TON network extension TAC has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round led by web3 venture capital firm Hack VC and Symbolic Capital to help provide TON and Telegram users in-app access to Ethereum Virtual Machine applications.

Primitive, Paper Ventures, Karatage, Animoca Ventures, Spartan Capital, TON Ventures and Ankr also participated in the round alongside angel investors, such as Polygon co-founder Sandeep Naiwal. A valuation and the structure of the round were not disclosed.

TAC’s founding team includes TON venture builder TOP (The Open Platform) and Curve creator Michael Egorov. The project aims to simplify building on TON, connecting Ethereum's developer community and applications directly with TON blockchain and tapping into its close affiliation with the Telegram messaging platform, which has an estimated 950 million global users.

The funding will be used to scale the project's marketing, developer relations and tech development efforts to connect various EVM applications across DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi and RWAs while enabling wallet abstraction to simplify self-custody of TON and Ethereum assets, the team said in a statement shared with The Block. TAC’s infrastructure will be partially secured by TON liquid staking tokens, introducing restaking to the ecosystem.

TAC’s public testnet phase is expected to go live this week during Devcon, with a mainnet launch anticipated in the first quarter of 2025.

“Since announcing our launch earlier this year, we’ve seen incredible levels of interest from developers, builders and investors who understand the project’s potential to expand the possibilities of web3 development,” TAC CEO Pavel Altukhov said. “We’re excited to be debuting the public testnet at DevCon 2024 and showing developers the 950 million reasons why they should build on TAC.” 

Telegram has expanded its crypto footprint in recent months, with millions of gamers using the platform to play tap-to-earn games like Hamster Kombat, Notcoin and Catizen in the hope of earning corresponding tokens on TON blockchain. It also introduced a mini-app store and an in-app browser with support for web3 pages in July. TON blockchain's daily transaction volume has grown twelvefold from 100,000 to 1.2 million over the past year, according to recent research from Bitget.

Source : The Block Crypto News - Nov 11, 2024