How to Find the Most Valuable TON Projects: An Investor's Guide

In the dynamic world of blockchain investment, The Open Network (TON) ecosystem has emerged as a significant player, attracting numerous investors with its unique technology and development potential. For new investors, identifying high-value projects within the TON ecosystem can be daunting. This guide offers practical advice to help you navigate the TON ecosystem and discover promising investment opportunities.

1. Monitor The Open League Rankings

Using existing tools to evaluate project quality is crucial for new investors. The Open League is a powerful tool for assessing TON projects. By observing metrics like Total Value Locked (TVL), token price, active user numbers, and core user transactions, you can gauge a project's quality. Pay special attention to TVL changes, price fluctuations, and holder variations, as these indicators reflect market performance and stability, providing a reliable basis for investment decisions.

2. Emphasize Community Base and Operations

A strong community foundation is vital for a project's success. Choose projects with robust community engagement, often indicated by active social media presence and user interactions. Projects with high user engagement on platforms like Twitter and Telegram are likely to have strong community support, which is essential for sustained growth and user retention.

3. Seek Projects with Unique Value

High-quality TON projects should exhibit innovation and practical application value. Look for projects with distinctiveness, real value, scarcity, and fairness. These projects can attract significant activity and real users to the TON ecosystem, offering long-term development potential. Focus on projects that address real-world problems with unique solutions.

4. Evaluate Projects Through Data Analysis

Data analysis is an effective method for assessing project quality. Observe on-chain data performance, such as new user growth, KOL (Key Opinion Leader) tweets, and engagement. Analyze discussion sentiment and geographical distribution to see if the project has global interest. Reading whitepapers and roadmaps can also provide insight into the project's vision and development path, which is crucial for making informed investment decisions.

5. Assess Gaming Experience and User Retention

For beginners, gaming projects are an easy entry point. When evaluating these projects, focus on game experience and user retention rates. Games that are simple, fun, and addictive tend to attract a large user base. Monitor user retention metrics, such as daily and weekly retention rates, to determine ongoing user interest. High engagement on social media platforms is also a good indicator of user loyalty and project potential.

6. Capitalize on Market Trends

In the blockchain market, new trends often bring investment opportunities. For beginners, it is important to focus on projects that quickly gain market attention and user participation. For example, look for projects that use interactive methods like "tap-to-earn" games to attract new users. These games significantly lower the entry barrier for newcomers to the crypto world and effectively guide users to understand the project's basic features and advantages, leading to higher user conversion rates and market acceptance. Projects that are easy to understand and use typically have high investment potential. Stay updated with market trends and be ready to invest in projects that align with current hype cycles.

Challenges and Opportunities in TON Ecosystem

When evaluating TON projects, understanding the ecosystem's challenges and opportunities is crucial. This knowledge can help you identify projects with the potential to address these issues and seize the opportunities.

User Investment Psychology: Currently, unlike in traditional gaming, users in the blockchain world keep an investment mindset when playing games. They often invest a certain amount of time and money in games, but if the returns do not meet their expectations, they tend to abandon the project. This poses a challenge for projects to shift users' investment mentality to a consumer and entertainment mindset. One approach is to leverage the attention economy by engaging users in activities through launching pools, which can extend the ecosystem's lifecycle and increase user retention.

Infrastructure and Asset Retention: Ensuring that user funds remain within the ecosystem is a critical issue on Telegram. Users need to trust the platform's security and stability to hold and use their assets long-term. Building a robust infrastructure that users can rely on is essential for retaining assets within the TON ecosystem.

TON Ecosystem Expansion: TON should not solely rely on the Telegram ecosystem. Just as WeChat Pay operates beyond WeChat, TON aims to expand to other platforms. For instance, at the Token2049 conference, TON officials announced plans to tokenize Telegram stickers as NFTs. Once realized, this could revolutionize the entire NFT ecosystem, broadening TON's reach and appeal.

Development Language Improvement: TON offers three smart contract programming languages: Fift, FunC, and Tact. Tact, a new statically typed high-level language, simplifies smart contract development and enhances security. It supports asynchronous calls for improved blockchain performance and uses message-oriented programming to manage dependencies and updates more efficiently. Although new programming languages can bring many advantages and fully exploit technical strengths, they can also pose barriers to developer entry, ultimately affecting the ecosystem's growth and prosperity. 

Leveraging WeChat Experience: Telegram currently lacks features like WeChat's Moments and Nine-Square Grid. Exploring how Web3 products can create non-Web3 revenue streams could be beneficial. For example, Hamster's app broke YouTube subscription records within a few weeks, demonstrating the potential of combining traffic and investment. Learning from WeChat's successful features can inspire new functionalities within the TON and Telegram ecosystem, enhancing user engagement and monetization.

Conclusion

Finding the next gem in the TON ecosystem involves considering multiple factors, including user experience, data evaluation, community operations, and market trends. Understanding the challenges and opportunities within the TON ecosystem can help new investors make more informed decisions. By following these guidelines, you can identify promising TON projects and maximize your investment returns. While investment always carries risks, a thorough and scientific approach can lead you to successful ventures in the TON ecosystem. Embrace the journey, stay diligent, and you might just uncover the next big opportunity in the world of TON.