Messari: TON's first quarter Telegram product revenue reached $88.5 million, and cross-chain NFT market share rose to 35.5%

In comparison, Messari released the “TON 2026 First Quarter Report”, showing that although TON prices fell 26.4% during the quarter, the overall TON ecosystem remained resilient thanks to Telegram's huge user base. Among them, revenue from Telegram products settled through fragments fell 20.3% month-on-month to $88.5 million, while recurring revenue such as Premium subscriptions and ads fell by only 10.5%, which is better than non-recurring businesses such as Stars.

According to the data, TON NFT's cross-chain market share increased 130.4% month-on-month to 35.5%, driven by demand for on-chain products such as Telegram usernames, numbers, and gifts.

On the DeFi side, total hedging volume (TVL) in US dollars decreased by 34.9% month-on-month, but by only 11.6% in TON. The average daily USDT transfer volume dropped by 32.5% to $77 million, but the average number of daily transfers remained at around 73,600, indicating that peer-to-peer Telegram transfers and Mini App payments are replacing large DeFi transactions.

In terms of user activity, TON's average number of daily active addresses fell 8.8% month-on-month to 90,800, indicating that there was no significant increase in new users in the first quarter. However, the number of single-address transactions increased from 19.2 to 21, reflecting increased engagement from existing users.

After the end of the first quarter, TON's Make TON Great Again (MTONGA) program has completed four of the seven measures, including launching Catchain 2.0 to achieve sub-second final confirmation, reducing transaction fees by about six times, and making Telegram TON's largest validator. Currently, the pledge scale has reached 2.2 million TON.

Messari said that the second quarter will be a critical observation period to test whether the infrastructure upgrade can drive the large-scale conversion of Telegram's wider user base into active users on the TON chain.

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