The First Ever Full Disclosure of Telegram User Profiles: Comparing to WeChat, How Far is TON from Mass Adoption?
Authors: Evan Lu, JoyChen, Aaron J, Waterdrip Capital
1. Now is the time to place Mass Adoption at the forefront of visible initiatives.
Mass adoption has long been the foremost challenge facing Web3. Yet, the market frequently gravitates towards short-term financial rewards, overlooking the critical elements necessary for sustainability and achieving true mass adoption. Since Bitcoin’s 2009 debut, only centralized exchanges like Binance, with their user base surpassing 200 million, have truly realized mass adoption in the Web3 landscape.
With the approval of the BTC ETF, the market is now in the midst of a bull run largely embraced by BTC OGs and devoted believers. On the other hand, new tokens have underperformed due to insufficient liquidity, and altcoins have yet to exhibit the widespread flourishing seen in the previous bull market. Most Web3 users have not reaped the full benefits of this bull run. During the last bull market, the number of crypto users skyrocketed from under 50 million in 2019 to 420 million by 2022 — a tenfold increase. However, from early 2024 until now, global crypto users have grown by only 30 million, with the growth pace falling far short of the last bull market.
From a first-principles standpoint, the primary cause of this gap is Web3’s lack of Mass Adoption products capable of effectively attracting Web2 users and capital inflows. As such, now is the crucial time to prioritize visible efforts toward building for Mass Adoption.
2. The Challenges to Achieving Mass Adoption in Web3
A16Z’s “Big Ideas in Tech 2024” report stresses that simplifying the user experience is essential for achieving Mass Adoption in Web3. Similarly, Binance’s “Road to One Billion On-chain Users” report outlines two core requirements for Mass Adoption: first, there must be on-chain applications that users genuinely want; second, these applications must be easy to understand and access. Many products that have achieved Product-Market Fit (PMF) and successfully navigated market cycles confirm these two fundamental conditions. At the same time, the crypto industry still needs to develop the necessary infrastructure, tools, and public awareness to make the idea of “digital ownership” both understandable and accessible to global users.
Mark Suster, managing partner at the veteran Los Angeles venture capital firm Upfront Ventures, pointed out that creating a Mass Adoption product requires not only PMF but also the ability to generate consistent revenue and target a sufficiently large market.
Mass Adoption is about more than just user acquisition; it’s also about capturing the liquidity that users hold. IOBC Capital believes that resolving compliance pathways for traditional institutions entering Web3 is another key aspect of achieving Mass Adoption. Compliance is considered soft infrastructure. With the approval of BTC/ETH ETFs, the establishment of BlackRock’s RWA fund, and U.S. presidential candidates including Web3 in their campaign promises, policy and compliance developments are steadily moving forward in an irreversible manner.
To summarize, for Web3 to realize Mass Adoption, the following conditions must be met:
1. Address a genuine need (i.e., PMF).
2. Target a market of billions of people or a valuation in the tens of billions.
3. Ensure low barriers to adoption and high user-friendliness.
4. Build mature infrastructure and supply chains to support the product’s core value and user experience.
5. Acquire users at scale with precision.
6. Establish a long-term, sustainable business model.
Conditions 1 through 4 have seen significant investment and improvement in Web3. Telegram and TON have provided strong advantages in meeting condition 5. However, condition 6 — sustainability — has shown limited progress. The key logic is:
· PMF ≠ Profitability. Just because a product meets market needs doesn’t guarantee that it will be profitable.
· Without sustainable revenue, it’s difficult to acquire users at scale and with precision over the long term. Airdrops may generate initial growth, but without sustained profitability, who will continue to back the tokens distributed in these campaigns?
Looking back at the last market cycle, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, and the Metaverse all provided significant momentum for Mass Adoption. These sectors met several of the conditions listed above: Axie Infinity and YGG addressed the income needs of unemployed Filipinos during the pandemic, while StepN met users’ fitness demands and lowered adoption barriers with its built-in wallet. However, despite their significant achievements, many of these projects fell short of fulfilling their Mass Adoption missions due to a lack of sustainable business models. Non-financial return products struggled to convince users to pay, preventing long-term continuation of Mass Adoption. These experiences offer valuable lessons for the future.
The Advantages and Challenges of the TON Ecosystem in Achieving Mass Adoption
3.1 Advantages
A Social Viral Network of 1 Billion Users — Enabling Large-Scale User Acquisition
As of now, Telegram has 950 million monthly active users, providing a vast platform for the social viral marketing of projects. Word-of-mouth marketing is currently one of the most efficient methods for large-scale user acquisition, and large-scale, efficient user acquisition is a crucial prerequisite for achieving Mass Adoption.
