TON key events 2025-2026: an ecosystem retrospective

2025 and the first half of 2026 were the period when TON stopped being a “Telegram-adjacent” niche project and became a fully fledged L1 with institutional recognition. This piece is a chronology: what happened to the network, how the team changed, how major integrations resolved, and which event was actually the turning point.

It’s not a summary of one-day news — it’s a roadmap of the path travelled, useful to keep handy when you read the next press release and want to gauge how much it really changes.

Context: where TON stood at the start of 2025

By the start of 2025 TON had three major assets in hand. First — the Notcoin (2024) and Hamster Kombat (launched March 25, 2024, 300M+ players in five months) mini-apps, which onboarded tens of millions of addresses. Second — native USDT on TON, launched by Tether and Telegram in April 2024 at the Token2049 conference in Dubai. Third — Fragment, the auction marketplace for Telegram usernames and anonymous numbers, which became the most liquid NFT venue on the network.

Against that backdrop, 2025 opened with ecosystem TVL around $150-200M, more than 650 dApps and steady growth in TON holders. From there, events come thick and fast.

January-April 2025: extending the Telegram deal and betting on the US

In January 2025 the TON Foundation announced an extension of its partnership with Telegram. The most consequential element — TON Connect officially became the exclusive protocol for connecting wallets to mini-apps. That ended a long-running standards debate.

In parallel, the foundation began its US expansion. That same January, Manuel “Manny” Stotz — an investor with experience scaling projects — joined as TON Foundation president. His mandate was stated publicly: open the US market for TON.

In April 2025 Maximilian Crown, MoonPay co-founder, became CEO of the TON Foundation. The combination of “MoonPay-pedigree leadership plus an investment-focused president” signalled what was coming: the foundation was preparing for an institutional listing.

Summer 2025: NFTs, celebrities and DeFi milestones

Summer 2025 was about cultural integrations. In July a Telegram Gifts drop from Snoop Dogg raised $12M. Later, UFC legend Khabib Nurmagomedov released the Papakha Gift collection — 29,000 items sold across 290 auction rounds, with individual lots fetching $30,000.

DeFi had its own milestones:

• STON.fi launched the first fully on-chain DAO on TON, turning the network’s leading DEX into a community-governed protocol;
• Tonstakers, Hipo and bemo continued to grow stake, lifting delegation infrastructure to a maturity comparable with Ethereum;
• Ecosystem TVL crossed several hundred million dollars and kept rising into year-end.

For a primer on the current DeFi state — see the TON guide.

August 2025: foundation leadership change

On August 20, 2025 the TON Foundation announced that Manuel Stotz was moving to Verb Technology Company — soon to be renamed TON Strategy Co. — to focus on integrating Toncoin into global finance. The trigger was a successful $558M PIPE deal.

Maximilian Crown received expanded authority: the CEO role gained the President title. Concentrating responsibility simplified decision-making ahead of the autumn releases.

For more on the people behind the protocol — see the TON Foundation deep-dive.

Autumn 2025: USDT across all of Telegram, xStocks and the Coinbase listing

Autumn 2025 brought three industrial-scale announcements.

USDT for every Telegram user. Tether and Telegram rolled out native USDT support directly inside the in-Telegram Wallet. Per Tether, more than 12M USDT wallets were created in the first six hours after launch. Toncoin gained roughly 18% within a day on the back of it.

Mini Apps clear 500 million. In the November 2025 TON Ecosystem Update the foundation publicly confirmed for the first time that mini-apps had reached half a billion monthly users. Comparable to App Store category sizes.

Coinbase Ventures and the spot listing. Coinbase Ventures bought Toncoin directly from Telegram, and on November 18, 2025 Coinbase opened TON spot trading for retail and institutional clients in the US. That closed years of foundation work on US market access. Bitstamp got a regulated American counterpart.

Chainlink CCIP. In the same window TON adopted Chainlink CCIP as its canonical cross-chain infrastructure. Toncoin became a Cross-Chain Token (CCT) transferable across major blockchains via decentralised oracle networks.

January-March 2026: the run-up to Catchain

Winter 2026 was about technical work. TON Strategy Co. began discussing a treasury accumulation in TON. The first products with treasury-backed staking yield appeared on the market.

In parallel, the protocol core was preparing a consensus upgrade. By spring 2026 the foundation had announced Catchain 2.0, redesigned along QUIC-transport principles (the same approach Google built into HTTP/3) — claiming sub-second finality.

April 10, 2026: Catchain 2.0 and a 6x fee cut

Catchain 2.0 activated on April 10, 2026 at 14:32 UTC. What changed:

• block time dropped from 2.5 seconds to 400 milliseconds;
• payment finality landed around one second; trading became effectively real-time;
• issuance inflation rose from about 0.6% to about 3.6% per year, because more blocks meant more validator rewards.

In late April, the standard transaction fee was cut roughly 6x — to a fixed 0.00039 TON (about $0.0005). That made micro-tips, in-app tips and other operations economical where gas previously consumed the action’s purpose.

May 4, 2026: Telegram supplants the TON Foundation

On May 4, 2026 Pavel Durov publicly announced that Telegram would take on the TON Foundation’s main responsibilities and become the network’s largest validator. Telegram’s stake is around 2.2M TON. The initiative was branded “Make TON Great Again” (MTONGA).

Toncoin gained 33.8% intraday, reaching $1.86. What this announcement actually means:

1. It is not a corporate takeover. Legally, TON remains an open network with an independent foundation. But the largest validator and technology driver is now Telegram.
2. Structural demand. The messenger’s 950M MAU is officially anchored to one blockchain for the first time. Previously there were integrations; now there’s operational dependency.
3. A new roadmap. Under MTONGA the foundation promised rapid technical upgrades and a website/documentation overhaul within 2-3 weeks.

For an extended breakdown of the Telegram-TON relationship — see the partnerships overview.

In summary

By mid-2026 TON is a blockchain with sub-second finality, a one-and-a-half-cent fee, and a 950-million distribution channel through Telegram. Next steps — see the 2026-2027 roadmap piece.

Sources

• TON Ecosystem Update: November 2025
• Max Crown Appointed President and CEO of TON Foundation
• TON Foundation welcomes Manuel Stotz as new President
• Tether: USDT and XAUT on TON
• Cointelegraph — Catchain 2.0, 400ms blocks
• Cointelegraph — Telegram becomes largest validator
• Coinbase listing announcement