With a market cap of $5.1 billion, Toncoin (TON) is the 16th largest cryptocurrency trading at $1.49 at the time of writing. The price of TON has jumped 5% in the past 24 hours while managing $36.4 million in trading volume during this period, which has increased 1.50% from a day ago.
TON’s price actually started surging ahead of the past weekend when it was trading around $1.25, and since then, it has jumped about 20%.
With the latest jump in price, TON has come out of its month-long period of consolidation between $1.30 to $1.50. While the price remained range bound during this period, there have been some failed attempts at a breakout above $1.50, but so far, the price hasn’t really managed to do so yet. Strong resistance at this level suggests a prevailing sentiment that the price may not be able to sustain an extended rally beyond $1.50 at this point.
On the upside, the price has strong resistance at the current level, while on the downside, it has support present at $1.30, which, if it doesn’t hold, the price can decline to the support level of $1.17.
Still, the token is currently up 9.8% in the past 30 days and 19.3% over the past year. However, in 2023, so far, TON’s value is down 32%. Between the period of January and April, the crypto asset has been trading in the range of $2 and $2.55, and since then, TON’s value has been on a decline. Earlier this month, the price hit a low of $1.18. The token is also down 72% from its all-time high of $5.29 hit in Nov. 2021.
Toncoin’s latest gains came as Tap Fantasy, an MMORPG blockchain game, crossed over to the TON Network to tap into its massive user base and robust technical support. The cross-chain migration will further help Tap Fantasy provide its players with a more streamlined and efficient transaction experience, facilitating the growth of in-game economies.
Just less than a month ago, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced on his official Telegram channel that he owns Toncoin and Bitcoin. This revelation comes as Telegram continues to experience significant growth. At the time of his announcement, Durov also stated that the instant messaging app has more than 800 million monthly active users this year, with over 2.5 million new accounts being created per day.
Click here to learn all about investing in the Open Network (TON).
Network Growth and Expansion
Amidst the bullish momentum, the TON network’s development activity grew, as revealed by the TON Developer Report for Q2 2023. The TON Foundation noted that TON has been standing out amidst a declining crypto industry landscape, with a formidable 102% increase in developer involvement over the past year.
Developers working on the project had grown to 9,134 by the end of June, an increase of 6.56% from 8,572 members on April 1st. Meanwhile, TON Documentation received over 300 commits and 111 merges submitted by 32 unique contributors.
This growth has been stimulated by the DoraHacks hackathon, which saw an impressive degree of engagement with developers continuing their work on production repositories with closed-source code, noted the report released earlier this month. During this quarter, the Foundation also organized several challenges, including one for TON Wallet, which received about 100 submissions.
Last month, TON’s wallet team launched a payment system called Wallet Pay that allows users to purchase goods and services on Telegram using crypto. It also seamlessly integrates with the Telegram bot or service, enabling users to pay not just Toncoin but also BTC and USDT directly via the Telegram messenger interface.
Wallet Pay is a tool to empower millions of Telegram users to embrace blockchain technology and integrate crypto into their daily lives. It eliminates the need to navigate complex and unintuitive crypto payment services, streamlining the entire process to just a few clicks within the merchant bot or Telegram Web App. Wallet users can also top up their crypto accounts with a debit or credit card during the payment process, considerably simplifying the use of digital assets.
Most recently, the Ton Foundation, which drives TON’s adoption and brings more use cases to Toncoin and the entire ecosystem, teamed up with crypto exchange BIT to allow traders to pay trading fees on the platform with Toncoin.
With this, BIT became the first exchange ever to allow users to pay trading fees in a token that is not native to the platform and isn’t a stablecoin either.
“TON has always been about creating an open, scalable network that transcends traditional barriers, and now, by enabling payments of trading fees in Toncoin, we’re bringing this vision to life,” said Daniel Yang, Global Business Development Lead at TON Foundation at the time. “This integration is just one of the many practical use cases of Toncoin exemplified on one of the most important digital asset platforms in the world.”
A Vast Ecosystem
Toncoin is the native currency of The Open Network, or TON for short, which is a layer-1 blockchain and was established in 2018 as a proof-of-stake (PoS) network.
TON is a multi-layered network made up of a masterchain and several workchains and shardchains. It uses TON Virtual Machine (TVM) to provide a secure and isolated environment for executing smart contracts on the network. As for the consensus mechanism, TON uses Block-Proof of Stake (BPoS), which ensures that a supermajority of honest validators is required for block confirmation, enhancing the network’s security.
For scalability, which is the biggest bottleneck in the crypto sector, TON uses sharding. Here, each Workchain divides into multiple Shardchains, which process transactions in parallel and maintain a subset of the global state, enabling efficient processing of transactions without requiring every node to process every transaction. The network also facilitates interoperability and cross-chain communication between different Workchains and Shardchains, enabling seamless asset transfers and transaction execution across various chains within the TON network.
