The Onchain 5: How Telegram and Binance Turn Going Onchain Into Fun and Games

The final two members of the Onchain5 have very different business models. But they are both iconoclasts and have largely built their followings outside of the U.S. market. Now they are relying on that continued loyalty to drive further growth.

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Mantle

Mantle is building the Blockchain for Banking — where TradFi meets Web3. Explore real-world financial tools, powered fully on-chain.

The Onchain 5: How Telegram and Binance Turn Going Onchain Into Fun and Games

The two companies leverage in-house multibillion dollar tokens to promote worldwide usage.

This is the third in a series of articles on the Onchain5, the crypto companies that will lead in bringing the next wave of users onchain.

Along with Coinbase, Robinhood and Stripe, Telegram and Binance make the list. The two have similarities in their onchain strategies, with both using coins for funding, which necessitates developing healthy onchain economies around those coins. 

🔼 Telegram

TLDR – Telegram is global and growing, but its in-app economy is still in its early stages, and it must finance itself under the weight of debt and political baggage. TON addresses these constraints by functioning as Telegram’s balance-sheet asset, settlement rail, and developer platform — turning solvency and platform growth into the same strategy.

Telegram has ~1 billion MAUs and is concentrated in markets such as Eastern Europe, India, and Latin America. Its brand is anchored in privacy and autonomy, and its product surface is now extending well beyond messaging into channels, groups, and mini-apps (a web app that runs directly within Telegram). 

But it also comes with certain structural constraints — it rejects data-driven ad monetization, its founders face political baggage that blocks certain Western capital markets, and its monetization story has only recently begun and has had to keep up with its debt financing. In December 2024, the New York Times reported that the company was on track to make its first corporate profit in history.

For the app to meet its grander ambitions beyond messaging, Telegram needs an alternative liquidity path and an aligned economic model for developers.

History of TON

The Open Network (TON) was originally launched by Telegram in 2019 but handed off to the community in 2020 after the SEC blocked its original GRAM token sale, which raised $1.7 billion in one of the largest ICOs in history. Mining began in July 2020, with most of the supply distributed in the beginning stages, although independent analysis shows that a large portion of TON’s supply was mined by groups affiliated with the TON Foundation.

Today $TON’s fully diluted valuation is $13.6B, marking it as a top 20 crypto asset by market valuation. According to Dune, TON chain stats include 2.8B transactions, 49M activated wallets, 822K tokens deployed, and 152M smart contracts deployed, with $37M in lifetime gas fees paid to contracts deployed. 

However, its token price has failed to keep up with the market’s rather bullish 2025. It is currently down 51.94% YTD.

TON Is a Financial Lifeline for Telegram 

Telegram has primarily financed operations through debt as it figures out its monetization path. TON now fills that gap by functioning as a balance-sheet asset. In 2023, Telegram generated ~$342M in revenue with a net loss of $173M. In 2024, revenue rose to ~$1.4B with ~$540M profit — but over half came from TON-related flows, including ~$700M in token sales and a $225M exclusivity subsidy from the TON Foundation. These token injections flipped Telegram from loss-making to profitable on paper, allowing it to refinance $2.4B in debt and raise another $1.7B bond in 2025. TON is effectively Telegram’s bridge financing substitute.

TON Powers Telegram’s In-App Economy

Telegram’s monetization today is still early — subscriptions, gifts, and creator tools generate revenue, but these value flows do not go back into the ecosystem. This changes with TON being embedded as the default backend. A native crypto wallet (built by TopCo) gives users instant access to TON and stablecoins; Telegram Stars are an in-app virtual currency, allowing users to buy digital goods and services from bots and creators, and effectively serve as a fiat on-ramp, which has driven ~$44M in gaming app revenue; Fragments are tokenized Telegram usernames, which have generated ~$490.7M in volumes; Creator subscriptions and rewards settle directly in TON. This integration allows Telegram to recycle value inside its ecosystem, turning microtransactions, mini-apps, and cross-border flows into token demand that anchors growth to its balance sheet.

The platform saw a surge in usage in mid-late 2024 as tap-to-earn games became popularized on Telegram, where users could obtain TON for playing simple mini-dapp games that rewarded attention. Two popular ones were Notcoin and Hamster Kombat. For TON and Telegram to meet these broader ambitions, usage will need to grow again and be spread out among a wider variety of applications.

TON Aligns Telegram’s Developer Strategy With Value Capture

To date, Telegram’s developer ecosystem revolves around external code plugged into simple widgets and experiences, without deep integration into Telegram’s core payments or data. Popular crypto trading bots, for example, let users buy tokens through a Telegram interface, but none of those flows or assets were actually captured by Telegram itself.

TON becomes the opinionated backend for crypto apps — effectively making all mini-apps into crypto apps. Developers can issue tokens and build programmable flows that keep value on-platform. And because Telegram’s wallets are integrated directly into the app, users can seamlessly interact with these mini-apps without needing external infrastructure. Every transaction is routed through TON. Developer success is tied directly to TON velocity, aligning ecosystem growth with Telegram’s token economy and balance sheet.

Takeaway: Onchain lets Telegram convert TON into both its financing substitute and its platform engine. By making TON its balance-sheet asset, embedding it into the in-app economy, and enforcing it as the developer backend, Telegram aligns solvency and platform growth into the same strategy.

Risk: That synthesis cuts both ways. Telegram leans heavily on TON sales for solvency, blurring the line between true monetization and financial engineering. If TON adoption stalls beyond speculative trading, or if regulatory and political baggage limit mainstream uptake, Telegram’s balance sheet and its platform ambitions could unravel together.

