TON Foundation launches Toncoin community rewards initiative worth over $100 million

The  TON Foundation, a non-commercial group of contributors behind The Open Network (TON) blockchain, has launched the first round of a Toncoin community rewards initiative named The Open League, valued at more than $115 million at current prices.

Following a successful pilot program, The Open League will distribute 30 million Toncoin to competing projects and TON ecosystem users starting April 1.

The TON Foundation has already distributed 650,000 Toncoin ($2.6 million) to users via liquidity pool boosts as part of the pilot, with projects winning the pilot competition on March 31 set to share 550,000 Toncoin ($2.2 million), according to a statement shared with The Block.

The TON Foundation claimed that the network saw a 70% increase in total value locked on its decentralized exchanges and a 370% surge in daily active addresses during the pilot.

“The Open League's pilot season has shown our community is ready to have some fun," TON Foundation Marketing Director Jack Booth said. “Crypto doesn’t have to be complex; it can and should be easy, fun, and highly rewarding. With The Open League, we’re taking a different approach to ecosystem growth by actually putting crypto in every pocket."

Competitions, airdrops and quests

Funds for The Open League will be distributed via a performance-based competition, simple token mining mechanisms, airdrops and quests, and liquidity pool boosts.

The performance-based competition for TON projects has around $15 million in Toncoin up for grabs for TON projects, with users able to earn a share of $100 million worth of Toncoin rewards by interacting with those projects.

Simple token mining mechanisms have been employed by TON-based projects like Notcoin on Telegram, with Open League participant projects encouraged to create the same to introduce their tokens to new crypto users on the social media and messaging platform.

Approximately $22 million in Toncoin will be used for airdrops and on-chain quests, with $40 million in Toncoin allocated toward boosting liquidity pool rewards for The League’s participating tokens. A further $38 million worth of Toncoin is reserved for incentivizing an upcoming project launch on TON, the TON Foundation said.

Any project on any chain can attempt to join the first season of The Open League by migrating to TON, with projects coming bottom “relegated” to a minor league with lower incentives.

Toncoin is currently trading for $4.05, according to The Block’s price page — up more than 6% over the past 24 hours.

Telegram initially developed the Telegram Open Network, as it was then known, raising $1.7 billion in a private sale the same year before abandoning the project following SEC investigations. In 2022, open-source developers saved and rebranded the blockchain as The Open Network with a functional mainnet.