Entrepreneurs are losing a lot and ecological tokens plummet. The bubble of Telegram games is still bursting

Last week, the split incident of Yescoin's team's power seizure brought traffic back to the "TON ecosystem". There was no sound of the TON chain for too long. We began to recall this public chain that was backed by Telegram, which was on the eve of "take-off" for three years but was only popular for several months.

At its peak, trading platforms rushed to launch tokens for Telegram mini-games. In more than 4 months, Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency trading platform, launched 5 tokens for TON ecosystems. Hundreds of mini-games have emerged in a short period of time, with more than 2,000 being prepared to go online. Notcoin's monthly revenue exceeded US$300,000, and Catizen has achieved revenue of more than US$16 million. TON Chain's TVL data grew 70 times. The price of TON also rose from $2 to $8 at its high. The market's expectations for the TON ecosystem have been pushed to the highest point, and the industry and the outside world have once believed that Web3's "traffic gold mine" has finally found a new explosion.

However, this seemingly booming ecosystem is just a speculative game with a very short window of time. In the summer of 2024, the market came to an abrupt end - the trading platform stopped using TON Ecocoins, the founder of Telegram was arrested, the project party was collectively silent, and the player group formed a "ghost city". Overnight, this track called "traffic gold mine" became a hollowed-out mine, with only data black boxes, overdrafted markets, and abandoned developers.

What exactly happened during this period? Rhythm BlockBeats interviewed three former Telegram mini-game projects to analyze the real reason why the TON ecosystem is "flash-for-sky".

False prosperity; traffic from black boxes

The low cost of acquisition of Telegram mini games has always been one of the topics that everyone talks about before, and it is also one of the reasons why most Telegram mini game projects choose to do projects. Today, it is also the root cause of the entire ecological bubble.

"In Web3, the customer acquisition cost of a company such as a trading platform or a large chain game is around $10 to $15, but through Telegram mini-games, this cost can be much less than $1, around $0.7." KinKin, a project leader who left Telegram mini-games half a year ago, has turned to research on the AI ​​Agent track. She added to rhythmic BlockBeats: "In some areas, such as India, the cost of acquiring customers can be as low as $0.002 to $0.05."

This extremely compressed customer acquisition cost creates a paradise for the project factory, and real users have become an optional existence for them.

"Before I went to the Institute, I didn't need some real users. The studio volume was enough. In a short time, I achieved a volume of 200,000-300,000 yuan. This volume was a qualified line for a Telegram mini game, and it was a light and medium-sized mass." Xiaoguang had operated the token launch of several Telegram mini games. When he faced the question of rhythm BlockBeats, he did not shy away from talking about the operation model of the industry.

This kind of gameplay has been standardized and processed by the industry. Several studios who have worked together for a long time are familiar with each other and even live longer than most Web3 projects. "The project party and the studio will negotiate how much it needs to be in the early stage of the project and how much it needs to be supplemented before the TGE (token generation event)." Xiaoguang explained. If the amount of brushing alone is not enough, the data will be enlarged by "changing the amount".

"After reaching 200,000-300,000, we will change the volume - that is, the two games will divert traffic to each other to reach the next level of magnitude," Xiaoguang added. Compared with traditional chain games, the data volume of Telegram mini games has far exceeded that of most Web3 projects. But everything has two sides. The other side of low cost often means low quality, and the expansion of data also conceals the real problems of the ecology.

"The data of the TON ecosystem has always been operated in black boxes. In the past, most of those VC projects could be found on Dune's data platforms. Investors will also do some back-tuning. However, the real data of Telegram mini-games is not disclosed, and only a few insiders know the approximate number of users and the real user ratio." In Xiaoguang's view, this is the soil environment of a natural project factory.

"Do you know how many real users Notcoin has? You don't know." Xiaoguang said bluntly, "All the data seen by the outside world is what the project party wants you to see."

The decline in the proportion of real users has further exacerbated the false prosperity of the market. "The early games, like Hamster kombat, are relatively good, and about 60% of them are real people. But with the expansion of the ecosystem, this proportion continues to decline, and 40% of them are already considered very powerful." Xiaoguang revealed to Rhythm BlockBeats.

Even among these 40%, the "airdrop tax" of professional hair-fighting party has not been removed. Their goal is not to play games, but to give airdrop rewards. "When we counted the recharge users, 90% of the remaining real users were behind the same group of people. They specialized in airdrops and left after playing."

This user structure directly determines the vicious cycle of the Telegram mini-game ecosystem. In the short term, data expansion covers the real situation and allows investors and trading platforms to continue to pay; but in the long term, the user quality of the entire ecosystem is extremely poor and has extremely low stickiness.

