Using Telegram as a carrier, TON users have high authenticity and low acquisition costs, making it a unique presence in today's blockchain.
Author: Vivi, TON Foundation
1. From BTC to the Multichain Inscription Revolution
1.1 Analysis of the Driving Force of BTC Inscription Outbreak
1) Capital Foundation: Thanks to the improvement in macro capital liquidity, the approval of spot ETFs, and the expectation of the 2024 BTC halving, the market found the BTC ecological inscription as an ignition point, and funds poured in, initiating a bull market. Narrative-led projects and value-led projects are taking the lead in the market.
2) Consensus Foundation: BTC's consensus is the strongest in the encryption field, which is not so much related to the technology itself, but more dependent on the historical events of cryptocurrencies. Developing products on the existing strong consensus foundation is much simpler than creating new narratives or consensus in product development.
3) Growth Expectations: The financial market looks at expectations, and undervaluation and imperfect ecology imply huge growth potential. If we compare the BTC ecology's growth expectations with the over a trillion-dollar Ethereum ecology, the growth expectations for the BTC ecology are still considerable. BTC is following the development path of the Ethereum ecology, and speculative behavior has played a driving role, but it has indeed brought funds and attention to the Bitcoin ecology. This wave of enthusiasm has also attracted a large number of builders to participate, laying the initial foundation for the development of the BTC track.
4) Competition: Although Bitcoin's inscription protocol is mainly based on Ordinal, there are also numerous competitors, including Atomical, Rune, SRC20, BRC420, Taproot Asset, each with its own advantages, application scenarios, and supporters.
5) Head Advantage: Funds and liquidity are mainly concentrated in the head inscription protocols of Ordinals, while other protocols usually only have a certain market value and liquidity for the first project or a few projects. This still differs significantly from the situation of a variety of flowers blooming in the previous bull market.
1.2 Reasons for the Continuation of Multichain Inscription Heat
1) Spillover Effect: The existence of transaction costs on the BTC chain, namely miner fees, has become a barrier to entry for many players. The prosperity of the BTC chain's inscription ecology has led to network congestion, resulting in higher minting costs for users, prompting players to seek other chains to participate in inscription projects, thereby bringing about the prosperity of inscription projects on other chains.
2) Low Development and Deployment Costs: Compared to infrastructure and most DeFi projects, the development cost and technical requirements for inscription protocols are not high, which to a certain extent reduces the participation threshold for project parties. If OP stack can achieve one-click chain deployment, inscription protocols often achieve one-click deployment as well. Therefore, for inscription projects, the most important thing is the utility empowerment and development planning of the inscription project itself, which emphasizes operations and the market.
3) Lottery-like Nature of Inscription: Users mint inscriptions similar to buying lottery tickets. Inscription protocols produce a large number of targets every day, so liquidity is scarce for inscriptions. Players rarely use large funds to mint inscriptions, and their mentality is more like using a small amount of funds to buy lottery tickets, making players' behavior continuous. After diving into many inscription communities, I found that the consensus of most players is "mint 30U for self-defense, 50U for a safety net." This mentality represents the fact that individual players do not want to miss any potential opportunity to get rich.
4) Fair Launch New Narrative: Every asset has meme properties. If meme is a sum of project mechanisms, narratives, market value, background, and development history, then the most welcomed method in the secondary market is Fair Launch. Compared to Public Sales, inscriptions have taken this to the extreme, as users only need to pay a small amount of network gas to mint coins.
2. An Overview of the TON Inscription Ecology
As an important public chain for encryption, TON has also followed the trend in this inscription boom. From December to January, TON successively saw several inscription projects, some of which were inscription protocols, and some were inscription infrastructure. Some projects have achieved outstanding results, all of them are building the TON inscription ecology and striving to expand the ecology in mini-programs, asset trading, DeFi, protocol integration, and small game applications.
