TAC Secures $6.5 Million in Seed Funding to Enable Ethereum Apps on Telegram's TON Blockchain, Testnet Launch This Week

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TAC has successfully raised $6.5 million in seed funding. This round was led by Hack VC and Symbolic Capital. The goal? To provide users with seamless access to Solidity-based applications.

The testnet phase is set to launch this week. The mainnet release is expected in Q1 2025.

In this funding round, Hack VC and Symbolic Capital took the lead. They helped TAC secure the funds needed for TON and Telegram users to access Ethereum Virtual Machine applications directly within the app. Other participants included Primitive, Paper Ventures, Karatage, Animoca Ventures, Spartan Capital, TON Ventures, and Ankr. Notably, angel investors like Polygon co-founder Sandeep Naiwal also joined in. However, details about the valuation and structure of the round remain undisclosed.

The founding team consists of the TON venture builder TOP (The Open Platform) and Curve creator Michael Egorov. Their aim is to simplify development on TON. They want to connect Ethereum's developer community and applications directly with the TON blockchain. This is especially relevant given the close ties to Telegram, which has around 950 million users globally.

The funds will help scale marketing, developer relations, and tech development. The goal is to connect various EVM applications across DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi, and RWAs. They also plan to enable wallet abstraction, making it easier for users to manage their TON and Ethereum assets.

TAC’s infrastructure will include TON liquid staking tokens to enhance security. This introduces restaking into the ecosystem. The public testnet is expected to go live this week during Devcon. A mainnet launch is anticipated in the first quarter of 2025.

“Since we announced our launch earlier this year, we’ve seen incredible interest from developers, builders, and investors,” said TAC CEO Pavel Altukhov. “We’re excited to debut the public testnet at DevCon 2024 and show developers the 950 million reasons to build on TAC.”

Recently, Telegram has expanded its crypto footprint. Millions of gamers are now using the platform to play tap-to-earn games like Hamster Kombat, Notcoin, and Catizen. They hope to earn tokens on the TON blockchain. In July, Telegram also introduced a mini-app store and an in-app browser that supports web3 pages.

According to recent research from Bitget, the daily transaction volume on the TON blockchain has grown twelvefold. It jumped from 100,000 to 1.2 million over the past year.