In the eyes of trading platforms and investors, the monthly active users of Telegram games are astonishing and have a huge traffic, but the real user retention and conversion rate are pitifully low. "If it is just to create monthly active data and wallet address for trading platforms and investors to see, then these low-priced traffic is enough." The person who spoke was Sleepy, the founder of Little Ghost NFT, who decided to suspend small game development on Telegram this month.

"But if you want a truly active user, a user who is willing to play your games and use your app, you will definitely not be able to obtain it with such a low cost of buying." Sleepy said. "It seems that the same thing is true - you get what you pay for."

"Our promotion method still relies on the Crypto circle's Twitter, community promotion, and encrypted advertising channels, plus the exchange of projects," Sleepy said. "But after all the changes, I never got out of this circle."

In other words, the flow is just flowing from one project to another, but the water in the entire pool is always dead, and there is no new live water injected.

The TON ecosystem has never truly opened up the barriers between Telegram’s 900 million users and Web3. It seems that the TON Foundation and Telegram have not built a truly effective distribution channel that can enable Crypto applications to reach a wider range of users. "Maybe they're working hard, but I haven't seen any results yet," Sleepy said.

TON and Telegram have never been the same thing.

TON Foundation: The Power of Vacuum and the Direction of Out of Control

In the past six months, when talking about the TON Foundation with industry insiders, they always mention the "faction struggle" within the TON Foundation: the Russian team, the Taiwan team, and the Dubai team after obtaining the Dubai financial license at TON. The three teams did not bring synergies, but instead made the resource allocation of the TON ecosystem extremely uneven. In the TON ecosystem, whether it can obtain support often depends on the relationship with the Russian team.

The TON Foundation was first founded by two core members, one is Steve Yun, the chairman of the foundation who is still active in major online and offline activities, and the other is Andrew Rogozov, who was former CEO of VK, the founder of Telegram (the first social platform created by Telegram, the Russian version of Facebook), and is the so-called "core figure" among some people.

But I don’t know when the power structure of the TON Foundation has undergone subtle changes at some point in time - Andrew Rogozov seems to fade out of the foundation’s core management and founded TOP (The Open Platform). This organization is now more like a real foundation than the TON Foundation, or like the Consensys in the TON ecosystem, and even dominates the construction of TON’s core ecosystem.

"To be honest, as a foundation, we don't get much information from Telegram. Pavel Durov doesn't discuss anything with us at all. In fact, they only communicate with the wallet team because the wallet is the only real integration point. And this is not our team, it's a completely different company called TOP." This is what Jack Booth, marketing director of TON Foundation, said in an interview in July 2024, which indirectly confirms the influence of TOP.

TOP's influence gradually surpasses the TON Foundation. It not only invests in and supports the most critical projects on TON, but also controls the infrastructure in the ecosystem. They are responsible for running TON Space, the official Telegram wallet, and Tonkeeper, the most active wallet in the TON ecosystem, as well as the DEX Stonfi with the largest transaction volume. Even the only staking protocol, Tonstakers, is also the TOP's support target. Judging from the key nodes of the TON ecosystem, TOP has become the de facto "core builder" of TON, while the TON Foundation is more like an external publicity agency, and its power is gradually being emptied.

Then on January 14, 2025, the TON Foundation announced the appointment of Manuel Stotz, founder of Kingsway Capital, as the new president, and former president Steve Yun will continue to serve on the board of directors.

Under such a "power disintegration", it is also possible to understand why there are rumors that "the TON Foundation, which is dominated by the Taiwan team, has almost no say in many matters."

The Chinese in the TON Foundation's weak position in ecological resource allocation has become more obvious. "The Taiwan team has no say, and core technical decisions are still in the hands of the Russian team," Xiaoguang pointed out. "If you can establish a good relationship with the Russian team, you can get the greatest support, such as Catizen. They have a very good relationship with Russia, and have obtained investment and a lot of resources."

Xiaoguang's words were indirectly confirmed in the TOP's investment list, which included Catizen's game maker Pluto Studio.

Sasha Plotvinov, the founder of another popular mini-game Notcoin, bluntly stated that he has a very close relationship with the TON Foundation. This relationship not only gave Notcoin the lead in the TON ecosystem, but also made it a benchmark project in the Telegram mini-game track. What is more noteworthy is that Sasha Plotvinov is also the CEO of Open Builders, and the products of Open Builders basically overlap with the TOP and are also "a person in the core circle". "DOGS is also made by Notcoin, and they are all plates controlled by the Russians themselves." Xiaoguang said, "There are also many similarities in the trend."