2.1 Tonano
Tonano is the first inscription protocol deployed on the TON blockchain: TON20. The minting process of the first TON20 inscription nano (early December 2023) had a wide-ranging impact on the TON ecology. The participation of users and the large number of triggered network transactions put pressure on the TON network's infrastructure.
Tonano launched its TON20 inscription protocol on December 5, 2023. Despite not conducting prior market promotion activities, the minting activity of $nano (the first inscription) still brought huge traffic and transaction loads to the TON blockchain, leading to temporary transaction delays and network congestion. As a result, Tonano suspended the minting activity. After the network recovered, Tonano restarted the inscription minting on December 11, 2023, and completed the minting of $nano in one day. $nano brought more than 20 million interactions and 37,000 unique minting addresses to the TON ecosystem.
After the successful minting of $nano, other TON20 inscriptions were also actively deployed. Bolt20 completed minting on December 16, with over 31,000 minters. Dedust.io also attracted over 20,000 minters.
First is first, Tonano's appearance is a dual re-establishment of the TON user's mindset and the inscription brand. Looking at the BTC inscription ecology, the sequence has a strong influence on the value of assets and protocols. For example, ordi, as the first brc20 token, has had a huge impact and community consensus, which has also greatly helped the project become a "leader."
In addition to the mentioned TON20 inscription protocol (deployment, minting, querying, transfer), Tonano is also updating its product ecology, launching TON20 inscription index query, TON20 inscription trading market, and cross-protocol asset bridges for TON inscriptions. Tonano's Marketplace has a trading volume of over a million dollars, providing necessary liquidity for TON20. The cross-protocol asset bridge can achieve asset exchange between TON20 and other inscription protocols and Jetton tokens, making a broader inscription ecology possible.
In 2024Q1, Tonano will launch a mini-app to further improve its user-friendliness, consolidate its ecological position, and promote easier and more extensive use of inscriptions. In the future, Tonano will continue to focus on technological innovation, invest in TON ecological construction, and utilize the high concurrency and low-cost technical characteristics of the TON blockchain, combined with the resources of the Telegram platform with 800 million users, to promote the large-scale application of the TON network.
2.2 Gram20
Gram20 is the second inscription protocol on TON, different from TON20, this protocol has greater ease of use and more functionality. Gram20 is the first inscription protocol on TON to use Telegram mini-programs for inscription deployment, minting, and transfer, and has launched a trading market to provide trading services for users. The Gram20 protocol supports limiting the time interval for users to mint inscriptions, penalizing early minting, and setting start times, which represents an improvement over basic inscription protocols.
The Gram20 team conducted good publicity before minting, and on December 22, 2023, they started minting and had a conversation with OKX Ventures and TON DevRel managers through the Odaily platform. For the sustainable development of the protocol, Gram20 forcibly charged a certain fee for minting on its own platform, which reduced the enthusiasm of community members. Lasting for 7 days, the inscription was finally completed on December 29. The fee design for inscription product design brought about a backlash, not because the mechanism was bad, but it did not align with the mainstream narrative of freemint in the current inscription market.
2.2 Gram20
Although Gram's minting charges a Protocol Fee, the platform promises that this fund will be used to meet future economic incentives, maintain the sustainability of the GRAM project, including using 50% of the funds for GRAM token buybacks, and the other 50% for infrastructure development, ecological incubation investments, liquidity management, team building, and marketing. Subsequently, Gram20, with the help of the Umbrella platform, opened an OTC market and attracted user attention through promotion with multiple institutions and KOLs, facilitating gram inscription trading on Umbrella.
The Gram20 team is highly professional in market making, with support from various resources, including joint meetings and promotional activities with exchanges, VCs, and KOLs in marketing and promotion. As a latecomer, it has gained good market attention, and in business cooperation, it has promoted exchange listing and collaborated with Umbrella to advance the OTC market, with a reserve of protocol assets, leaving room for future operations.
