The Open Network (TON), the blockchain initially developed around the Telegram messaging app, has announced a partnership with blockchain gaming company and investor, Animoca Brands.
As per the agreement, Animoca Brands has become the largest validator for TON and is set to play a pivotal role in enriching the TON gaming ecosystem. Its contributions will span various domains, including funding, research, analytics, and the support of third-party gaming and GameFi projects.
Animoca Brands stands as one of the largest and most influential investors in the blockchain gaming sector. Valued at $5 billion in its latest funding round, the company boasts an extensive portfolio of over 400 projects in blockchain gaming, NFTs, and the metaverse. This portfolio includes high-profile projects such as Sandbox, Opensea, Axie Infinity, and many others.
While it is still uncertain whether Animoca has directly invested in the organization behind TON, it must certainly have purchased TON tokens for staking as part of its move to become a validator.
Animoca sees a substantial opportunity in Telegram and TON for its diverse projects, given Telegram’s expansive user base of over 800 million. This offers immense potential to integrate these users into Animoca’s gaming ecosystem.
Concurrently, TON stands to benefit greatly from the partnership with Animoca, which could help attract new projects to its platform. TON’s challenge in onboarding more projects onto its platform stems from its relatively new programming language, which deviates from the languages typically used by blockchain developers. This difference presents a learning curve that has been a barrier for developers to build on TON.
In the announcement, Animoca disclosed its intention to use Ton Play, a toolkit tailored for launching games on Telegram. This toolkit aims to streamline development, providing game developers with an accessible way to tap into Telegram’s large and active user base.
Source: ton.org
Over the past year, TON has made significant strides, ranking as a top 12 cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Initially developed by the Telegram team, the project was abandoned following a legal battle with the U.S. SEC. However, a dedicated group of open-source developers took over the project, leading to the establishment of the TON Foundation in May 2021. Later that year, Pavel Durov endorsed the project on his Telegram channel, fueling its growth ever since.
This year, Telegram announced TON Space, a self-custodial crypto wallet that links users’ Telegram accounts to their TON blockchain addresses. It aims to provide a seamless blockchain experience for Telegram users, potentially attracting more people to cryptocurrency.
While Telegram fully supports TON, it emphasises that TON is an entirely separate, decentralized organization, distinct from Telegram and not affiliated with it.