🔶 Binance

TLDR – BNB is Binance’s onchain equity proxy. Burns mimic buybacks, exchange profits drive its value, and embedded utility makes it the loyalty glue across Binance’s ecosystem.

Binance is the largest global crypto exchange by spot and derivatives volume, with deep roots in non-Western markets. Its strengths are scale, liquidity, and a full-stack product suite. But it also faces legal and regulatory pressure across certain jurisdictions. Without equity or bank-based financing — outside of a $2 billion investment from an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm — Binance must primarily use onchain mechanisms to share profits and fund itself and reinforce its position as the gravitational hub of crypto liquidity. 

BNB as Binance Equity Analog

Binance has been the world’s most successful crypto exchange since 2017. It has held that title through numerous crypto bull and bear markets and seen would-be competitors wither away. While it’s a privately held company, BNB acts as a proxy to equity — which might be one of the drives for token holders. That, in effect, is also how Binance has gotten millions of people onchain (a rough estimate is that around 50M total unique addresses hold Binance-wrapped onchain assets).

Binance owns a large portion of BNB tokens, and BNB auto-burns around 20% of the exchange’s profits per quarter, which would put the 2024 annual profit to sit somewhere around ~$22 billion. BNB’s value relationship is primarily to the exchange’s trading revenues. In 2024, Binance’s auto-burn program destroyed ~$4.4 billion worth of BNB — almost entirely funded by trading profits. By contrast, all onchain fee burns since BNB Chain’s inception account for less than 3% of supply reduction. The reality is clear: BNB functions as a financial mirror of Binance’s core trading business. Exchange volumes and profitability drive BNB’s scarcity, while alternative value dimensions like chain-fee burns are marginal in comparison. 

$BNB is now valued at $139.6B on a fully diluted basis, and is up 42.04% in 2025 and is currently a bit above $1,000, not far from its all-time high of $1,079.07.

BNB Embeds Utility Across the Ecosystem to Lock In Users

Beyond its financial role, BNB functions as the connective tissue of Binance’s product suite. On the exchange, it unlocks fee discounts, VIP tiers, Launchpool, and Launchpad access. In CeFi services like Earn, Loans, and Pay, it acts as collateral and a settlement asset.

Additionally, the token has familiarized its user base with onchain activities, even if the products are on its exchange. Products like Binance Launchpool, for example, allow users to familiarize themselves with crypto native actions like yield farming. Binance users pledge $BNB into the project’s DeFi liquidity pools earning rewards on centralized and decentralized platforms, and they access new income and rewards and earn ownership in new tokens that Binance plans to support. In 2024, Launchpool programs awarded over $1.75 billion to users.

Similarly, Binance Launchpad allows Binance users to use $BNB and participate in token sales of imminent listings. This is effectively the crypto-native / token version of Robinhood’s pre-IPO products, which familiarize retail investors with new and upcoming investment opportunities. Launchpad (plus Earn) has generated around $215 million in net fees in 2025 so far.

The net result too is that Binance users are incentivized to hold and stake their $BNB to access the broader Binance financial services ecosystem.

BNB Chain + Binance Wallets Act as Consumer Platforms

Binance serves as an onramp for BNB Chain, Binance’s EVM chain, which has existed for 5+ years. Today, BNB Chain is host to over 650M+ unique wallets on BNB Chain (similar to the ~600M unique wallet count on Base), settled over 9B transactions (vs 4B on Base), and current holds over $7.8B in total value locked (vs $5B on Base). 

PancakeSwap, which is the native DEX of BNB Chain, currently custodies over $2.4B in total value locked (vs Aerodrome’s $500M in TVL which is Base’s native DEX).

On BNB Chain, $BNB serves as a gas and validator stake, while in wallets it underpins Binance Pay and Trust Wallet. Therefore, $BNB is unique among exchange tokens because it anchors both Binance’s balance sheet and its L1 chain, while other rival exchange tokens do discretionary burns (vs programmatic) or serve as reward points within far smaller ecosystems.

Each utility may be modest in isolation, but collectively they ensure that anyone engaging deeply with Binance inevitably touches BNB. This embedded utility drives loyalty and retention, turning BNB into both a value-accrual mechanism and a user relationship anchor.

Takeaway: BNB serves as the onchain equity substitute. By mimicking buybacks through burns and embedding itself across the Binance ecosystem, BNB ensures Binance can fund itself, lock in users, and remain the center of global crypto liquidity without access to traditional markets.

Risk: Reliance on BNB ties Binance’s solvency and valuation tightly to market cycles. Additionally, If regulators classify BNB as an unregistered security or clamp down on burn mechanics, Binance’s equity substitute model could unravel, leaving its financial destiny fragile.

THE NUMBER: $410

– Juan Aranovich, managing editor of Unchained

Global financial services firm BTIG just initiated coverage on Coinbase (which closed at $346.17 today) with a Buy and a $410 target, right as BTC pushes +3.5%, nearing $118K.

I found their note interesting amid today’s bullish mood. BTIG sees:

• COIN’s product depth (banking, dev tools, Prime) as a moat

• Derivatives adding 6%+ to revenue, with more upside via Deribit & U.S. perps

• Base + USDC ecosystem as sticky growth engines

Valued at 25x 2027 EV/EBITDA—a premium, but justified, they argue.

Related content: 

• The Onchain5: These 5 Onramps Will Power Crypto’s Mainstream Moment 

• The Onchain5 Part 2: Robinhood and Stripe Upgrade Finance’s Back End

• Two VCs on Why the 4-Year Cycle Is Dead, DATs & Hyperliquid vs. Binance