Subhead: Arch Town Labs ran its open innovation ranking across the TON ecosystem, with no affiliation to the The Open Network, TON Foundation or any project listed. The result is a tiered, comparable view of where TON-native ventures actually stand - from early builders to ecosystem-defining scale.
Every cycle, a new wave of "TON ecosystem" projects gets announced, and the market is asked to take traction claims on faith - user counts, TVL figures, partnership logos. We decided to check some of those claims from the outside. Arch Town Labs ran its scoring engine across The Open Network category, with no stake in any token and no commercial relationship to any team listed, and produced a tiered, comparable view of where these ventures stand today.
This is an innovation ranking, not an ecosystem press release. The same methodology that powers the rest of our index was applied here, so any TON-native venture in this list can be compared against any other startup we track, in any city or category, on identical axes.
What The Open Network is, and why this category is worth ranking
The Open Network (TON) is the layer-1 blockchain integrated directly into Telegram, putting blockchain-based wallets, payments, and mini-apps in front of an audience that is counted in the hundreds of millions rather than the tens of thousands typical of most chains. That distribution is the reason TON deserves its own category in our index: distribution risk, normally the hardest variable in any startup ranking, is partly already solved before a TON-native team writes its first line of product code.
That doesn't mean the category is easy. It means the failure modes shift. The constraint stops being "can anyone find this app" and becomes "does this app do something a Telegram user will come back to twice." A wallet, a game, or a marketplace that simply repackages an existing crypto product for Telegram's audience tends to plateau quickly. The ones that hold up are the ones that treat the chat surface itself - groups, bots, mini-apps, social graph - as the product, not as a distribution channel bolted onto a product built for somewhere else.
We split the category into the same stage tiers we use across the index - Building, Scaling, Growing, and Unicorning - because a five-person team shipping its first mini-app and an infrastructure project already processing millions of weekly transactions are not comparable on a single table, even if both are "TON projects."
How we ranked it
The methodology behind each table is the one we publish openly, so scores stay comparable across categories, cities, and cohorts. We call the output iRank, and it is the product of three components rather than a single impression of the product or team.
The first is Innovation Stage, meaning how far the work has moved from idea toward something deployed and used by real wallets, real groups, or real money. The second is Blue Ocean Trajectory, scored against eight documented factors, meaning whether the venture is opening uncontested space inside the Telegram surface or competing in an already-crowded lane (and TON has several very crowded lanes - DEXs, liquid staking, and tap-to-earn games among them). The third is Capital Accessibility, meaning how readily the venture can raise and deploy the capital its roadmap requires, including its relationship with TON Foundation grant programs, exchange listings, and outside investors. The three multiply, so a weakness in one is not quietly averaged away by strength in another.
Scores update as new evidence arrives - that's the point of a real-time ranking rather than a frozen annual list. A project that lands a real integration into Telegram's native UI moves up. One whose volume is concentrated in a single incentivized campaign and fades once the campaign ends drifts down. We also publish our miss rate, because a ranking that never admits error isn't measuring anything. The axes and weights sit in the open methodology so anyone can check how a position was earned.
