A group of senior builders of The Open Network (TON), Telegram’s blockchain of choice, announced on Wednesday that they have spun off to create TON Ventures, a for-profit fund equipped with $40 million to support the next generation of on-chain Telegram mini apps. 

The fund will be led by Ian Wittkopp, the former head of TON’s accelerator program, and Inal Kardan, the TON Foundation’s former head of gaming. It will focus initially on early-stage projects with investments of $500,000 or less, Wittkopp told Decrypt. 

At a later, unspecified date, TON Ventures will expand to support larger “strategic” deals with protocols seeking guidance on entering the TON and Telegram ecosystems, he added. 

The newly formed VC fund says it is looking to support consumer, “mass appeal” applications that exist within Telegram, the dominant messaging platform, and run on TON. In the last few months, crypto-backed mini apps—primarily games that offer crypto rewards via airdrops—have exploded in popularity, catapulting Telegram to over 950 million monthly active users worldwide.

While the TON Ventures team says it understands why gaming has served as a point of entry for most nascent Telegram mini app developers, they anticipate that the diversity of the TON app ecosystem—and thus of the types of projects TON Ventures supports—will quickly expand. 

“This makes sense, as WeChat mini apps gained their first traction with enterprise apps and gaming,” Wittkopp said. “And over time, mini app composition skewed towards life apps, mobile shopping, practical tools, etc.”

The allusion to WeChat, China’s so-called “everything app,” is not incidental. Other developers who build on TON have previously expressed hope that with the aid of blockchain tech, Telegram might soon become the West’s first integrated go-to app for everything from online shopping to banking and car rides, all under one roof.

By facilitating peer-to-peer transactions in mini apps with Toncoin, TON’s native cryptocurrency, and USDT, the popular stablecoin, Telegram has created a framework for establishing an entire economy within its own digital walls. Wildly successful play-to-earn games like Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen have shown the potential effectiveness of that system, by meeting smartphone users where they are.

Now, the challenge is to sustainably grow Telegram’s system of mini apps into maturity. In addition to dangling funding to achieve this goal, TON Ventures will also offer selected projects free advertising and media support, as well as access to strategic partnerships and growth and traffic experiments at TON.

TON Ventures is not the first program designed to parlay the red-hot success of Telegram mini app games into long-term growth. Last month, the makers of Notcoin launched an accelerator program aimed at supporting the next wave of TON-supported mini apps.

Edited by Andrew Hayward