In terms of product, using the TG mini-program as a starting point has to some extent avoided direct competition with TON-20, while also being a very user-friendly product that aligns with TG's mini-program planning. Limiting mint command intervals and imposing penalties is a good way to increase platform user participation and avoid predatory behavior and cheating by scientific groups. Additionally, using the TON smart contract to charge users has achieved an innovative POS chain ICO, known as Inscriptions Coin Offering. However, unlike traditional ICOs, the token exchange ratio that end users receive can be determined by the project party.
Gram20 has launched a $200,000 Ecosystem Grant Program for ecological development, supporting Gram20 through wallet integration, browsers, and indexers to create a stronger ecosystem foundation. It has developed bridges for inscriptions, utilized inscriptions to build DeFi on the DEX, and created small games for Telegram Mini Apps, enriching the utility of Gram20.
2.3 TONOT
TONOT combines the concept of inscriptions with the social attributes of Telegram to create fair inscriptions for every community user. By binding and activating a Telegram account, TONOT ensures the authenticity of users minting inscriptions. Each activated Telegram account binding address can mint 500 TONOT inscriptions, with an additional 50 inscriptions for each new invitation, up to a limit of 2000.
TONOT was issued on January 5, 2024, and launched the inscription protocol. The unexpectedly high user participation caused issues with its front-end page. After the fix, TONOT reissued on January 11 and completed all minting in close to 24 hours. $TOT itself brought a large number of interactions to the TON ecosystem, and the 61,751 unique minting addresses broke the previous record held by nano, which is rare participation heat for any blockchain project.
This was achieved through its unique invitation and minting mechanisms. TONOT's invitation mechanism requires users to be associated with a Telegram account, and its minting mechanism can only be achieved through the Telegram mini-program, limiting the total number of inscriptions minted by users within a certain time. It is also difficult for scientists to cheat using scripts, ensuring TONOT protects the interests of community users and provides a truly fair and transparent minting experience—genuine FairMint. TONOT does not charge a protocol fee, allowing all users to mint TOT inscriptions for free, greatly increasing user participation enthusiasm.
So, what practical applications can TONOT achieve? According to the official product plan, TONOT aims to achieve:
Staking and Mining: Users can stake TONOT inscriptions and mine tokens from other projects within the TON ecosystem (similar to Binance Launchpool), providing additional profit opportunities and gaining the continuous growth dividends of the TON ecosystem.
Decentralized Identity (DID): Users can use TONOT inscriptions to generate exclusive decentralized identity attributes (DID). DID can be used for identity verification, digital signatures, encrypted emojis, and other applications, making TONOT the social currency of Telegram.
In-Game Token Consumption: With the development of the Telegram App, TON games will become the core business of TON. TONOT plans to collaborate with over 50 games in 2024, enriching the application scenarios of TONOT. In future GameFi collaborations, TONOT will serve as a consumption token, allowing users to purchase virtual items and upgrade equipment within the GameFi of the TON ecosystem, encouraging users to play and earn for free.
TONOT is currently the first social inscription on the TON blockchain, with over 60,000 holders. TONOT's integration with Telegram ensures the fairness of inscriptions and, through binding with Telegram accounts, also ensures the authenticity of users. TONOT's product plan aims to expand inscription application scenarios through inscription staking, in-game currency, and paid Telegram group participation, boosting the network ecosystem of TON.
2.4 FairTON
FairTON is a fair-first, community-native, and full-lifecycle project launch platform. FairTON is not limited to the BRC20 inscription protocol in its positioning, focusing on the "localization" innovation of the TON blockchain, abandoning the Achilles' heel of off-chain indexers, and achieving inscription primitive operations at the smart contract level.
