Toncoin is a crypto that I see going to zero, despite all the hype and price action that seems to go against the market on various days. I went through some of the documentation straight off their official website, and I have serious concerns about it. It looks to me like what they say it does, and what you think it does, versus what it actually does technically, are drastically different things. We're going to dig into this, because I'm tired of getting ripped off on these junk fake altcoins that promise you things they don't actually deliver when you check the documentation. This is my opinion and my own read, not financial advice.
The token unlock problem
The first huge problem with Toncoin right now: it has a $20 billion market cap, but there's something like $20 billion more on the fully diluted valuation. That is a massive level of token dumpage that, to me, is going to absolutely stifle the long-term price action. If you want to see that in action, just look at XRP. They relentlessly and always dump on the price, because Ripple still has tens of billions of dollars' worth. With Toncoin, only about half the supply is even out right now, which means you can pretty much guarantee there's going to be a lot more dumpage. If you look, only 48% of the supply is even in circulation.
So at best, this might have a decent bull market here. It did release and catch a little bit of 2021, but it's actually at an all-time price high right now. And this is the exact chart people like to buy, and this is the exact time people lose money. To me, this is an absolute overhyped loser, for the reasons I'm going to go into here. This massive unlock of tokens is the first critical warning sign to me.
"Decentralized" is the word they want you to believe
Now look at what Toncoin actually is. Toncoin is the native cryptocurrency of — you know, you've got to throw "decentralized layer one blockchain" in there. Is there any proof it's decentralized? It reads like everything else to start. This was the project from the Telegram team that got killed by the SEC and then reborn into this nonprofit TON Foundation, which is rebranding from Telegram Open Network to the Open Network. It utilizes proof of stake. And it makes promises that, in my view, it can't deliver on — and you can quickly check this in the documentation.
If you go to the official website at ton.org, it says "a decentralized and open internet, created by the Telegram community using technology designed by Telegram." So this is heavily integrated with Telegram. Even though I use Telegram, I've never used TON at all. And it's sounding like it's trying to be like Internet Computer, because it's talking about a decentralized and open internet. But we're going to very quickly see that's a promise it doesn't deliver on.
If you go into their documentation, under docs.ton.org/learn/introduction, it says "the Open Network is a decentralized..." How many times are you going to say the word decentralized before I start believing it? It's going to take a lot more, because I don't believe it by default. Decentralization is the biggest lie in crypto. Bitcoin is centralized — there's a handful of miners that control all the hash rate. Ethereum is almost the same — a handful of stakers control the vast majority of the staked ETH. Almost everything in crypto is centralized. CZ controls 60-something percent of all the BNB. Almost everything in crypto is centralized.
And even if the blockchain itself has decentralization, almost everybody interacts with crypto through centralized entities like Coinbase, like Binance, like MetaMask, like Uniswap, or some website or game that's hosted off chain. So to me, you've got to really prove decentralization beyond a reasonable doubt.
The storage and the websites are off chain
So you look into the documentation — I know what to look for now. It says they include TON Blockchain, TON DNS, TON Storage, and TON Sites. So it's clear that the blockchain itself does not do the storage, which means stuff is hosted off chain. And there can't be real decentralization when the stuff is hosted off chain and the websites are hosted off chain. The TON blockchain connects the underlying infrastructure together, but the stuff isn't actually on chain itself. If it's not on chain, it's not really decentralized. There are always centralized points of failure.
This one almost nobody knows in crypto. You can't just have a few tokens on the chain and then call that decentralized when all the other stuff is off chain — and then there are security vulnerabilities from all that stuff, because it's often hosted the same way traditional tech is. So I searched through their developer docs. I searched for IPFS. If you go to "step by step NFT collection minting," and you go down to "what is an NFT on TON," and you look for how that NFT is done, you have an IPFS storage system. Please don't tell me that's decentralized, because it's not on chain.
The wealthiest, smartest people in the world, like Elon Musk, know that when you actually buy an NFT on chain, all it has is a hash to something else stored off chain. That's worthless, because what you've bought on chain is hosted off chain, and the off-chain component can be hacked. You can have your picture swapped out. That's worthless. So TON is presenting this in a way that makes it look like something it's not.
