TON Now Has a $100 Million Fund to Boost Projects Built on the Network

TVM Ventures has launched a $100 million fund to advertise the enlargement of The Open Community’s on-chain choices — signaling a push to steer the community away from its reliance on L2s.

TVM mentioned the objective of the fund is to equip startups and enterprises with capital and infrastructure to drive mass adoption of TON, a blockchain developed in live performance with messaging app Telegram. The fund will do this by selling improvement on the TON blockchain’s base layer, reasonably than on its L2s or facet chains.

If TON does not develop its personal blockchain, it “will grow to be one more EVM L2 the place individuals come to farm ‘new’ initiatives that duplicate and paste good contracts written years in the past in Ethereum,” TON Basis board member Steve Yun informed Decrypt.

Allocations from the fund will go towards three funding pillars, the agency mentioned: Decentralized finance infrastructure, cross-border funds and safety on TON.

Below that investing framework, TVM Ventures plans to prioritize DeFi protocols that allow customers to retailer and save their crypto and entry different conventional banking-like providers. In the meantime, it’ll additionally allocate funds to accelerating initiatives that deal with “huge inefficiencies” in remittances and the broader cross-border funds area, in keeping with Yun.

On the safety entrance, TVM Ventures mentioned it’ll additionally assist security throughout its portfolio protocols, collaborating with superior safety auditors for the TON Digital Machine.

TON launched in 2021, aiming to onboard at the very least 500 million customers to Web3. It began because the brainchild of messaging app Telegram, which finally handed the buck to an out of doors group of builders resulting from regulatory considerations.

Nonetheless, Telegram and TON have become increasingly enmeshed over the previous two years, with a number of purposes bringing in waves of Telegram customers to the community. These purposes embody TON Pockets, an utility launched on Telegram to facilitate tap-to-earn crypto video games equivalent to Hamster Combast, Notcoin and Catizen. The video games have managed to draw lots of of thousands and thousands of gamers.

Nonetheless, Yun envisions a world during which the TON group is concentrated by itself chain, reasonably than facet chains and L2s.

Constructing on a Layer 1 permits customers to have a extra decentralized and safe expertise than constructing on Layer-2 networks, which generally sacrifice safety for pace. It additionally prevents the fragmentation of liquidity, he mentioned.

“TON is at a crossroads,” Yun mentioned. “It may well both pursue the trail of reliance on L2s and side-chains or dedicate itself to its personal chain. We select the latter.”

Edited by Stacy Elliott.