TON vs Solana: Competition for Consumer-Level Public Chains Targeting 1 Billion Mobile Users and the Reconstruction of Traffic Models

In May 2026, The Open Network captured the attention of the entire crypto market with a structural ecosystem overhaul. On May 4, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced that the platform would officially replace TON Foundation as the network’s largest validator, and transaction fees were simultaneously lowered to about $0.0005. The market reaction was intense—Toncoin rose by about 30% to 36% that day, with the price jumping from about $1.35 to the $1.80 range. As of May 11, 2026, Gate market data showed Toncoin at $2.3020, with a 7-day gain of 39.14% and a 30-day gain of 57.94%.

Meanwhile, another long-term, high-performance, low-cost public chain, Solana, has continued its mobile rollout. Its second-generation Web3 phone, Seeker, shipped in August 2025, and the Firedancer validator client went live on the mainnet in December 2025. As of May 11, Solana was priced at $95.07, up 12.86% over 7 days and 11.76% over 30 days.

Both chains have written “billions of users” into their narrative frameworks. But the paths to that goal are completely different.

System Explosion Triggered by Validator Restructuring

On May 4, Durov announced via official channels that Telegram would replace TON Foundation as the network’s largest validator and had already staked about 2.2 million TON. At the same time, the network’s base transaction fee fell to about $0.0005, a roughly 6-fold reduction.

This was not an isolated parameter change. In April 2026, the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade was deployed on the TON mainnet, compressing block production time from about 2.5 seconds to about 400 milliseconds, and shortening final transaction confirmation time from about 10 seconds to about 1 second. In his May announcement, Durov said Telegram would shift its focus to technical advantages, with the new version of ton.org, new developer tools, and performance upgrades expected to be released within 2 to 3 weeks.

Telegram taking over the largest-validator role means that the network’s largest single operator has moved from a relatively decentralized community governance structure to the hands of a global instant messaging platform with over 900 million monthly active users. The market response was direct and immediate.

At the ecosystem token level, DOGS (TON on-chain meme token) rose by about 128.94% over 7 days, and its 24-hour volatility amplitude reached 110.5%; Notcoin rose by about 70% over 7 days. The sentiment amplifiers have been fully switched on.

Parallel Tracks Rebuilt From the Ruins

TON: From an SEC Ban to Telegram’s Return

In 2018, Telegram launched the TON project and raised about $1.7 billion in its ICO. In 2020, the U.S. SEC halted the project on the grounds of securities laws. Telegram was forced to refund more than $1.2 billion and pay a $18.5 million civil penalty, and then withdrew from development. After that, the community took over the code to create TON Foundation and maintained the network outside the original team.

Change began in 2023. Telegram began deploying TON-based wallets, username auctions, and ad revenue sharing in its app. In January 2025, TON Foundation announced that TON would become the exclusive blockchain infrastructure for Telegram’s mini-app ecosystem. By April 2026, with Catchain 2.0 going live and in May Telegram officially becoming the largest validator, this marked the shift of the messaging platform from a “supporter” to an “infrastructure operator.” Durov referred to this as the third phase of the “making TON great again” plan.

Solana: From an Outage Crisis to Client Diversification

Solana’s story has also been dramatic. Frequent network outages in 2022 led it to be seen as a “failed experiment” for a time. The turning point came from fundamental improvements at the infrastructure level. Firedancer, an independent validator client developed by Jump Crypto since 2022, officially launched on Solana’s mainnet in December 2025 after roughly 1,200 days of development. This ended Solana’s long-standing reliance on a single client and significantly improved network resilience.

On the mobile hardware front, Solana Mobile launched its first-generation Saga phone in April 2023, and later in October 2025 announced it would stop providing software and security update support for Saga, focusing instead on the second-generation device Seeker. Seeker was priced at $450 to $500; it shipped globally on August 4, 2025, with pre-orders exceeding 140,000 units. In January 2026, the SKR incentive program was launched, tying hardware holdings to token distribution.

Both chains completed their recovery period after disaster narratives, but their recovery paths differ sharply. Solana relied on tech-geek culture and client diversification; TON relied on Telegram’s inherent massive user pipeline.

Data and Structural Analysis: Two Different Traffic Models

If you compress the competition between TON and Solana into the most core dimension, it’s not TPS or gas fees—it’s the fundamental difference in how traffic is acquired.

Solana: Reaching Out via Hardware

Solana’s mobile strategy has a “self-built channel” characteristic. Seeker phones embody this approach—making every phone user naturally a wallet holder on the Solana network. At the time of shipment, Seeker pre-orders had covered 57 countries. The logic for user growth is to expand boundaries through technological products.

