TON Foundation launches $25M accelerator program

On May 22, The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain previously created by Telegram, announced the launch of a $25 million fund for projects building on its ecosystem. 

The venture, dubbed “TON Accelerator Program,” will invest between $50,000 and $250,000 per project and be accompanied by partnerships and mentorships from TON’s staff. Justin Hyun, head of incubation and growth at TON Foundation, commented:

“Funding forms part of our local hubs rollout strategy and our ecosystem will work to attract new developers as well as successful repeat founders, based across a variety of key global locations.”

The initial pool of recipients for the funding will be geared toward projects that participated in a recent TON hackathon, with investment particularly focused on incubating decentralized finance, or DeFi, projects. In addition to having the prerequisite of building on TON, projects must have a minimum viable product (MVP) ready and require support in marketing, business and technology. 

“Proof-of-concept or prototype teams that require greater technical support should apply for earlier-stage grants,” TON’s developers specified. 

Since 2020, TON has been run as a community-led, open-source project. Its architecture is said to enable significant scaling and processing of millions of transactions per second. In April, TON secured an initial $250 million commitment from major firms for its ecosystem TONcoin Fund. Amid its launch, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo announced plans to adopt the TON blockchain.

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