GameFi and DeFi Buoy TON as Crypto Markets Continue To Slip

• The Open Network (TON) became Telegram’s exclusive blockchain to power its ecosystem in January 2025.
• Telegram’s play-to-earn mini apps have often been criticised for being unsustainable.
• Toncoin (TON) is currently trading at $3.01, down 51.21% over the past year. It has a market cap of $7.56 billion.

Toncoin (TON) has stayed afloat during the current crypto market downturn as its utility within Telegram’s Web3 gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems.

It also seems that the network is shifting away from the broken and unsustainable airdrop promises of play-to-earn (P2E) gaming and toward play-to-win models.

Web3 Gaming

According to the TON Ecosystem: March 2025 Report , the network has managed to stay afloat through a turbulent market period thanks to its DeFi and new play-to-win offerings.

Perhaps acknowledging the limitations of play-to-earn (P2E) and subtly responding to the many criticisms that its Mini apps get for being unsustainable, the report indicates a shift in the other direction.

More specifically, it highlights a shift toward “Play-to-Win” gaming with the integration of Miomi Game, an eSports platform that focuses on tying rewards to a player’s performance and effort, not just their participation.

Notably, Miomi soaked up 5% of TON transactions in early March.

The report follows 2024’s much-hyped Web3 gaming push from Telegram mini apps such as Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen, which garnered millions of players and distributed billions worth of tokens to hundreds of millions of players through their P2E airdrops.

Telegram’s DeFi

The report also notes a few DeFi projects that are making waves on the platform.

It begins by noting lending protocol Factorial, which increased its total value locked (TVL) from $16 million to a new high of $29 million. This, however, has since retreated to $14.3 million .

In addition, decentralized exchange (DEX) TONCO grew its TVL tenfold from $749,000 to $7.9 million in March. It reached $9.91 million on April 1, 2025, and has since shrunk to $7.68 million .

The network’s first yield tokenization protocol, F IVA, launched on the TON mainnet in late March and has since garnered $1.28 million in TVL.