TON Society acts as the primary organization driving support for the TON community, dedicated to providing developers, builders, and enthusiasts with the resources and opportunities needed to foster collaboration and growth within the ecosystem.
At a recent event, TON announced several significant updates, including improvements to Telegram's applications and the launch of Society DAO, a governance initiative introduced by TON Foundation.
Benzinga recently caught up with Jack Booth, co-founder of TON Society, to discuss the organization's efforts to amplify community goals, initiatives like the Open League, Hackers League bootcamps, and more. Here's an excerpt of the conversation.
What makes Telegram uniquely effective for onboarding new users to crypto?
The massive user base, for one. And the ability to create a Telegram mini app for two. So, Telegram mini-apps open in one tab from a Telegram channel. And that provides a totally unique experience because you don’t need to download a new app.
You normally don’t need to go through a registration process even to get started. And that is like a 10x better experience than having to go through like, you know, before you’d start using a crypto application, go through KYC, fund the account, send money from your bank account. Normally most projects on TON are free to get started, free to start using. And so that means it’s very easy to understand and begin to learn about the crypto application.
How does TON Society support and amplify the TON community's goals?
We are responsible for community engagement. So, our main metric is reach on the community’s projects and activities as well as getting people to engage in what the ecosystem is up to. So as part of that, we run all of the community channels. So, we see ourselves as almost as an ecosystem journalist reporting on the main stories of the ecosystem as they happen and also running all of the events.
We also run Hackers League as well, which is a more developer-focused event series. We’re doing this concurrently, so it’s just a crazy amount of work that we’ve put into this event plus the boot camps, 20 boot camps we’ve run over six weeks, each of them three days long over a weekend.
So, starting mid-October until mid-November, we’ve got these 20 boot camps happening all over the world. And it’s all in a way of bringing the community together to connect, help them understand how to build their projects, help them get in touch with core members who can help them reach the right people, get the right funding, get access to the right resources. And so, we provide a very important role, I believe, in the ecosystem.
Could you share more about the Open League and how it incentivizes community engagement?
The Open League is a competition between projects where the Open League this season will actually pay airdrops to the users of the projects. And in that way, that pushes people to go, oh, you know what, I want to participate in the Open League. And because we make it a big structure that all projects in the TON ecosystem can plug into, now everyone in the TON community knows about it. They know how to get involved, and there’s incentives involved. So now we’re incentivizing people to not only just get involved in the projects, but also to share those projects, to post about them.
It’s like a flywheel effect of like, projects come in, then they go into the Open League, then they get users, then those users get paid, then those users bring other users in. And so, it’s like a nice kind of flywheel effect, bringing more people in. In a competitive way, where we’re not like specifically supporting particular tokens over other tokens. It’s all fair and transparent.
What is the purpose of The Hackers League bootcamps, and what impact have they had globally?
The purpose is to get people from pitch stage all the way to prize-winning and hopefully fully funded VC-funded startup. This year, we closed $2.1 million of committed capital from different VCs, MEXC Ventures, KuCoin Ventures, Gate Ventures, Kenetic Capital, TON Ventures. So, the idea is really to provide a platform that can actually deliver on that promise. You come with a pitch, you meet a load of community members in your boot camp, you do your pitch at the end of the boot camp, and then you apply with that pitch to the hackathon, and then your application gets reviewed and provided to all of these VCs who can then say if you win or not.
So, it’s a really proven model, like we did in the summer. It was fantastic. We got 1,000 applicants to the hackathon. The Hackers League is like an offline element, which is the three-day boot camps, and then the online hackathon, which all of the applications feed into. So, the one in the summer was 14 of those people from the boot camp actually became winners of the hackathon.
And now they are building projects on TON today.
Are there particular regions or demographics TON Society is focusing on to drive adoption?
Yes, the super app regions. So anywhere where there’s already an existing super app, we found to be very receptive to the vision of TON. Because they already use super apps.
They have super apps in their lives. There are also a lot of developers that are already building super app applications that are familiar with that type of experience of building within another app. And so, it just makes sense to focus there, where those people have already developed use cases and use, use cases that are valuable for them. So yeah, those are the places. Southeast Asia, CIS, Eastern Europe.
What key metrics or milestones does TON Society use to assess the success of initiatives like The Open League and Hackers League?
Well, there’s a big variation in different things. Like The Open League is based on users, like acquiring new users into TON blockchains and activate wallets. Hackers League is based on applicants to the hackathon.
Generally, TON Society is responsible for reach for all of the ecosystem. So, we want to provide different platforms that all the projects can plug into. They get them reach, get them discovered, get people seeing them.
Are there any upcoming programs or initiatives TON Society is planning to support TON's growth?
Yes, there is TON Teleport launch. So, TON Teleport is a decentralized Bitcoin bridge. It uses the validators of TON network to actually secure the third-party keys.
And so, no one has access to the keys. And it’s a very secure bridge, extremely secure bridge to take Bitcoin over to TON and mint a wrapped asset called, we’re calling TG Bitcoin, Bitcoin in Telegram. There’s going to be a big testing period and then we’ll launch sometime in Q1. So, with Society DAO, we want to build a way where the community can debate on whatever’s going on within the ecosystem.
And that would look like a platform that people can come, share their opinion, achieve consensus of community opinion. And when you achieve consensus of community opinion, that can be used to create proposals, on-chain blockchain proposals. In governance generally, there’s a lot of things that happens before you actually get to a Bill passed, right? A lot of debate in parliaments and Congress and all those types of stuff. In order to actually get to a Bill, it’s gone through 26 different steps in the case of the UK government. So, we don’t actually have that in blockchain in general because the debates are so mixed up. There’s no signal or the noise of what exactly is the community opinion. And so, we want to build a platform that allows us to find consensus in community opinion. And that’s what we’re working on.
