Laying the foundations for DeFi on TON

[chenaski786]

The TON blockchain has laid some great foundations with quick and low cost transactions and innovations such as asynchronous contracts. These are advantages that other Layer 1’s much further ahead in their journey are still struggling with. Despite the ecosystem being in its early stages, valuable use cases that solve real peoples problems have already emerged with tools like Fragment. Having strong infrastructure and traction with users gives me a lot of confidence in TON and its ability to grow and beat competing chains in the long term.

In order to achieve that success, TON needs to continue to grow and increase the range of activity it can provide users: Gaming, NFT’s, DeFi and many more. The more value TON provides people, the more success it will find. This notion is backed by the concept of Metcalfe’s law which has shown to be true across various computer and telecommunication networks and other blockchain networks in modern day.

Personally, I identify DeFi as one of the most valuable services that TON could provide. We live in a world in which powerful financial functions like lending and the best investment opportunities are reserved only for institutions and high net worth individuals. Some people think that this is for selfish reasons and greed but it's more down to basic economics. Right now, the world's financial systems and infrastructure is fragmented, dependent on people to run and costs billions of dollars in legal and compliance every year to maintain the system.

Money is a business of scale and it currently costs too much to provide these services to the average person. However, DeFi has already shown on other chains that it can be automated, inclusive and most critically, cost effective. Billions of dollars are invested, swapped and lent to people all across the globe in a completely trustless system.

I think TON has great potential to accelerate these opportunities and provide them to the masses. We’ve seen how WeChat has grown into a superapp where people communicate and manage money alongside a bunch of other activities. While there are questions about the intention and implementation of WeChat, TON could provide people all around the world with a seamless and valuable user experience in a completely secure and decentralized way.

How do we actually build a DeFi ecosystem on TON? Great work has already started with AMM’s like STON.FI but the ability to exchange assets is only 1 part of the puzzle. In my experience, Collateralized debt position (CDP) based stablecoins are the key growth enabler and supporter in DeFi ecosystems. Maker and their DAI protocol was one of the first DeFI protocols and was key in bootstrapping the DeFi economy in Ethereum and creating new opportunities for others to build and innovate. Even in a fairly bearish market, it holds over $6bn worth of total value locked (TVL).

A CDP based stablecoin brings a number of advantages:

1. Providing users with flexibility and opportunities to maximize the liquidity of assets, particularly as new assets emerge in the TON ecosystem.

2. A native and independent stablecoin to TON, an “open” USD you could say. This limits dependency on external service providers and some of the security risks of bridging.

3. Ways to fund more growth by leveraging the underlying value of TON currency.

4. Giving access to any protocol participant a recurring revenue stream through fees and liquidation penalties.

Gigaton is on a mission to provide liquidity to DeFi on a Giga scale. We are still in the early stages of our journey so if you’re curious in supporting the mission, particularly around development, then please reach out!

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gigatonapp
Whitepaper coming soon!

[Vudi]

native advertising?

[chenaski786]

Definitely a possibility, the more infrastructure TON has, the more value it can provide users and builders

[DeFiTON]

You Twitter: This account doesn’t exist

[chenaski786]

We decided to pause on the project for now.

Honestly we were pretty disappointed by the reception from the ecosystem which is frustrating as we were all really excited about the prospects of TON initially.

We reached out to the visibile members within the TON ecosystem and received no response from any including TON Society and this blog we put here a month ago.

We might reconsider if the ecosystem matures a bit more but if no one has time to reply to emails and messages of devs looking to support the TON ecosystem, its not a great sign.