An unusual history
Telegram started building TON in 2018 and raised 1,7 billion dollars for it. In 2019 the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued over the token sale, and in May 2020 Telegram abandoned the project and returned funds to investors.
The code was open, so an independent community picked it up and continued development under the TON Foundation. Telegram has no ownership of the network, and the practical relationship reasserted itself anyway: a TON wallet is built into Telegram, and mini-applications inside the messenger use it for payments.
That distribution is the whole reason the network matters commercially. Telegram has hundreds of millions of users, and a wallet sitting inside an app people already have removes the largest barrier in crypto payments.
Speed and cost
Transfers confirm in seconds and cost roughly three tenths of a cent. Both figures put TON among the cheapest options available, comparable to Solana and well below TRON.
The architecture behind that is sharding: the chain splits into parallel segments that process transactions simultaneously and merge results, which is what allows throughput without fees rising under load.
USDT on TON
In 2024 Tether launched USDT natively on the network, and this changed what TON is used for. A stablecoin transfer that costs a fraction of a cent and confirms in seconds, inside a messenger that a customer already has open, is a genuinely strong payment path.
For merchants selling to audiences concentrated on Telegram, which describes a great deal of business in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and parts of the Middle East, this combination is worth enabling specifically.
What to know before accepting it
Memos matter
TON addresses sent to exchanges often require an accompanying memo or comment. A transfer that omits it arrives at the exchange and is credited to nobody until support intervenes.
Address formats vary
TON has several, typically beginning with UQ or EQ, and wallets display them differently. Verifying by first and last characters is the reliable check.
Support is narrower than for older networks
Coverage has improved substantially, though it remains thinner than for Ethereum or TRON.
How TON compares
Against TRON, the two are close on speed and TON is cheaper, though TRON has far broader exchange and wallet support built over more years.
Against Solana, fees and speed land in a similar place. What separates them is distribution: Solana has deeper stablecoin liquidity, TON has a wallet inside an app hundreds of millions of people already use.
Against Ethereum, there is no contest on cost. Ethereum’s advantage lies in ecosystem depth and universal support rather than in anything a payment touches.
For a merchant the choice rarely comes down to technical merit. It comes down to which network the customers already hold funds on, and for a Telegram-centric audience that answer is often TON.