Original | Odaily Star Daily
Author | Nan Zhi
With the explosion of Notcoin, the TON ecosystem has seen a viral growth pattern through Telegram invitations. This method has been seen in multiple examples in WeChat mini-games, such as “Sheep Sheep Sheep,” “Synthetic Big Watermelon,” and “Cute Dog Transformation.”
However, due to restrictions on game approvals in China, direct payment models cannot be adopted, with the most common monetization model being through advertisements. In the Telegram ecosystem, there are no restrictions, and the convenient link with the TON wallet provides a convenient channel for payments. After viral marketing, how do these TON ecosystem games monetize users?
Paid Props
Taking the most popular click-type games as an example, the in-game tokens or points in such games are directly related to the number of clicks, and some click games have added a boost using TON in the game, but the fees are not high. In TapSwap, users can pay 0.5 TON (worth about $3.5) to permanently double their points. If users believe that the game token of the project has a high expected value, purchasing a Boost becomes a must for long-term participants.
Apart from click-type games, there are also projects with real gameplay, where users purchase the underlying logic of the game not solely based on the expected token issuance in the crypto space, but also because they are willing to pay for the game itself.
Taking the most well-known Catizen as an example, this game is consistent with the gameplay of Cute Dog Transformation, which became popular on WeChat years ago. Users can raise pets of various levels, collect their output tokens, and then continue to raise higher-level pets. At that time, Cute Dog Transformation could only monetize through advertisements, while Catizen took a different approach in the TON ecosystem.
Firstly, Catizen introduced a game props payment module, allowing users to pay in TON to obtain Fish tokens, which can accelerate the hatching process of pets in Catizen and the marginal cost increases rapidly. For users ranking high, they are more willing to pay for the game rather than to win game rewards. According to Catizen’s official disclosure, over 50% of users have become paying users, and the conversion rate is already very high. In addition to paid props, Catizen plans to become a game Launchpool platform, which we will analyze later in this article.
Entrepreneurship Towards Exchanges
Exchange Commission Registration
While other games are still incentivizing users through invitation tasks, TapSwap was the first to include a Binance new account registration task, with the registered link verified to include an invitation code.
Telegram has surpassed 900 million users, compared to Binance’s 200 million users, indicating a lot of development space. However, it is worth noting that Telegram’s top five download regions are India, Russia, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil, most of them non-crypto industries and Binance-friendly countries, and the achievable user increment remains uncertain.
Exchange Product Diversion
Pixelverse is a combat nurturing game where users automatically receive game tokens over time and then train pets for battles.
Pixelverse, in the Dashboard task list, included a task in collaboration with Bybit Web3 wallet, with the number of participating addresses reaching 700,000 after eight days of launch. According to Odaily’s query on completed activities, the previous six activities lasted about 3-4 weeks, with the number of participating addresses being 320,000, 250,000, 580,000, 120,000, 70,000, and 80,000 respectively. It is evident that the number of users that the TON ecosystem can capture is much higher than that of native Web3 projects, demonstrating a significant advantage in traffic growth.
Monetization of Traffic
As we can see from the previous section, traffic growth is a prominent advantage of Telegram, and projects with large communities can secondarily transfer their traffic to other projects for monetization.
Returning to Catizen, the official has disclosed the next steps of the Launchpool and game platform development roadmap. Catizen has signed contracts with over a dozen WeChat mini-games and plans to gradually launch these games on the Catizen game platform. From Gaming Bot to the game Launchpool, empowering governance token holders.
Projects using this method are also widespread, with specific practical paths varying. For example, the education application XPLUS directs traffic to Catizen through homepage ads, while the click-type game PocketFi allows users to consume tokens from another application, TON PUNKS, to gain click boosts.
Conclusion
Breaking down the closed-loop logic of TON ecosystem projects into user visits, payment conversion, user retention, and repurchase, it can be seen that relying on Telegram, TON ecosystem projects have a natural and significant advantage in gaining enough user visits.
However, in terms of user conversion, except for a few projects with genuine gameplay, most projects lack sufficient reasons to attract users to pay, and there is severe homogenization, making it more difficult for non-head projects to convert paying users.
Therefore, the only way to close the commercial loop of the current TON ecosystem projects is to be a “success guru” or a “seller of shovels,” that is, to take the lead and sell traffic to other projects to generate revenue.
The current TON ecosystem projects have initially demonstrated the feasibility of the free game viral + paid value-added approach, but how to truly leverage Telegram’s unlimited spreading ability, crypto’s highly compatible wallet extensions, and the massive user base of 9 billion, we are still waiting for the next answer.
After Viral Marketing How Will TON Games Complete the Business Loop