Looking at the three coin trend charts from August last year to the present, the trends are indeed very similar. In addition, looking at yesterday's March 16th, affected by the news that "Telegram founder Pavel Durov was allowed to leave France", some of the tokens of TON Ecology rose, including: TON's 24-hour increase of 20.7%, and is currently quoted at US$3.53; NOT's 24-hour increase of 18.7%, and is currently quoted at US$0.002543; DOGS's 24-hour increase of 10%, and is currently quoted at US$0.0001475. (The quote is the price on March 17th)

 From top to bottom are: TON, NOT, DOGS

The success of Catizen and Notcoin is not a track success to some extent, but a high concentration of TON's core resources. The launch time of these two projects was half a year earlier than most mini-games and received full support from the foundation. In other words, the prosperity of TON mini-games is not a real "open ecosystem", but a resource allocation game.

Another fatal problem in the TON ecosystem is the chaos and sharp turn of strategic directions - at the resource support level, the TON Foundation's focus has quickly shifted from Telegram mini-games to DeFi, which directly led to the forced abandonment of a large number of mini-game developers.

"When we came into contact with the foundation, we could clearly feel that after a certain point in time, they basically stopped paying attention to all game projects, but began to look for DeFi projects in a crazy way," Sleepy said. "This transformation came too suddenly, and it was a huge blow to those teams who were serious about product production, and many developers and users were lost as a result."

Sleepy strongly disagrees with the direction change made by the TON ecosystem: "I think TON should not copy what other public chains are doing. If it is not based on Telegram, TON will not be able to obtain the current number of users from the perspective of performance, language and development difficulty. In this case, TON's subsequent development should plan the next step based on the attribute characteristics of the social platform, rather than copying other public chains."

"Our initial judgment on TON was that its ecosystem would become part of the monetization of traffic on social platforms like WeChat mini-games or Douyin mini-games." But the decision of the TON Foundation completely deviated from this direction. "They made stablecoins and DeFi, these are huge mistakes, just like WeChat mini-games. Do you use WeChat mini-games to trade stocks?" Sleepy was blunt.

This strategic mistake by the TON Foundation not only made the ecology miss the correct narrative direction, but also directly triggered a crisis - in August 2024, TON founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France. This incident has suffered a huge impact on the TON ecosystem and has also put the foundation in chaos.

"The reason is actually because they have added a new feature similar to fiat currency against stablecoins, which involves compliance and political factors, especially in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war." Xiaoguang revealed to BlockBeats that before this, BlockBeats had heard similar views from other sources, and a stablecoin-related feature attracted regulatory attention.

TON The original ecology has fallen into chaos due to strategic swings and uneven distribution of power, and the founder’s emergencies have made this ecology lose its final support point.

"Death Accelerator": Project Factory and Trading Platform

In addition to the traffic black box, the factional struggle of the TON Foundation, and the sudden change in resource support, project factories and trading platforms are also key factors in accelerating the demise of the Telegram mini-game track. This ecological carnival is essentially a short-lived capital game, and real user growth has long been stagnant.

In this track, the game development method is extremely industrialized. The project factory mass-produces various mini-games in the assembly line mode. Try and errors in the market, and there will always be several projects that can come out. "For example, Pluto Studio, the game maker behind Catizen, first played more than a dozen games, and finally found that the model of Catcat is the best, so they decided to bet on the key points," said KinKin.

In other words, Catizen's success is not accidental, but a result screened through intensive project experiments. Such a model is essentially high turnover, low cost, and quick trial and error.

"This cost is actually very low," KinKin explained. "Many game manufacturers go directly to the WeChat mini-program market to find those verified games, get the game code, replace the H5 with a skin, and then install a Telegram IDK (integrated development toolkit), and then go online directly. Moreover, in the later stages, the code price of such mini-games is getting cheaper.

Low cost, short cycle and fast launch make these game projects have extremely high speculative attributes. More importantly, once a certain game mode is verified by the market, it will be quickly copied and amplified, and the head often means having "pricing rights". KinKin mentioned: "Catizen was very strong when talking to trading platforms to list coins, and even turned to OKX, asking for $500,000."

Once a project comes out, its bargaining power will be greatly improved. The reason why Catizen is able to negotiate strongly is that it has accumulated enough market experience after the failure of multiple game projects and has accurately found a user group willing to recharge. "The products of mini games like Catizen, which have been verified by more than a dozen projects, are indeed mature enough, and have gained a wave of users who are truly willing to recharge their money," said KinKin.

The success of top projects also brings another problem - the high concentration of resources. "Hamster Kombat The traffic of a project can almost match a medium-sized trading platform."

However, the Telegram mini-game ecosystem has never been "live water" and lacks the entry of external incremental markets. The high-density "bombing" of the project factory has left other mini-games with little room for survival, let alone Web2 game manufacturers - they hold a large number of abandoned and unlisted games in their hands, and the trial and error costs are extremely low. In this competitive environment, the Telegram mini-game track is accelerating its decline.

