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- [00:00]
Jack Booth
Foreign.
- [00:11]
Steve Yoon
Board member Steve Yoon and Ton Society co founder Jack Booth. Hello.
- [00:18]
Sam
Hello. Thanks for having us. Hello.
- [00:19]
Steve Yoon
Hello. We know that you have been very busy, busy folks. So let's just start this by laying a foundation. I know years ago Telegram was going to launch Ton and then there were some challenges with that. And then the group of independents launched ton and now here we are talking about us talking about it. Give us a brief history. How did we get here?
- [00:40]
Jack Booth
So, as you know, TON was designed and created by Telegram and when they were forced to give up the development, they open sourced the whole code code base. And from then, community members like myself picked up the baton and to continue the development. And in 2023, we created ton foundation in Switzerland and we enter into an exclusive agreement with Telegram to basically leverage Telegram to get Ton blockchain into mass adoption.
- [01:12]
Steve Yoon
Now talk to us a little bit about the Telegram partnership. I know a lot of the headlines have really been focused on gaming on Telegram, but talk to us a little bit about that. Is that your main focus or are there other ways that Ton integrates with Telegram?
- [01:26]
Jack Booth
So Telegram launched the Telegram minia platform and we integrated ton based wallet inside Telegram. So basically it allows an experience of on chain applications without downloading a separate wallet or another application. So it's not clunky as the website version, but it's totally powerful and intuitive right inside Telegram messenger that people can use within the social context and the boundaries of social network that they have. And also we established a exclusive partnership with Telegram just this January, where every mini app on Telegram looking to utilize a blockchain function must use Ton blockchain as the exclusive blockchain. And the reason for that is for user experience. Ton was designed to service a billion users and there is no such scalable blockchain in the world other than ton. So this is why for Telegram, it is important to standardize the user experience across many apps.
- [02:28]
Sam
And you mentioned gaming as one of our main use cases. And the reason why that is so important is because we have so many new people in crypto inside of Telegram. So the user base is 50. Most people that have done surveys have found 50, 60% of them are new to crypto entirely. So how do you actually activate that audience? Well, gaming is a great way to actually bring them on, get them engaged, help them to learn a little bit about crypto through a simple game interface. And that's why you've seen some of these apps last year grow from 30 million users, 50 million users, 300 million users, in the case of Hamster Combat. So the gaming ecosystem is now changing on ton. The tap to earn craze has died off a little bit, which is good. You know these guys were early, early adopters of like how to onboard people with a simple use case. But now these, the games that are coming out now are much more mid core, much more interesting and engaging and integrating crypto in new ways where it's still going to keep people engaged and allow people to share these applications a lot more widely and then be complemented now with a focus that Tom foundation is having on Defi so that these people can come from the games, go straight into simple yield producing protocols.
- [03:52]
Steve Yoon
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- [04:25]
Jenna
Is when you think of the early days of discord in crypto. Discord, the user base was very anti crypto. We saw a lot of, a lot of people want to flee and the place they ended up was Telegram. So you have a gaming platform that sort of didn't want to embrace its crypto roots. And I feel like Telegram, which is so native to kind of the crypto ecosystem, has now embraced gaming as an alternative to that. Do you think there's any correlation to that and the fact that Telegram embraced the crypto ecosystem with open arms and then started to create their own blockchain?
- [04:59]
Jack Booth
I think Telegram absolutely is the crypto native crypto centric platform. There are 40,000 crypto communities on Telegram alone. So we are exchanging Telegram context all day long. So I think it's definitely the right place to build a blockchain application. And I can also go further into some use case. So I think the next mass adoption on Defi will come from community driven copy trading. So instead of asking someone to use a complex trading instrument, we can create a super accessible mini app interface and distribute trading strategies in Telegram channels in context. So 40,000 crypto channels on Telegram can be saying, okay, we think ton will go to $40, therefore you should trade, you should follow my trade. And if they trust this person who posted it, they can Simply click without leaving Telegram messenger at all. Confirm and subscribe. So I think leveraging the trust already existing in Telegram social network is a key to bringing mass adoption in Defi.
- [06:12]
Sam
Yeah. If you think about what works really well in Telegram because it has this unique way of distribution where it doesn't have an algorithm censoring a newsfeed, right? Most every other social network has a newsfeed where you post everything, whereas the distribution in Telegram is different. You have one message and if that message is good, worth sharing, it can be forwarded onto all of your chats, all of your channels, all your DMs, right? And then inside of that maybe you have a million people. A million people can then forward that onto all of their chats, channels and DMs and then 100 million, and then up to a billion users right inside of Telegram can receive that message if it's worth sharing. So the things that do really well in Telegram are these social apps that really use the social distribution of Telegram to enrich the the actual experience of the user. Right? You can see that with the growth of Telegram Premium, where you can buy Telegram Premium with Toncoin, we see a lot of people do that. And what Telegram Premium gives you is animated emojis, stickers, statuses, all these things which like improve a one to one interaction. Because now I can give you a nice cool emoji in support of whatever your point is, right? Simple things like that, but they grow because they are enriching the social experience. So there's one actually app I can highlight which is called Olympics. Olympics does skill based wagering. So effectively it can turn any Web2 game into a skill based wagering game with a leaderboard where I can now tell you about the game that I'm playing and say, Kate, come join me playing this game and I'll bet you one ton you can't beat me. These games can grow to millions of people in a single tournament. And so when you think about the distribution of Telegram and how big these tournaments can grow, that's a really exciting use case as well for Ton, where it could even eclipse trading in many ways because it's a much more native thing to non crypto audience. A skill based wagering game, right? So like 100 million users all paying 1 ton in a tournament to beat me at Candy Crush, right? That's a much more fun, engaging thing that uses crypto and still gives you the reward of crypto than potentially trading, which is a bit more difficult to understand for most people.