Building on this advantage, the TON ecosystem has successfully nurtured several projects with user bases in the tens of millions, with 60% of active projects being in the gaming sector. Among them, Notcoin was the first to achieve this milestone, having attracted over 35 million crypto users since its launch. Its token, $NOT, transitioned from listing to trading on exchanges in less than a month, achieving a 400% price increase within just two weeks. It has become one of the standout altcoins of this bull market.
Maximizing Product-Market Fit (PMF) Through the Mini Program Framework — Meeting End-User Needs
In the world of ecosystems and infrastructure, achieving Product-Market Fit (PMF) often comes down to probability. By expanding the number of products, ecosystems increase their chances of meeting user needs. The combination of Telegram’s mini-programs and the TON ecosystem has been particularly successful in attracting developers, resulting in the creation of a wide range of mini-programs designed to meet diverse user needs.
For developers, the reasons to join Telegram and TON are clear: there is a massive user base, and the conversion rate from exposure to application usage is high. Mini-programs offer the shortest route for users to access services — there’s no need to enter a URL or download an app; it’s just click and use. This approach not only lowers the barrier for users but also enhances conversion rates for products seeking to grow their user base.
Banana Gun, a Telegram bot, launched on Binance on July 18, 2024. It enables both automated and manual trading on the Ethereum network, and users can also manually trade tokens on the Solana network. Banana Gun’s success is largely due to the support from Telegram’s bot and mini-program frameworks, along with its advantage in reaching Telegram’s vast user base.
Highly Integrated MPC Wallet — Low Barriers, High Usability
TON currently provides users with two wallet options: the Telegram Wallet and TON Space. Excluding U.S. users, everyone else can activate the Telegram Wallet by adding the wallet bot and launching TON Space through the Telegram Wallet mini-program. When making transactions within the Telegram app, from registration to transfers and payments, the Telegram wallet offers one of the most seamless user experiences, rivaling the ease of WeChat Pay.
Thanks to TON’s low-barrier wallet infrastructure, Catizen has achieved an impressive 10% on-chain user conversion rate. The game now has 25 million players, approximately 1.5 million on-chain gamers, and over 500,000 paying users worldwide. In-game revenue has surpassed $16 million.
On July 23, Binance Incubator announced its investment in Pluto Studio, Catizen’s distribution platform. Binance co-founder and Binance Labs head, Yi He, remarked: “Binance Labs has always been passionate about supporting projects like Pluto Studio, which have the potential to onboard billions of users into Web3. We are eager to support more visionary builders who are focused on developing products designed for Mass Adoption.”
3.2 Challenges
Reliance on Telegram
The TON ecosystem’s biggest strength is its exclusive support from Telegram — it is the only Web3 infrastructure integrated with and promoted within Telegram. But this advantage is also its greatest risk. Any significant changes within Telegram could have systemic repercussions for TON. For instance, when Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov was arrested, the Total Value Locked (TVL) in the TON ecosystem dropped by over 60% in just one day, illustrating the systemic risk of relying solely on a centralized entity.
Underdeveloped DeFi Sector
While users are the foundation for liquidity, not all products and teams possess the capability to monetize traffic effectively. The limited willingness of Telegram users to spend is not necessarily an issue with the ecosystem itself but more a consequence of product structure and team execution. Projects like Catizen and various trading bots/mini-programs have effectively captured liquidity from Telegram’s traffic. In Web2 mini-games, such as those on WeChat, roughly 60% of traffic comes from decentralized viral marketing. Despite this, the TVL in TON’s ecosystem remains relatively low, primarily due to an underdeveloped DeFi sector. Currently, STON.fi and DeDust together account for 80% of the TVL in the TON ecosystem.
Incomplete Commercial Services
When developers evaluate an ecosystem, they typically focus on four key aspects:
1. Platform size
2. Infrastructure completeness
3. Efficiency in reaching users
4. Support for traffic monetization
The last two fall under commercial services and infrastructure. In these areas, TON has only reached about 50% of its potential.
· In terms of user reach, TON has been able to achieve large-scale, efficient access. Apart from viral sharing, user acquisition methods in the TON ecosystem mainly involve non-performance-based marketing via Telegram Ads using a CPM model and traffic redirection between mini-programs using points walls. However, due to privacy policies, precise targeting and performance marketing are not fully feasible unless Telegram compromises its core principles and collects extensive user data.