What Internet Computer does differently
Now, on Internet Computer, you can actually build everything on chain. This is the only crypto where you can build everything on chain. You can actually put an entire NFT on chain. In fact, on Internet Computer you can put a gigabyte of data on chain for just $5. That's much cheaper than Arweave, and that is fully on chain, so you're secured — you've got ChainKey cryptography. You can have an entire website on chain. Internet Computer is the only infrastructure where you can put every single component on chain, and that allows for truly decentralized exchanges. Because if the website is not on chain, you can't really say it's decentralized. What's happening on chain and what's happening off chain have totally different security, and all the off-chain stuff is very vulnerable to getting hacked and to being manipulated by centralized controlling entities. I broke down this same off-chain trap in my Arweave review, where the storage runs on what looks like Amazon Web Services dressed up as decentralization.
So it's very clear: if you look at what they say they're doing — "a decentralized and open internet" — using IPFS is not a decentralized open internet. That's the same Web2 infrastructure we're already using. And that means, with the stuff not on chain, this is not being accurately presented to people. They're making it look like you can just build your website and run your whole business or whatever on Telegram. You can do that on IPFS, you can do that on TCP, but with TON it's not actually on chain.
A "decentralized supercomputer" that can't put a JPEG on chain
If you look at this, there's an even worse thing I saw. Look at what it actually can do versus what it says. If you look at the docs for the Open Network and scroll down a bit further, it says the TON blockchain is designed as a distributed supercomputer intended to provide a variety of products and services, to contribute to the development of a decentralized vision for a new internet. That sounds like Internet Computer, doesn't it? But can it actually execute that at all? Can it actually do that at all? They explain very little following that. A decentralized supercomputer that can't put a JPEG on chain is not a decentralized supercomputer. To me, that is inaccurately presenting what your technology can do.
Now, there are eight different node providers that have 80% of the nodes. So there are centralization issues there too — but that's more node providers than control Bitcoin mining, where two control 50%, and more than Ethereum staking, where three control 50%. Still, there's centralization everywhere in crypto. But Internet Computer does what it says it can do. You can actually put a whole website, crypto, and an entire application like OpenChat from jerrybanfield.com all on chain. All of it is on chain. You can see exactly how it's hosted, the node machines that run it.
This, to me, is a fake. And they're trying to sound like Internet Computer because people can see that this is where the future is going. But a supercomputer that can't put a freaking JPEG on chain, that has to offload the computation and storage to IPFS — that's completely disingenuous.
And I'm not done going off on TON yet. It gets worse. If you go to the TON Foundation, again, the word "decentralized" is very important to them and they use it constantly. But where's your proof of decentralization? If it's on IPFS, it's not truly decentralized. A bunch of IPFS nodes go right back to Amazon. We've seen stuff get shut off before, where a whole bunch of IPFS nodes all go offline. It's ridiculous to say it's decentralized when it's on IPFS.
Who is actually building this?
So you look at the Open Network Foundation. Back in the documentation, it said this is designed as a distributed supercomputer intended to provide a variety of products and services. Okay, so which engineers are building this? Because if you're going to have a supercomputer, I imagine there should be some very talented cryptographers — people who might be recognizable and have a bunch of widely cited papers and patents. And if I was going to invest in this, which I'm absolutely not, I would want to see who is actually building this technology, and who I can watch in videos talking about building this technology.
Well, you've got the Open Network Foundation. If you go to their website, they were established in Switzerland in 2023. So this is pretty new, which to me is a problem — I want something older if I'm going to invest in it. They have a grants program "coming soon," so they're not even giving those out yet. And then all you have is a foundation council. You have three people here. I don't know what any of them even know about crypto. Are they engineers, developers, marketing people, business people? All we have is foundation council members.
It says the Open Network Foundation team is made up of various TON community contributors who bring together diverse expertise to actively shape platform development and drive TON's growth. So you have no idea what these people actually do. And I see no engineers that are actually working on this. That anonymous-team red flag is the exact same thing I hit in my Cardano review — no transparent team, and a price held up by narrative instead of users.
Now, you all may take shenanigans like this for granted in crypto. I don't — because with Internet Computer, you've got the DFINITY Foundation. They actually do have a huge amount of technical people. They actually have a founder who, when you listen to him, sounds like the Steve Jobs of crypto. I've never heard anyone in crypto that sounds as future-thinking and has actually put a working product on the market. He put together an absolute superstar team of engineers.
And Dominic is the one who told me, in one of his videos, that if you want to see how good an altcoin really is, go look and try to find the engineers that are actually building the product. He said that on almost none of these altcoins will you find a team of engineers that's actually building anything. Because in most cases, these projects have just done the absolute minimum work to copy some other chain's basic technology, thrown it out there, and then tried to make as much money as possible. If you want the other side of this comparison, I keep the deep ICP case going on my ICP Crypto playlist.
