OKX has invested $5 million in TON Ventures to support TON-based developments

What’s new? Leading centralized crypto exchange (CEX) OKX has invested $5 million in TON Ventures, a venture fund focused on supporting projects in The Open Network (TON) blockchain ecosystem, closely related to messenger Telegram. The funds will be used to build a community of experienced programmers to develop innovative applications.

Press release

What else is known? This initiative follows the launch of the $10 million Telegram Growth Hub, organized by OKX together with The Open Platform (TOP) and Folius Ventures.

Exchange officials emphasize that TON has great potential for mass adoption, given its connection to Telegram, which has 950 million monthly active users, and the successful launches of blockchain applications for the messenger, including Notcoin, Catizen, and the OKX-developed game OKX Racer.

TON Ventures, led by former TON Foundation CEOs Ian Wittkopp and Inal Kardan, focuses on supporting early-stage TON-based consumer applications in the areas of decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming, content earning, and infrastructure.

Such projects typically receive investments of up to $500 000. In August of this year, a $40 million fund was launched for this purpose.

The fund has already invested in the gaming platforms DeLabs and Goat, the creative platform Memetics for Telegram channels, and the Grably app, which uses TON and Telegram to collect data and train AI models.

Developers in the TON ecosystem are actively working on the mass adoption of blockchain technology, creating financial applications with a simple interface for beginners and games with earning opportunities.

In August, Telegram launched a mini-app store and a browser for decentralized websites based on TON. At the same time, the X10 Exchange team announced the launch of a retail crypto exchange in the messenger.

In September, the TON Foundation, together with the team of decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) Curve Finance, began developing a platform for exchanging stablecoins.

The native token of the Toncoin blockchain with the ticker TON, ranks 15th overall in the overall cryptocurrency ranking by market capitalization at over $14,76 billion and is trading at $5,79, having lost 10,2% overnight amid the collapse of the broader crypto market. TON has added 10% for the month and 148% since the beginning of the year.

As for OKX, in October, the exchange obtained a license in the UAE and launched a local platform for retail and institutional investors. According to analyst Colin Wu, in October, OKX’s total trading volume in the spot and derivatives markets amounted to $717,91 billion with 23,5 million website visits. Most traffic to the exchange came from India (10%), the United States (6%), and Russia (5%).

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OKX native token under the ticker OKB ranks 53rd with a capitalization of $3,23 billion and is trading at $53,76, having lost 4,9% overnight. Monthly growth amounted to 27%, but the asset has fallen in price by 2,3% since the beginning of the year.