Fair-First
The popularity of BTC inscriptions has extended the wave of fair launches to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Most inscription project parties have copied the off-chain indexing scheme of Bitcoin inscriptions. The technical solution for inscriptions is a compromise under the limitations of Bitcoin script capabilities, rather than its essence. Fair token minting that is accessible to everyone is in line with the original spirit of Bitcoin. The off-chain indexing scheme not only brings liquidity fragmentation to the public chain ecosystem but also brings hidden dangers to asset security, and people have witnessed multiple security incidents in the development of Bitcoin inscriptions.
Community-Native
The community is key to the early launch of Web3 projects and the foundation for sustainable development. Telegram, as the world's most popular social software platform with over 800 million monthly active users, far exceeds the existing participants in the cryptocurrency industry. With native TON support and a wide social network, FairTON aims to simplify the entry barriers for more individuals and projects into the Web3 field.
Full-Lifecycle
FairTON not only focuses on innovative project launch methods but also provides a series of token management solutions, including highly customizable vesting tools, anti-rug mechanisms to protect participant funds, and liquidity tools for projects.
JettonX
FairTON has introduced JettonX (Jetton eXtension) for the first time in the TON ecosystem, fully compatible with existing Jetton token specifications. Jetton (Russian for Token) is the ERC-20 token model on TON, supporting the creation of homogeneous tokens like USDT, which is currently the most widely adopted token standard in the TON ecosystem. FairTON can customize the fair minting of tokens, lottery minting, proof-of-work minting, social viral airdrops, and traceable airdrops for project launches. Tokens completed through FairTON's project launches can seamlessly connect to the liquidity and on-chain infrastructure of the entire TON ecosystem.
2.5 TownSquare
TownSquare is dedicated to promoting mass adoption of the TON blockchain, effectively connecting Telegram's extensive user base of 800 million with the inherent privacy, transparency, openness, and sovereignty of the web3 world. The project's focus is on developing the necessary infrastructure and key applications within the TON ecosystem. TownSquare plans to launch the first decentralized open-source inscription indexer within the TON ecosystem. Additionally, the team is actively exploring and developing protocols and application tools to achieve fair and secure asset insurance.
The data of inscriptions is on L1, but the calculation process and data results are on the index, and the index is essentially an off-chain server, no different from a web2 website server. The holdings and transfer records of inscriptions are all on a website server. Once the index service has a problem, the assets based on this index service will be affected, potentially leading to the collapse of the entire protocol ecosystem. There have been instances of bugs in certain protocol indexes, resulting in arbitrary issuance and misalignment of data between two index parties, causing significant losses to the community. Therefore, for the TON public chain, the decentralization of inscription indexing is a must.
Decentralized indexing is similar to nodes on the public chain, with unified code, ensuring consistent data for anyone who downloads and runs it. There is no risk of collusion among multiple indexers. It offers high data security. By simply upgrading the decentralized indexing code, protocol upgrades can be quickly implemented, greatly enhancing the protocol's flexibility.
Open Source Infrastructure
Looking at the development of the BTC ecosystem, inscription infrastructure includes indexers, wallet support, marketplaces, minting tools, and data analysis. After nearly a year of development, the BTC ecosystem has flourished, while the TON ecosystem is still emerging. Fortunately, Tonano, Gram20, and TONOT, all purely community-launched projects, have received good feedback initially.
However, for the long-term development of the inscription ecosystem, infrastructure construction is essential. Different inscription standards have led to fragmentation and closed indexing. Fair participation itself is part of the inscription narrative. TownSquare is about to launch a completely open-source third-party indexing service, reducing the potential barriers for inscription project parties to participate. TON ecosystem developers no longer need to develop their own indexing system; they only need to run the open-source decentralized indexing program, making it convenient to use. Unisat and IERC-20's decentralized indexing also have incentive mechanisms, encouraging more people to build indexes, further enhancing decentralization.
Automated Services
Inscription minting itself is a form of Proof of Work (PoW). In both Tonano and Gram's releases, there has been observed asymmetrical advantages for scientists and programmers over ordinary retail investors. TownSquare will also launch a bot that can automate inscription minting, making inscription minting more fair.
