TVM Ventures has launched a $100 million fund to promote the expansion of The Open Network’s on-chain offerings — signaling a push to steer the network away from its reliance on L2s.
TVM said the goal of the fund is to equip startups and enterprises with capital and infrastructure to drive mass adoption of TON, a blockchain developed in concert with messaging app Telegram. The fund will do that by promoting development on the TON blockchain’s base layer, rather than on its L2s or side chains.
If TON doesn’t develop its own blockchain, it “will become yet another EVM L2 where people come to farm ‘new’ projects that copy and paste smart contracts written years ago in Ethereum,” TON Foundation board member Steve Yun told Decrypt.
Allocations from the fund will go toward three investment pillars, the firm said: Decentralized finance infrastructure, cross-border payments and security on TON.
Under that investing framework, TVM Ventures plans to prioritize DeFi protocols that enable users to store and save their crypto and access other traditional banking-like services. Meanwhile, it will also allocate funds to accelerating projects that address “vast inefficiencies” in remittances and the broader cross-border payments space, according to Yun.
On the security front, TVM Ventures said it will also support safety across its portfolio protocols, collaborating with advanced security auditors for the TON Virtual Machine.
TON launched in 2021, aiming to onboard at least 500 million users to Web3. It started as the brainchild of messaging app Telegram, which eventually passed the buck to an outside community of builders due to regulatory concerns.
Still, Telegram and TON have become increasingly enmeshed over the past two years, with several applications bringing in waves of Telegram users to the network. Those applications include TON Wallet, an application launched on Telegram to facilitate tap-to-earn crypto games such as Hamster Combast, Notcoin and Catizen. The games have managed to attract hundreds of millions of players.
However, Yun envisions a world in which the TON community is focused on its own chain, rather than side chains and L2s.
Building on a Layer 1 enables users to have a more decentralized and secure experience than building on Layer-2 networks, which typically sacrifice security for speed. It also prevents the fragmentation of liquidity, he said.
“TON is at a crossroads,” Yun said. “It can either pursue the path of reliance on L2s and side-chains or dedicate itself to its own chain. We choose the latter.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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