When it comes to the token, it has a total supply of 5.09 billion with an annual inflation rate of 0.6%. There are currently 3.48 billion Toncoin circulating in the market. Meanwhile, 473.45 million tokens are staked by validators to maintain and secure the blockchain.
Besides contributing to network security via staking, Toncoin also acts as a utility token, as one can use it to pay the processing fee for transactions and smart contracts and payment services provided by apps built on the platform. Toncoin is also integral to TON’s on-chain governance program while being used as payment for blockchain-based domain names (DNS), TON Proxy, and decentralized data storage.
As can be seen, TON has a vast ecosystem of products and services that includes TON Wallets, which are digital wallets specifically designed for storing, managing, and transacting with the Toncoin. They provide users with a secure and convenient way to interact with the blockchain and participate in various activities within the network.
Meanwhile, TON Storage allows users to store data and information on the blockchain. This way, it provides a decentralized storage solution with the added advantage of private encryption using the user’s wallet’s private key.
TON WWW is another component of this ecosystem, which is the collection of web pages and services on the TON network that are accessible via the TON network. TON WWW utilizes TON Sites, which allows users to launch web servers and make their websites available on the TON network, and TON Proxy, a technology that aims to combat censorship, provide easy access to dApps, and allows browsing and interacting with TON Sites.
There’s also TON DNS, a service designed to make crypto wallets, accounts, smart contracts, and other services more user-friendly, and Ton Bridge, which facilitates the conversion and transfer of TON coins between Ethereum, BSC, and The Open Network.
Click here to learn all about buying the Open Network (TON).
Boring Broad Crypto Market
While Toncoin is enjoying an uptrend, the same cannot be said of the broad crypto market, barring a few altcoins like RUNE (15.2%) and HBAR (13.5%), which are among those experiencing significant greens. This has the total crypto market cap down by 0.1% at $1.214 trillion.
When it comes to majors, both Bitcoin and Ether are trading flat and have been so for a while now. At the time of writing, Bitcoin has been trading at $29,329 while Ether has been exchanging hands at $1,837.
According to on-chain analytics provider CryptoQuant, institutional investors may have been done with their Bitcoin accumulation, which occurred during the two major crashes last year with the collapse of FTX in November and before that of the Terra/Luna ecosystem in May.
As per the ‘token transferred’ metric, all whale transactions occurred at or near cycle bottoms. And the fifth-largest volume in history was recorded in mid-June 2022 after the Luna collapse. This is why there were no signs of large OTC transactions when Bitcoin’s price doubled this year.
With this, CryptoQuant concluded that $15,700 was the low created after institutions mass-bought, which could also be the lowest point of this cycle. “If ‘Token Transferred’ and ‘Velocity speed’ increase along with price increases in the future, this is likely a precursor to an upward rally,” it added.
With the volume and volatility drying up, crypto exchange Coinbase has been focusing on expanding its crypto services. The platform has formed a strategic collaboration with Peoples Trust Company, a subsidiary of the Peoples Group, to enable seamless deposits and withdrawals of Canadian Dollars for Coinbase’s Canada-based users.
According to Coinbase, Canada is a priority “Go Deep” market as it presents a significant growth opportunity while it battles legal issues in the US. In contrast, Binance withdrew from the Canadian market in May, citing the country’s regulatory guidance as a hindrance to its continued operations.
Amidst the current boring market, the only thing exciting is Bitcoin ETF, which broker Bernstein said in its report on Monday will add capital to the market by creating demand in the spot market as well as signaling regulatory approval of these products, which produces a momentum for retail and institutional flows.
Analysts led by Gautam Chhugani wrote in the report that with the interest of leading global asset managers and potential mechanisms to address the SEC’s objections, the probability of a spot Bitcoin ETF “has risen.” The firm expects the ETF’s market to reach 10% of the largest cryptocurrency market cap in two to three years.
While the SEC extended its review of the Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF application last week and decisions for applications from BlackRock, WisdomTree, Invesco, and VanEck are due soon, too, Bernstein noted that crypto ETFs will benefit from a “strong brand marketing push by leading global asset managers,” and a “distribution push from retail brokers and financial advisors.”
Besides ETFs, the broker said new capital to ignite the new bull cycle would also come from the tokenization of traditional assets and native crypto infrastructure, and fresh stablecoin supply.
For now, experts expect a delay in Bitcoin ETF applications, with former SEC attorney John Reed Stark seeing an ETF approval unlikely, citing multiple potential risks but suggesting a potential shift in the securities regulator’s approach post-Election Day.
With crypto splitting the two major parties in the US, a Republican victory in the impending election in 2024 could make the way for a Bitcoin spot ETF. Interestingly, a recently released filing with the US Office of Government Ethics revealed that former US president Donald Trump is holding up to $500K in an Ethereum wallet.
Trump, who is running for the President again next year, has been a long-standing crypto skeptic. However, over the last year, he released an NFT collection featuring images of him, which sold out in hours, with a second series released in April, which made him between $500,000 and $1 million, as per the filings.
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