by Coinstrooper Crypto Articles
Quick Take
  • One might think that with a billion users, Telegram and its TON cryptocurrency would be world-beating.
  • But just like many other cryptocurrencies, TON hasn’t performed well over the past year as crypto winter winds seem to be blowing hard.
  • The blockchain lost nearly $700 million in TVL since its 2024 peak.
  • So, is TON dead or the greatest comeback yet to come?

What Happened

At the heart of this is the decentralized protocol Cocoon AI, which Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced in late 2025.

Market Context

According to data aggregator CoinGecko, the price of TON is down 67% over the past year. That’s quite a cooling off for TON.

While the price of TON hasn’t performed as well as those 2024 salad days, there is still forward motion in terms of development within the Telegram ecosystem.

Building economic value for cryptocurrencies like TON by increasing demand could boost their prices. It’s something AlphaTON and strategic advisor and Skybridge Capital Founder Anthony Scaramucci told BeInCrypto he finds appealing.

Having been White House Communications director for the first Trump Administration for ten days or, “like seconds, actually – it’s 954,000 seconds,” as Scaramucci likes to say, he’s big-time into various different cryptocurrency efforts and isn’t dismayed by market doldrums.

Bitcoin price performance over the past year. Source: CoinGecko

Why It Matters

One might think that with a billion users, Telegram and its TON cryptocurrency would be world-beating. But just like many other cryptocurrencies, TON hasn’t performed well over the past year as crypto winter winds seem to be blowing hard.

In November 2025, Coinbase finally listed TON on its exchange, a likely nod to the messaging app’s roughly 100 million users in the United States.

Details

The blockchain lost nearly $700 million in TVL since its 2024 peak. So, is TON dead or the greatest comeback yet to come?

The Toncoin Tragedy

Previously, Telegram-based meme coins such as Notcoin and Hamster Kombat had led to Toncoin hitting an all-time high of over $8 in June 2024.

A favorable US environment led to Telegram Wallet becoming accessible to Americans in July 2025.

Now, as 2026 rolls out, Telegram is bringing along AI – and TON – into the future.

A TON of DAT-titude

A sign of a maturing TON is that there are now several associated Digital Asset Treasuries, or DATs, operating around the ecosystem. Most well-known is the Manuel Stotz-run TON Strategy (NASDAQ: TONX).

But there’s also AlphaTON (NASDAQ: ATON). rebranded from Portage Biotech in September 2025 and helping to hopefully spearhead a TON-AI evolution.

AlphaTON is helping scale the decentralized AI network by securing a $46 million deal for NVIDIA GPUs to compete with centralized players like OpenAI and xAI, among others.

“In the way that I see it, when I look at the biggest super apps in the world, most of them have their own AI,” AlphaTON CEO Brittany Kaiser told BeInCrypto.

The big difference between many centralized AI players and crypto-backed decentralized ones is the self-sustaining economy they create.

Organizations like AlphaTON are providing computing services for developers who want to build Cocoon AI-based apps within Telegram.

But in a novel twist, to access Cocoon AI, developers have to pay for services in TON. This is not unlike the Bittensor-style economics where miners are providing the decentralized AI computing power while users must pay for the services in the Bittensor native TAO token.

The Decentralized AI Economy

“We frankly did get hit with a dark winter October 10th for all of the crypto, that would include Bitcoin,” Scaramucci told BeInCrypto.

His firm, Skybridge, has been a major backer of TON – even before crypto’s recent turmoil.