How far is TON from Solana?

Amid Toncoin’s renaming to Gram, the same old story has resurfaced on English-language X: TON is supposedly about to overtake Solana. In reality, the narrative seems to have less to do with TON’s growth and more with SOL’s weakness in recent months — plus the usual habit of X influencers living in their own bubble. So today, let’s see how this new narrative holds up against reality.

Let’s start with the basics: TON is currently ranked 19th on CoinMarketCap, with a market cap of around $4.6 billion. Solana is 7th, at roughly $38.2 billion. The gap is large, but not impossible to imagine closing: TON has made it into the top 10 before, though for a short moment.

But once you look at actual network usage, things get much less comfortable. Over the past 24 hours, TON DEXs have processed around $5 million in trading volume, while Solana DEXs have handled around $50 billion. Just think about that: the difference is not several times, but roughly ten thousand times. And while Solana sees tens of millions of daily transactions, TON only has a few tens of thousands.

To make it even clearer: a memecoin launched on Solana just a few days ago has already generated more trading volume today than the entire TON DeFi ecosystem combined.

So yes, TON is still very, very far from Solana. And English-language X needs to step out of the bubble: TON is not flipping Solana anytime soon. But since the network has already built decent developer infrastructure over the years, Telegram, as its new driving force, should finally focus on what TON has been missing for a long time: promotion. That is exactly what we hope to see in the next steps of MTONGA.

@thedailyton