Viewpoint: Several problems facing the Ton ecosystem

Author: Mike Source: X, @mikelee205 

1. Low user quality

There are obvious problems with the user quality of the Ton ecosystem, which are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

• User structure problem: A large number of users come from Africa, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, where users have low net worth and limited overall consumption capacity.

• User activity problem: Although the number of daily active users is comparable to that of WeChat, the actual number of users is much lower than that of WeChat. This is mainly because a large number of users use multiple accounts, resulting in data distortion.

• Insufficient depth of use: The user opening frequency and usage time are only 30% of WeChat, lacking sufficient depth of use. The main activity scenarios of users on Ton are also relatively single, lacking the diverse social relationships and business conversion scenarios like WeChat.

• Low potential business value: Overall, the overall value of Ton may be less than 5% of WeChat. The number of users is inflated, the willingness of users to pay is low, and business conversion is difficult. Even if the conversion is successful, the input-output ratio is not ideal.

In general, although Ton has achieved certain results in user scale, from the perspective of user quality and business value, there are obvious problems with the existing model, and it is necessary to rethink the way and logic of the attempt.

2. Single user relationship

The singleness of the relationship between users is another major challenge facing the Ton ecosystem:

• Insufficient breadth and depth of relationships: Compared with WeChat, the relationship between Ton users is mainly concentrated in specific scenarios, lacking breadth and depth. The relationships between WeChat users cover almost all acquaintance networks and have a high depth of interaction, such as meetings, games, and Moments. These interactions form a strong relationship network, meet most of the social needs of users, and successfully monopolize social traffic.

• Simple user relationship structure: Ton's user relationship structure is relatively simple, lacking intersections and complexity. Therefore, although Ton has a certain amount of users, it is difficult to support its long-term development due to the lack of structure in user relationships and the inability to form valuable usage scenarios.

Although TG and WeChat have different positioning, Ton's user relationship singleness problem still severely limits its development potential. Therefore, instead of pursuing the transfer of a large number of users from TG to Ton, it is better to focus on how to attract high-quality users, form a more valuable relationship network, and succeed in one or two major scenarios.

3. User relationships are the core value of social products

In social products, the relationship between users and its driving effect are the core value:

• The importance of social effects: The interaction between user relationships can produce a tsunami-like effect, which is the key to distinguishing social products from other types of products. For Ton, if it just blindly increases the number of users without paying attention to the quality of user relationships, it will eventually get a deformed user structure that cannot support the long-term development of the ecosystem.

• Limitations of the traffic sales model: The current traffic sales model on Ton is not optimistic. If the gameplay of WeChat is still used, the value of traffic will become increasingly weak, and it will be difficult to form an effective business model.

However, the Ton ecosystem is not completely without bright spots. The construction of transaction scenarios is relatively effective, and the process from demand triggering to relationship formation is relatively smooth. Especially in the small circle of cryptocurrency trading, from asset issuance, trading opportunity discovery to information sharing, although the user group is not large, its efficient user conversion rate shows certain potential.

Summary

Although there are many opportunities for experimentation in the Ton ecosystem, there are obvious problems with the current model and logic. Especially in the process of pursuing the number of users, the complexity of user relationships and usage scenarios has been ignored, resulting in low overall commercial value. It is recommended that developers should pay more attention to the quality of user relationships and the development of actual application scenarios when exploring new gameplay, rather than blindly pursuing the number of users.