- [08:32]
Steve Yoon
I want to Come back to something we were talking about before. We talked about chain exclusivity. We talked about games. There were some games that were not happy about the chain exclusivity. I know there were a few headlines about that recently. How would you respond to games who are looking at this chain exclusivity, looking at the TON ecosystem and are deterred by it?
- [08:50]
Jack Booth
I think that once they achieve such viral success, so having 50 million users and more, they will actually understand that there is no other chain that can mint tokens for 50 million users and above. So on paper it could sound a bit restricting, but in reality it is a total necessity, a technical necessity even for them to service their users. As an example, there is one application in one other blockchain who created a mini app, achieved tens of millions of users, and when they were trying to mint the tokens, they crushed their own blockchain and they simply couldn't fix it. Therefore, they had to recreate a smart contract on tonight to actually service their users in web 3. So rather than restriction, it is a necessity for them.
- [09:46]
Sam
Just to add. Another point is around the user experience. If there's multiple different connection protocols inside of Telegram, it's very dangerous for the user because they don't know what the normal connection process to a blockchain looks like. And so they can end up connecting to a scam protocol that's going to drain their wallets and take all their money. Right. That's very, very important and I think is one of the main reasons why Telegram decided that it should be exclusive to just one experience of connecting to a blockchain, which is Tonconnect.
- [10:17]
Jenna
So I wrote one of the first articles on Hamster Combat, which you guys mentioned earlier. At that time it was about 6 or 8 million users you mentioned. I think it's 300 million. It's some ridiculous number. It was fascinating to see how quickly that grew because I think we all think in crypto, as Jenna was mentioning, that gaming is an entry point for so many, it didn't feel like you were playing in crypto. I know there was some controversy of whether the reward system was the one that people wanted who would spend a lot of time playing. But regardless, I remember forwarding that game to so many people saying you have to just play to understand you don't need an amazing tier one gaming shooter game. You can really play something that just is virally behavioral, shareable and has social rewards built in. Is that really the secret sauce for a successful game on Telegram?
- [11:11]
Jack Booth
I think Refer to Earn is A critical part of achieving virality and also having a simple mechanics of engagement is also very critical. But there is one paradigm shift in my view where the Tong community is going through. So we, at least I, we. I've talked to many people and in our community we used to think that creating a super app is more like a funnel where there's a very simple hyper casual game at the top, mid core games, and then defi is somewhere in the bottom. But I've spoken with people who experienced and participated in the growth of WeChat and Kakao and other super ecosystems. Actually, when we have 1 billion users, some people will never use defi, but they will always play hyper casual game. Some people will never even play hyper casual game, but actually use defi protocols and so on and so forth. So therefore it means that instead of trying to transform the hamster combat users into defi, we should consider them different user demographic. Maybe there is an overlap. So it means that we should build more and more use cases, ride sharing, e commerce, AI mid core games, and many other use cases that can fit my unique target user base among the 1 billion Telegram users.
- [12:29]
Steve Yoon
Okay, we have to go. I really am going to get in trouble for asking this, but I have to get one more question in. Is the idea to make telegram the next super app, and how do you think about combating the other super app that's WeChat?
- [12:42]
Jack Booth
I think that no other super apps or social media at this scale is even able to dabble into blockchain because of Ton's unique architecture. So it has. It's a private company without an ipo. It has always stood for the freedom of expression and speech. I think ton hits the right culture and Telegram hits the right culture and the legal setup to be able to do something exclusive and intimate with the blockchain.
- [13:14]
Sam
Yeah, I would say definitely yes.
- [13:17]
Steve Yoon
Yes.
- [13:17]
Sam
The super app telegram is going to become the Web3 super app. Ton is going to be the foundational layer of it all the apps on top of ton are going to become well known, used and make crypto easy. Simple as texting. That's the vision and that's certainly what every team and Ton is working towards. What ton society is working towards. It's what ton foundation is working towards. Crypto. Simple, easy to use and straight to the value. Right. We don't need to financialize or philosophize or talk about the tech all the time. We just need to get people straight to the value so that we can prove that crypto is valuable, is useful, and I don't think we do that enough. We just talk about the philosophy. Is it decentralized enough? The tech, is it fast enough, or is it? Or has the number gone up? Right? We financialize everything. Let's talk about the value and get people straight as quickly as possible to whatever that value that crypto should provide is. And that's what apps on Ton are seeking to do.
- [14:23]
Steve Yoon
Well, Sam and I are all about the value, Sam. So thank you both for joining us here and sharing, and we hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.
- [14:30]
Sam
Thank you so much for having us.