TON: Embedded in the 900 Million Monthly Active Users’ “Pipeline Effect”

TON’s path is almost the opposite of Solana’s. It doesn’t need to re-acquire users, because Telegram itself already has the users. Data in 2026 shows Telegram’s global monthly active users have exceeded 900 million. When wallet functionality is embedded natively into this messaging app and fees are lowered to about $0.0005, any conversation scenario can seamlessly trigger on-chain actions.

Structurally, Solana tries to build an outward-radiating network that users must actively enter; TON uses the social pipeline Telegram has already built, laying the chain directly beneath users’ feet. In the race for 1 billion mobile users, both are targeting the same river with different directions.

Public Sentiment Breakdown: The Two Sides of Growth and Centralization

TON supporters generally use a set of intuitive numbers to support optimistic sentiment: a rise of more than 39% over 7 days, transaction fees falling to about $0.0005, and ecosystem tokens surging across the board. In their view, these signals prove that TON is moving from a “dormant asset” phase into a true application explosion period.

Critics, however, focus on the validator structure. With Telegram as the largest validator, consensus power is effectively concentrated in a single commercial entity. The tension between this arrangement and decentralization principles is obvious. Some members of the technical community point out that even if Catchain 2.0 has compressed final confirmation time to about 1 second, as long as the validator set still remains absolutely centered on Telegram, assumptions about censorship resistance and network resilience need to be reassessed.

By comparison, discussions in the Solana community focus more on ecosystem maturity and client diversification. Some analysts believe that although TON’s recent surge is astonishing, its base is still relatively low, and ecosystem applications are still mainly centered on simple interactions and token transfers. Solana’s application complexity and capital accumulation across areas such as DeFi, NFTs, and DePIN are difficult for TON to replicate in the short term.

Signals, Noise, and Unverified Premises

A fee drop is real, but it is not an independent variable

The transaction fee falling to about $0.0005 is the result of protocol parameter adjustments. The April Catchain 2.0 upgrade increased network throughput by about 10 times and reduced fees by about 6 times. But the key premise that enables fees to be maintained at this level is that Telegram bears the validator costs. This structure means the low-fee strategy is highly dependent on Telegram’s continued investment, rather than a system-inherent sustainable economic model.

The user base is huge, but the conversion rate is not yet sufficiently verified

Telegram’s monthly active users exceeding 900 million is data that has been publicly reported multiple times. But there is currently a lack of large-scale third-party audit data on how large a proportion of these users will actually trigger on-chain behavior. The conversion funnel—from wallet creation, to active addresses, to actual monthly active users—remains unclear.

Catchain 2.0 improvements are real, and the competitive gap is narrowing

The Catchain 2.0 deployment in April has compressed TON’s final confirmation time to about 1 second, and block production time to about 400 milliseconds. Solana’s block time is also about 400 milliseconds, sustaining processing over 1,400 TPS. The gap in theoretical peak performance between the two networks is shrinking, and the market has not yet fully priced in this trend.

Industry Impact Analysis: Paradigm Pressure on Social Chains and a New Axis in Public Chain Competition

If the effects of TON’s latest upgrades can be sustained, their impact on the industry will go beyond token prices.

For the modular public-chain camp, TON provides an unexpected form of validation: users don’t need to understand “modularity” or “data availability layers.” They only need an already-open app. If this “background blockchain” model is validated at larger scale, it may create pressure on the narrative logic of existing public chains.

For the developer ecosystem, Solana still retains a first-mover advantage in complex applications. The launch of the Firedancer client allows Solana’s theoretical throughput to exceed 1 million TPS after full optimization. Its tooling and developer community are structural barriers built over years of accumulation. TON’s on-chain applications are currently centered on lightweight interactions, and the migration path to complex financial logic or high-frequency applications has not yet been proven.

More broadly, the macro axis of competition in consumer-grade blockchains may be shifting from “technological optimality” to “distribution optimality.” If this holds, it will reshape valuation logic across the entire infrastructure layer.

Conclusion

The dispute over consumer public chain paths between TON and Solana entered a new stage in May 2026. This is not a simple contest of technical metrics, but a direct collision of two traffic philosophies. Solana represents the classic model of “users moving onto the chain,” while TON is testing a social penetration path of “the chain moving into users.” Catchain 2.0 pushes TON’s speed to a level comparable to Solana, and Telegram’s validator restructuring turns TON’s traffic engine from “bypass routing” into “direct connection.” Meanwhile, Solana, driven by Firedancer client diversification and Seeker’s hardware reach, continues to move steadily along the path of self-built channels. Speed, fees, and performance are tools—the ultimate divide lies in whether and how crypto applications can embed into the daily lives of a billion people. On this question, data is only just beginning to surface, and no conclusion has been written yet.