I am looking forward to TownSquare bringing protocol standards to the TON inscription ecosystem, standardizing inscription protocols on TON, and providing users with a more fair way to participate in the ecosystem.
3. Conclusion
Current inscription projects on various chains generally have some shortcomings:
Completely Free Minting leads to a lack of sustainability for most projects. A few well-funded inscription projects will buy back chips in the secondary market, bear the market-making costs, and list on exchanges, which is already a huge investment. Most early-stage projects are in a difficult position after the lively inscription minting activity due to the lack of token incentives and sustainable fundraising capabilities. Therefore, inscription projects should balance the relationship between fair launch and sustainable development.
Lack of innovation in the technology and gameplay of imitation inscription protocols. Most inscription projects have directly copied the data format and gameplay of BRC20 inscriptions without considering the differences between the Bitcoin network and other general smart contract networks. In a sea of uniform inscription protocols, standing out requires technical, token economic model, and narrative innovation.
Serious fragmentation of the inscription market. The implementation of most inscription protocols uses off-chain indexing, leading to a disconnect between on-chain and off-chain states. Over-reliance on centralized services restricts the circulation and exchange of inscription assets. The lack of smart contract programmability makes inscription protocols difficult to leverage the composability and interoperability of blockchain.
Fortunately, inscription projects in the TON ecosystem have provided their own solutions to the above problems in different aspects:
1. Leveraging Telegram's social infrastructure, innovating social inscription gameplay
Telegram mini-programs can quickly respond to a large number of access requests and provide seamless on-chain transactions through the built-in official wallet @wallet or the TON network wallet TONSpace. Telegram accounts have a natural defense against Sybil attacks, effectively preventing scientific groups from "front-running," "creating multiple accounts," and occupying network resources. Leveraging Telegram's mini-programs to provide a better product experience for Web3 users and convert Web2 users is a better way to achieve mass adoption.
Protocols such as Gram-20, TONOT, and FairTON have combined the advantages of Telegram and the TON network to create innovative mini-program products, which have achieved success to some extent. For example, NEAR's official support and endorsement by founder Illia for the NEAT inscription project resulted in a final minting volume of 24,600 addresses, while TONOT, a purely community-based inscription project, achieved a minting volume of 61,751 addresses without official endorsement. In an era where users and traffic are paramount, the high authenticity and low acquisition cost of TON users through Telegram make it a unique presence in today's blockchain world.
2. Adding smart contract functionality to inscription protocols, bringing programmability to inscriptions
At a TON network technical sharing event, I emphasized the flexibility of TON smart contracts. Through smart contracts, protocols can directly add protocol fees to achieve sustainable development, as seen in Gram-20. Additionally, protocols can help users pay Gas Fees, truly achieving Free Minting. FairTON has introduced the JettonX token framework, fully compatible with the ERC20 standard Jetton on the TON blockchain, providing a customizable solution for innovative project launch mechanisms. With the use of TON network smart contracts, flexible payment methods and launch methods are entirely achievable, offering a wealth of imaginative possibilities.
3. The TON blockchain inscription ecosystem is on the rise
Similar to the BTC inscription protocol, multiple inscription protocols have emerged on TON, including Tonano, Gram-20, TONOT, and FairTON, focusing on on-chain inscriptions, TG mini-programs, social attributes, and on-chain smart inscriptions. Just as inscription-based transactions, lending, and stablecoin projects have gradually emerged in the BTC ecosystem, the inscription ecosystem on TON is beginning to take shape, with each project exploring inscription ecosystems to bring more utility to their inscription products.
The above is my public analysis report on the TON public chain inscription ecosystem. I would like to emphasize that all the content does not constitute investment advice on behalf of the TON Foundation.
If you are interested in TON public chain ecosystem projects or work, feel free to contact me personally at vivi@ton.org.
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