The rise of TON (The Open Network) is by no means accidental, but is due to the traffic of Telegram.

From a technical perspective, although TON has mechanisms such as sharding and asynchronous communication, its overall architecture has not surpassed the industry's top public chains. Compared with Solana's innovation in high-concurrency execution and Move's public chain in asset security model, TON is more about optimization and integration, and is a robust rather than disruptive design. Therefore, TON's rapid success is not solely based on technological breakthroughs.

What really drives TON's explosion is the traffic giant Telegram. With hundreds of millions of users, Telegram has successfully embedded the experience of encrypted assets into social scenarios, greatly reducing the entry threshold for users. Relying on this native traffic advantage, TON has completed the user cold start that other public chains have been difficult to achieve for many years, and quickly occupied the market's attention.

However, the development of TON is not without hidden worries. The background of the Russian team behind it has become an important issue for the US capital and regulatory system to examine. In the current global political environment, the core team from Russia makes TON naturally face a trust gap with the mainstream US capital market. For US investment institutions, Russian-related projects not only pose potential sanctions and compliance risks, but also bring additional burdens of compliance review and policy sensitivity. This geopolitical obstacle may form an invisible ceiling that cannot be ignored in TON's future global expansion, especially in the expansion of the US market.

TON's success is a victory of traffic advantage and strategy execution, but geopolitical risks also doom its development path to be not smooth. In the future, how to balance geopolitical influences will become the biggest challenge that TON must face in its continued expansion. $TON