into the app's fabric.
But I’ll be honest—I lost faith.
Like many of you, I felt the "integration" was mostly surface-level. We had the mini-apps and the "tap-to-earn" craze, but Telegram itself always felt like it was keeping the chain at arm's length. The TON Foundation was doing the heavy lifting, and without the mothership being "all in," the vision felt stuck in second gear.
That changed on May 4th.
Pavel Durov just dropped a bombshell: Telegram is officially replacing the TON Foundation as the primary driving force of the network. Not only that, but Telegram is now the network’s largest validator.
Let that sink in:
The Founder is now personally running the roadmap.
A billion users are now sitting on a chain that is being operationally managed by the app they use every single day.
Fees have been slashed 6x (now nearly zero) as part of the new "MTONGA" (Make TON Great Again) initiative.
The thesis I had in 2024 didn't fail because the tech was bad—it failed because the integration was incomplete. $TON
