Before I say anything, I want to say how grateful I am for my journey at TON and all its community. It changed my life and my career.
It helped me get into rooms I never thought I would be in, and taught me lessons I would not trade for anything.
Two really special people I want to thank as well are @s0meone_u_know and Nadia, who always did her best to listen and look for the answers I had.
How I got in
It was April 2024, NFT.NYC. TON was around $5 and climbing. I had about 40k followers.
@s0meone_u_know had just started working at TON and put my name forward as a creator worth onboarding.
A few messages with someone from the Foundation, an agreement on how much content I would make, and that was it. I was officially a TON creator.
I started immediately. The idea of a blockchain living inside Telegram, the biggest messenger on earth, felt crazy bullish to me.
I knew my community would want to understand it. So I wrote. Thread after thread.
The rise
In May 2024, Notcoin launched its token. 35 million people had been tapping their way in since January, and it listed at around a billion dollars.
It was the biggest crypto onboarding any of us had ever seen. I kept creating content as attention kept compounding.
On June 15, 2024, TON hit its all time high, around $8.24. I was still living in Brazil, and I can still remember the moment it happened, me getting back from the supermarket.
TVL (total value locked) on the chain crossed half a billion dollars, up from almost nothing a few months before.
All of CT (crypto Twitter) was suddenly looking at TON. And I was one of the only global voices creating content for it, for months.
Then came tap-to-earn. Hamster Kombat exploded to over 300 million players.
Mini apps inside Telegram were getting millions of people, all farming for the crypto dream the same way Notcoin had pulled them in.
Most of crypto still did not even know what a mini app was, so a lot of the work was just education.
Meanwhile a lot of new games, new DeFi, new everything, all being built inside Telegram, every single day.
I hosted Spaces with huge projects, Hamster, Catizen, the TON Foundation itself. My account was growing like never before, while I kept doing my work as a creator and staying active in different communities.
When the picture broke
The first time the picture broke for me was at TOKEN2049.
The person who had been managing my content for about six months walked up to me and said, “are you one of the TON creators we work with, right?”
He did not know me.
I do not want to sound full of myself, but at that point I was one of the biggest creators on crypto Twitter, doing official Spaces with the Foundation. I am also one of the most doxxed, visible people you will find. And the person responsible for my content could not place my face.
Not a big deal, but I won’t deny it hurt my ego. It made me feel worthless.
I was being paid to be a creator, I was being called their biggest voice, projects from all over crypto were reaching out to me to get into TON and Telegram, and my own boss did not know who I was.
That was the first real moment of doubt.
The cracks widen
After that I started seeing the pattern everywhere. Miscommunication and misalignment.
Big announcements I found out about at the same time as everyone else, even though I was supposed to be representing the chain.
The same few mini apps with millions of players kept getting pushed by the official channels, the ones that needed marketing help the least, while smaller good projects got nothing.
I kept getting reached out to by projects outside TON wanting into the Telegram ecosystem, some with pretty good opportunities, many of which I took to my manager and never got an answer about.
I tried to do more anyway. When I saw the Brazilian community talking about TON with no real guidance, I took the lead and volunteered to build a Brazilian syndicate.
Remember, I was paid to post and host Spaces, that was the deal. Everything else was just my own desire to grow and build here.
I got a full Figma from the Syndicate manager with official designs, and inside it, the instructions on how to do everything I would need for the Brazilian one on my own.
The Brazilian logos, banners and posts, with no support and no approval to bring anyone in to help.
It became too much for one person, and it died after one post and one big Spaces with Brazilian communities.
A new hope
By the end of 2024 I was ready to leave. Salary came every month, but my questions went unanswered and I had no real direction from anyone.
Then a new person came in, and for a while it got better. I could see how overwhelmed they were by how fast everything was running, with no breaks and no real internal direction, creators and marketing scattered everywhere.
But my new manager did their best to really listen to me, and that rebuilt my trust again.
With new management and new people in different roles, the TON Foundation also wanted to actually educate TON’s own creators.
As so many new people had fallen in love with the chain and started making content on X, it made sense to start educating them, so we could have our own creators university inside TON.
I loved that idea, so I volunteered to give seminars on content creation to the whole creator group. We did weekly calls for about two months.
Again, not my job. Just me wanting all of us to grow together.
The rebuild, not the peak
By early 2025, TON was around $3, well off its high. This was already one of the rebuild moments, way after its peak.
In March 2025 the Foundation announced a $400 million investment and brought in a new CEO, with a public goal to onboard a huge share of Telegram’s users to the chain by 2028.
Underneath it, the same problem I had been watching for a year kept happening. Projects would not pay creators.
The whole ecosystem had started leaning on airdrop farmers for “organic” marketing, which is not organic at all. An airdrop is a payment.
A few apps had access to millions of users and decided they never needed to pay creators, especially not crypto Twitter creators.
So in summary, I was coaching new creators to get better, while none of them could land a single paid post with the projects they were promoting for free.
My biggest win
In the middle of all of this came the best thing to come out of that whole period. I became BC.Game’s first born crypto creator.
It happened because of everything I was doing, my growth, my network and my position as a TON creator.
By mid 2025 TON was past its hype, which honestly amazed me, because of how fast it had all happened.
The chain’s own following had gone from around 400k to over 2M. I had grown to 200 thousand followers.
A lot of that came from the collabs and mini-app traffic, which by that time was the only thing a mini-app project would give you in exchange for your content.
To be honest, it also brought me a wave of low quality farmers following me. Around 90k of them are no longer active and are like dead accounts following me. If I could clean them out I would.
But I still saw hope. Telegram still had a billion users, and TON was still the chain living inside it.
When it caught up with me
Then the misalignment problem reached me directly.
No real marketing budget was coming from projects, which meant the Foundation always had to find new ways to keep creators excited just to stay.
And then my own salary started delaying. More than two months late at one point, with the finance team simply not answering why, and my manager unable to explain it either.
Eventually three months of salary were paid at once, and one month after that, I was let go.
By then the manager of creators had changed twice in a short window. It was a mess, and I could feel it coming. My relationship with TON ended naturally in January 2026.
And now, the part that says it all
Here is why I am finally writing this.
About two months ago, @durov announced that Telegram itself would replace the TON Foundation as the force behind the chain, and become its largest validator.
The new ton.org put it plainly. The Foundation era is over.
Right after that, I watched a lot of the Dubai cabal suddenly talking about TON again, painting it as the big thing to watch.
Then came the last move. The token rebranding from TON to GRAM.
That is when I posted this, asking out loud if it was finally time to talk about all of it.
The timing feels a bit wrong. A big process of change had already started with Durov’s announcement, so why do this two weeks later and make it feel like one more huge change?
What I think
TON was one of the biggest opportunities I have seen and been part of in crypto. A blockchain, inside a billion user app, at exactly the right moment. I still believe in why a chain living inside Telegram can move, even after everything.
And I watched a lot of it get slowed down by disorganization, by people in roles they did not have the experience for, by money spent without a plan, and by a refusal to value the very creators and builders carrying it.
It left a lot of genuinely great people frustrated and burned out.
I did love TON once. But not anymore, not love.
Still, I can say it with no regret about any part of my journey with them. It gave me a lot of opportunities and space for growth, the same way four years in crypto without a single trade gave me a life I never planned for.
I learned hard lessons and met incredible people.