And naive crypto investors don't know the difference between the biggest research and development team in blockchain — where the employees have hundreds of patents and hundreds of thousands of citations on their thousands of papers — and then you go over to the TON Foundation and it's like, here's three foundation council members, and they're like, "Oh, we're going to do this for you." This is nuts to me. And this is what's normal in crypto, unfortunately. That's why I do these reviews, stacking each project up against what it actually delivers on my Money playlist. Because I'm tired of it. You watch the TON price go up and it's like, "Well, this thing's amazing." No — look at the technical details of it. In my opinion, it's a fake: what it says versus what it actually can do, what it looks like on the price chart versus the absence of proof that anyone is even building the protocol.
Transparency equals trust. Why isn't there a page on the TON Foundation that looks like the DFINITY Foundation? Because this is expensive, too. DFINITY is probably, you know, 270 team members — tons of engineers and technical staff, a bunch of PhDs in computing. And then on TON, you've got IPFS. It's cheap to have just a handful of engineers work on something. It's expensive to actually do this for real and put it out.
What can you actually do with Toncoin?
So I have very little hope for TON. I think it tops out this bull market and dies after that. That's my opinion. If you look at their X, they've got USDT on chain, which is what they're really excited about. They do have all the users on Telegram. But if you go look, despite the huge number of users on Telegram, they only have 62 transactions per second. Compare that to Internet Computer's transactions — 4,000 transactions a second. And that's because, what can you actually do with Toncoin? Practically all you can do is send it from one wallet to another, buy NFTs, and stake it. There's not that much you can actually do with the coin.
And despite there being millions and millions of addresses — it says there are 35 million addresses — many of these projects, if they're willing to not present their team members, if they're willing to make it look like it does something that you can quickly see it doesn't do, they're often willing to do anything to inflate those address counts too. I might have a TON address from having a Telegram account and not even know about it. If you look, though, there are only 62 transactions per second, five-second block times. The annual inflation rate, at 0.6%, is pretty good — but you've got to consider half the tokens haven't even hit the market yet.
So this looks like a well-done blend of the Telegram marketing and community. It's well done to make it look like there's something there. But to me, this is another crypto that's just a house of cards. People think it's doing something that it's not. 62 transactions a second versus thousands and thousands of transactions a second on Internet Computer Protocol — and there are many other cryptos that absolutely shred this on the number of transactions they do every second.
So this, to me, looks like a very obvious bad investment. There's no way I would buy this. It could have a decent speculative bull run, but the only way this is going to go much higher is if more people buy it with no idea what they're buying — just FOMOing in, looking at a green chart, throwing money at it, hoping for the best, believing easy hype and Telegram marketing. That's the same trap I described in my PEPE review, where the whole case for the coin is a green candle and nothing underneath it. But as high as this is getting, with all this token dumpage, and as big as the market cap is going to be, it's going to be hard for this to go much higher without absolutely tanking. And I imagine most people who have it now are going to lose money. Again, that's my opinion and my own read, not financial advice.
I track every one of these calls against ICP — even when I'm losing
That said, on my spreadsheet, the ICP price has been crapping out the last few days, despite my best efforts to tell everybody about it — which I just do because I'm tired of people getting lied to. ICP's got the best tech and the best team. That doesn't mean it's always going to win. It doesn't mean I'm right about it. And right now, if you'd literally bought every crypto opposite ICP on the day I reviewed it, you'd be up 5% versus ICP. And yeah, that's annoying. But it's also honest.
Almost nobody in crypto — I don't know of anybody else in crypto — would actually look at the crypto they talked about on the day they talked about it, pick one crypto that they actually believe in, compare it, and then put all the stats down for it. This level of honesty and transparency is what we need in crypto. Yeah, I'm losing on my own advice — or it's not advice, it's just what I'm doing with my own money and my own research. In a week, I'd be up 5% on all these other altcoins. But we'll see how it goes over the long term, because where most people go wrong in crypto is the long term. And this doesn't even look good short term. It looks like this thing could dump any time, when people figure out what I'm saying here.
Where I keep these conversations going is on OpenChat, fully hosted on chain on Internet Computer — that's actually the only way to reach me directly when I'm offline, and it's where the community gathers. If you want to bring your own crypto questions and talk it through with me directly, you're always welcome to join the Jerry Banfield family. I don't use Discord, Telegram, Facebook, or Instagram for that, so don't get ripped off by anyone pretending to be me there.
I think Toncoin is going to be a bumpy ride down, not up. We'll see who's right — but that's my honest read.