TON Ventures Launches With $40 Million to Fund Telegram’s Crypto Ecosystem

A group of senior builders of The fund will be led by Ian Wittkopp, the former head of TON’s accelerator program, and Inal Kardan, the TON Foundation’s former head of gaming. It will focus initially on early-stage projects with investments of $500,000 or less, Wittkopp told At a later, unspecified date, TON Ventures will expand to support larger “strategic” deals with protocols seeking guidance on entering the TON and Telegram ecosystems, he added. The newly formed VC fund says it is looking to support consumer, “mass appeal” applications that exist within Telegram, the dominant messaging platform, and run on TON. In the last few months, crypto-backed mini apps—primarily games that While the TON Ventures team says it understands why gaming has served as a point of entry for most nascent Telegram mini app developers, they anticipate that the diversity of the TON app ecosystem—and thus of the types of projects TON Ventures supports—will quickly expand. “This makes sense, as WeChat mini apps gained their first traction with enterprise apps and gaming,” Wittkopp said. “And over time, mini app composition skewed towards life apps, mobile shopping, practical tools, etc.”The allusion to WeChat, China’s so-called “everything app,” is not incidental. Other developers who build on TON have previously By facilitating peer-to-peer transactions in mini apps with Toncoin, TON’s native cryptocurrency, and Now, the challenge is to sustainably grow Telegram’s system of mini apps into maturity. In addition to dangling funding to achieve this goal, TON Ventures will also offer selected projects free advertising and media support, as well as access to strategic partnerships and growth and traffic experiments at TON.TON Ventures is not the first program designed to parlay the red-hot success of Telegram mini app games into long-term growth. Last month, the makers of Notcoin Edited by Andrew Hayward