Quick take:
- TON Foundation has announced a $25 million fund for an accelerator program based on the TON ecosystem.
- The fund is fully backed by the $250 million TON coin fund which supports projects building on TON.
- It will invest between $50,000 and $250,000 in projects selected for the program.
TON Foundation has launched a $25 million fund to accelerate projects building on The Open Network (TON) ecosystem. The Open Network is an open-source community built for the purpose of uniting all blockchains and web2 internet into one open network.
The network was initially founded by the people behind the cross-platform messaging service Telegram, but it has been run as an open-source project since 2020.
TON offers a highly scalable layer-1 infrastructure capable of supporting millions of transactions per second.
Last April, the company said it had raised over $1 billion in donations from users, after adding crypto payments functionality in Telegram to allow the platform’s 550 million users to send TONcoin.
Stewards on the network in November last year set aside a $126 million rescue fund to cushion projects building on the TON ecosystem from the knock-on effects of the FTX collapse.
TON Foundation’s latest initiative to expand its ecosystem is the accelerator program which is fully backed by the TONcoin fund, a $250 million ecosystem fund that supports founders building on the TON ecosystem.
The program will invest between $50,000 and 250,000 in selected projects, with a focus on decentralised finance (DeFi). Besides the funding, successful applicants will also benefit from the TON ecosystem’s network of partnerships and will also receive mentorship from accelerator partners including the UAE-based multi-strategy crypto investment company Cypher Capital, Gotbit, Web3Port, Tonstarter and a Korean-based incubator for web3 developers TEB, among others.
Commenting on the unveiling of the TON accelerator program, Justin Hyun, Head of Incubation and Growth at TON Foundation said: “This is the beginning of many different incubators which will be supported in the future. Funding forms part of our local hubs rollout strategy and our ecosystem will work to attract new developers as well as successful repeat founders, based across a variety of key global locations.”
On the other hand, Bill Qian, Chairman of Cypher Capital commented: “This is a program that is unique within the web3 universe today. What the TON Accelerator program is doing is taking the incubator principal made famous within the web2 ecosystem and refining it and evolving it using the best of web3 protocols and ways of working. We are delighted to play our part in this next-generation program.”
TON Foundation said it will direct the first round of funding towards projects that participated in the Hack-a-TONx DoraHacks virtual hackathon held in March 2023.
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