TON Crypto Ecosystem Gets Its Own Venture Fund to Invest $40M in Consumer Apps

The rapidly growing TON blockchain, originally launched by messaging app Telegram, is getting its own venture capital fund as ecosystem leaders create a for-profit organization independent of the network’s development foundation.

TON Ventures announced its formation on Wednesday, led by Ian Wittkopp, former director of TON Accelerator, and Inal Kardan, former gaming director of the TON Foundation.

The organization has already raised $40 million and plans to invest in early-stage consumer apps with “mass appeal” in the TON ecosystem, the press release said. Investors in the fund are “mostly [composed] “We are a community of individual, dedicated investors looking to support the long-term growth of the TON ecosystem,” the co-founders wrote in an email to CoinDesk.

The TON ecosystem has seen a rapid rise in popularity recently, with web3 games like Hamster Kombat and Notcoin attracting millions of users. These applications are built on The Open Network, or TON, a decentralized layer-1 blockchain that was initially developed by Telegram but continued as an independent operation due to regulatory concerns after Telegram settled a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2020.

Digital asset investment firm Pantera Capital said earlier this year that it made its largest investment in TON’s history and is raising funds for a second round of funding. Crypto giant Tether introduced its USDT stablecoin to TON in April to boost peer-to-peer payments among Telegram users.

Read more: Hamster Kombat Says It Skipped VC Funding Offers, Criticized Its ‘Exit Liquidity’ Behavior

The network’s native token, toncoin (TON), has also seen a price boom, gaining 339% in the past year to enter the top 10 cryptocurrencies with a market cap of $16 billion.

“TON and Telegram have created a paradigm shift for web3,” Ian W., managing partner at TON Ventures, said in a statement. “With our deep experience in the ecosystem, we believe the highest leverage point for TON is capital allocation.”