· In terms of monetizing traffic, TON offers excellent tools such as the Web3-focused Telegram Wallet and TON Space, alongside Web2 tools like Telegram Star. However, many products that best align with user needs — such as free tools and casual games — are not well-suited to paid monetization models. Yet, these free products play a critical role in driving Mass Adoption.
Establishing a stable and reliable business model is a crucial prerequisite for products to achieve Mass Adoption. The incomplete commercial services and infrastructure in the TON ecosystem represent a significant unresolved barrier to the creation of Mass Adoption products.
Efforts are being made to address the challenge of building sustainable business models. MiniTon, a monetization service provider funded by the TON Foundation, offers a TaaS (Tournaments as a Service) model for casual and competitive game developers, helping them reduce their reliance on ad-based revenue. MiniTon has also restructured the social operations of games using the Friend Tech protocol, aiming to establish a stable and sustainable Web3 business model.
The competitive tournament revenue model (EF & RK) is one of the three primary game monetization strategies, alongside ad-based revenue (IAA) and in-app purchases (IAP). This model is widely applied in PvP games like card games, a category with a market size exceeding $30 billion annually in Web2 and consistently one of the top-performing sectors in social apps. It has been a major driver of Mass Adoption in Web2. MiniTon leverages blockchain technology to seamlessly integrate the tournament revenue model into Telegram, optimizing operations for the PvP game market, which exceeds $30 billion in annual revenue.
In its early stages of development, MiniTon received significant investment and incubation from Waterdrip Capital. Currently, MiniTon provides a social and competitive platform for players, allowing them to experience esports-style competition within single-player casual games while forming new social connections. Developers can integrate MiniTon’s monetization solution into their games in just 1.5 days using the provided SDK.
To date, MiniTon has completed its Alpha I closed beta, involving 30,000 users and achieving a 1% payment conversion rate. Alpha II is expected to launch by the end of September, expanding the user base to hundreds of thousands.
Notably, MiniTon’s game contracts are built on a multi-chain protocol, meaning they do not depend solely on a single ecosystem, giving the platform strong resilience against systemic risks.
What Lessons Can the TON Ecosystem Draw from WeChat’s Successes and Failures?
4.1 Is WeChat a Worthy Reference?
Both WeChat and Telegram are fundamentally social platforms, with communication and relationships at their core. However, there are substantial differences between WeChat users and Telegram users. Below is Telegram’s user data from the past week, as reported by a third-party monitoring service:
4.2 Contrasting User Profiles: Telegram vs. WeChat
Aside from geographic differences in their user bases, the most striking contrast between Telegram and WeChat comes down to user habits:
· WeChat is primarily a close-knit social platform, fostering strong social connections, while Telegram is a broader social network, similar in nature to QQ.
· On average, WeChat users spend 1.5 hours per day on the app, whereas Telegram users spend just 0.5 hours.
As of June 2024, the monthly active users (MAUs) of WeChat mini-programs reached a staggering 930 million, with a penetration rate of over 90%. The combination of a vast user base and WeChat’s well-established commercial infrastructure is key to developers’ success within the WeChat mini-program ecosystem. The reasons include:
1. Seamless user access: No need for downloads or URLs, users can instantly access mini-programs with a simple click.
2. Social-driven user acquisition: Around 60% of the traffic comes from peer sharing.
3. New growth opportunities: Data shows that by February 2024, WeChat mini-games boasted 755 million MAUs, surpassing the 650 million user base of dedicated mobile gaming apps.
4. A highly efficient commercialization framework: Through WeChat Ads and WeChat Pay, mini-games generated $3 billion in revenue in 2023.
Although Telegram mini-programs share the first three of these advantages, the platform still faces significant shortcomings compared to WeChat:
1. Limited user spending power: A large portion of Telegram’s users come from regions with lower purchasing capacities.
2. Lack of precision targeting: Due to privacy regulations, Telegram cannot offer targeted advertising services like WeChat, making it harder to attract high-value users or specific target audiences.
3. Low payment adoption: Telegram Wallet’s penetration rate is only 5%, compared to WeChat Pay’s 92.4%.
That said, Telegram continues to dominate the crypto space in terms of user penetration. By focusing on high-value crypto users within this segment, Telegram mini-programs could mitigate some of these limitations. As such, the success of WeChat mini-programs offers a valuable reference model.