Another driving factor is the game of trading platforms. The traffic brought by TON mini-games has allowed trading platforms to see new growth points, and frequent coins are listed in the short term, resulting in the market being overdrawn prematurely. Looking back at Binance's currency listing timeline, we can find that the interval between new projects is getting shorter and shorter:

May 16: Notcoin is listed;

84 days old: TON to list coins;

13 days later: DOGS to be listed;

23 days old: Catizen to list coins;

13 days later: Hamster Kombat

"When DOGS is listed, all trading platforms are grabbing this data and even give rewards activities. "How much DOGS will I give you with withdrawal from my trading platform?" Why do they know that DOGS has traffic? Because NotCoin has proved once, NotCoin and DOGS are made by the same team, and they changed their leather case and took the NotCoin path again. ” KinKin said to BlockBeats.

The deeper problem is that the user growth rate in this cycle has lagged far behind the previous cycle. At least before Trump issued coins, the market's anxiety about the user growth of Web3 was very obvious, and this anxiety was naturally transmitted to the trading platform. Although the user quality of the Telegram mini-game track is uneven, at least in the early stages, the conversion of TON traffic can also bring some data growth to the trading platform. However, this data growth is inherently unsustainable.

Ultimately, the more plates the project factory, the faster the trading platform will be listed, and the faster the track will cool.

After a few more rounds, the increase in user growth of trading platforms gradually dried up, and they lost the motivation to continue to list coins. For latecomers, the first-mover advantage has been maximized, and the living space for latecomers and latecomers is getting smaller and smaller. All of this makes the collapse of the Telegram mini-game ecosystem inevitable.

Is TG+ Web3 a false proposition?

"Have you ever envied these projects that can be used on Binance?" Sleepy answered quickly in response to BlockBeats' question, obviously he had thought about this question a long time ago.

"It depends on how to define success. Many people think that being listed on the trading platform is recognized by a certain industry, but I don't feel that. For me, issuing coins is not the end of the project. If you treat it as the end, it will hurt people, hurt yourself, the community, and the investors. Because everyone can also see that these coins have a poor trend after they are listed, and the effect of attracting new products is far from the expectations of the trading platform." Sleepy said.

The "quick money logic" of TON ecosystem makes everything simple and rough -changing to a new plate in three weeks, traders who grab fast money dominate the rhythm of the market, and teams who really want to make games have become "outliers" that have been eliminated. In this ecosystem, idealists ultimately have only two choices: either give up their beliefs and go with the flow or be eliminated.

Sleepy and his team eventually chose the latter. He cut off 80% of the team, and several core members did not get their salaries at first, and distributed some resources to do Web2 design outsourcing business to maintain the survival of the team.

"In addition, we are also talking about grants with some public chains. We have won the first Launch Grant. We will continue to do some development work in the future and complete the remaining KPIs. We also signed up for some hackathon competitions like Monad Madness to see if we can achieve some results. The income in the past few months has been more profitable than playing games on TON." He said self-deprecatingly.

After the collapse of the TON ecosystem, all the people who were once active have found their own new ways out.

KinKin has now turned to the AI ​​Agent track and she is very optimistic about the development of the BASE chain. Xiaoguang, who was good at making plates, was studying memes. He knew very early that "the business of Telegram mini-games is structural, never a long-term mode of stability, and the window period is only a few months." A former member who had worked hard to promote the ecosystem at the TON Foundation, studied Kaia, a public chain merged by WeChat in South Korea and Japan, after leaving.

The traffic-first ecosystem is the only thing left in the end. The TON ecosystem has not become the "future of encrypted social interaction". It is just another periodic Web3 narrative, a market game that is shorter, faster and more extreme than the public chain and ZK tracks.

Looking back at this carnival today, for developers, the TON ecosystem once disguised as the hope of "social + Web3", attracting them into this market, but eventually turning them into producers of black box data; for players, airdrops created the illusion of "get rich overnight", and the result was that the $0.99 game gift package became the "Cyber ​​Incense Money" of the new era.

Looking at the entire industry, the rise and fall of Telegram mini-games is not an independent phenomenon, it is just an extreme "micro" of the entire Web3 industry. In fact, whether it is the public chain, ZK Rollup or Layer 2, the essence of many tracks is the same, but the packaging is more "highly sound", the cost is higher, and the cycle is longer. Most Web3 projects are essentially building a large-scale Telegram mini-game, but some have longer life cycles and some have shorter ones.

「Telegram + Web3，究竟是不是伪命题？」

Each interviewee gave his own answer, but I decided not to write it out because dear reader, this time, I want to hear your thoughts.

This article thanks all interviewees who provided the information. Due to privacy protection, some interviewees' information has been blurred.