4.3 Project Development Path: Lessons from the WeChat Mini -Program/Mini-Game Ecosystem
Examining the development of the WeChat mini-game ecosystem reveals that the viability of mini-game developers is closely tied to the level of support provided by WeChat’s official developer services.
The Wild Growth Phase of WeChat Mini Programs
· During this period, WeChat’s operations were slow to catch up, and the ecosystem developed in a chaotic, “wild” manner. Viral sharing allowed developers to easily attract massive user bases, leading to the proliferation of many “reskinned” games — games that could be developed in five days, launched, and have their costs recovered in just three days, which often resulted in low-quality products.
· At the time, mini-games were distributed in a decentralized manner, with most user acquisition relying on other mini-programs and WeChat ads.
· Revenue for these mini-games and free mini-programs primarily came from ad-based monetization (IAA), where users were redirected to other mini-programs or games, along with integrating WeChat’s ad plugins.
· A key takeaway for Web3 developers is that Telegram is currently in a similar phase. Aside from the exceptional success of Pirates, 98% of the top 50 games from this period were casual or casual-competitive games, such as Happy Dou Di Zhu, Three Match Numbers, Brain Challenge, Geometry Dash, and I Want to be Emperor, the latter sharing gameplay similarities with today’s Catizen.
2020–2022: Ecosystem Adjustments
· This phase was influenced by certain macroeconomic factors, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the Health Code mini-program reached 800 million users by 2020.
· By October 2022, WeChat mini-programs had reached 1 billion monthly active users. The ecosystem focused on scaling traditional industries such as education, healthcare, and dining, while also pushing the gaming industry to improve product quality. WeChat offered developers over 100 new features and APIs, steadily improving its monetization services (IAA and IAP).
· During this period, the only mini-game that achieved viral success was Sheep a Sheep. As WeChat imposed stricter standards on game content quality and limited viral sharing behaviors, mini-games experienced a “smile curve” in performance. Ultimately, WeChat’s operational strategy paid off: 50 games generated over 50 million yuan in revenue, and 7 games exceeded 100 million yuan.
Key Insights for Web3 Developers:
· During this period, the top-grossing games continued to be casual competitive games, particularly card games. In terms of gameplay, the highest-earning genres were card games, MMORPGs, simulation games, and idle games.
2023 to Present: Explosive Growth Amid Stability
· Thanks to WeChat mini-games’ ongoing push for high-quality content and continuous optimization of the technical infrastructure, numerous mid-core and hardcore games with high revenue potential have emerged.
· According to Tencent’s Q1 2024 financial report, the total time spent by users on WeChat mini-programs increased by more than 20% year-on-year. Revenue from WeChat mini-games in 2023 tripled compared to 2022, with over 240 games generating more than 10 million yuan in quarterly revenue over the past year.
· The key factors driving the explosive growth of WeChat mini-programs and mini-games during this period include:
o Allowing WeChat mini-games and mini-programs to advertise on external platforms like Douyin, which significantly boosted advertising efficiency;
o The addition of live streaming as a new channel for user acquisition;
o The most profitable game categories gradually shifted from primarily card games to MMORPGs, idle games, card games, and simulation games;
o Monetization strategies evolved from relying solely on IAA (in-app advertising) or IAP (in-app purchases) to hybrid models combining both IAA and IAP.
4.4 Lessons the TON Ecosystem Can Learn from the Growth of WeChat Mini Programs
· Focus on solving the core issues developers care about (PMF), such as enhancing compatibility with game engines, improving user acquisition efficiency, opening up external performance marketing channels beyond Telegram for mini-programs, increasing wallet penetration, and providing stronger support for commercial solutions.
· Cultivate a fast response to market demands, much like WeChat’s early years, when ecosystem policies were adjusted multiple times each month to better adapt to market conditions.
· Provide robust support for every new product, such as offering targeted and free traffic support policies for each mini-program (in line with WeChat’s priority support policies for select mini-programs).
· Encourage the creation and promotion of high-quality content within the ecosystem.
Reference：
https://cointelegraph.com/news/hamster-kombat-guinness-world-record-200m-users
https://www.triple-a.io/cryptocurrency-ownership-data
https://www.blocktempo.com/how-to-judge-web3-socialfi-mass-adoption/
https://a16z.com/big-ideas-in-tech-2024/
https://www.binance.com/en/research/analysis/road-to-one-billion-on-chain-users
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/building-products-for-mass-adoption-e193e6c3226a
