Weekly News Digest for May 12 - 18, 2025
▪️ On May 10, a new record was set in the TON gift market: the total turnover reached 285,593 TON (about $979,441), of which 83% belonged to Tonnel.
▪️ Marketapp started displaying off-chain transactions in the Tonnel Gift marketplace, marking the first step toward creating a multichain platform.
▪️ The creator of the successful Telegram project Major Roxman is preparing a new project (likely a gift market) called Portals, having purchased the username @portals for 2,095 TON (about $7,000) and posted a mysterious message “Loading.”
▪️ TONCO officially surpassed 100K transactions.
▪️ ONTON published information about the ONION token.
▪️ Tolk v0.12 was released with support for structs, generics, methods, compact names in the standard library, and improved Fift code output.
▪️ An interview with MyTonWallet founder Alexander Zinchuk was published in TON App Journal.
▪️ Closed beta testing of Tmail became available to all owners of the TON Email Names collection, with the public launch scheduled for June 5, 2025.
▪️ Plush Pepe reached a floor price of 1300 TON.
▪️ Telegram introduced a restriction: upgraded gifts can now only be transferred 21 days after the upgrade.
▪️ MRKT is officially open, new mechanisms for incentivizing participants and stimulating trading have been launched.
▪️ Telegram announced a creative contest on the @designers channel with a $50,000 prize for the best 3-minute viral video about Telegram’s innovation advantages over WhatsApp.
▪️ @tapps added the ability to vote for favorite projects with monthly gift giveaways; users with Premium subscriptions receive increased voting power.
▪️ Fresh updates for TON developer tools were released, improving platform stability, usability, and functionality.
▪️ The MyTonWallet blog was launched, gathering all major wallet updates, key changes, and future plans.
▪️ The daily turnover of Telegram gifts reached $1.8 million.
▪️ May 16 marked one year since Notcoin’s listing.
▪️ The owner of popular Telegram usernames including @founder, @dope, @crypto, and others plans to launch an NFT marketplace for anonymous numbers, usernames, and gifts.
▪️ The Tonnel marketplace reported that since launch, the number of purchases and bids reached 2,000,000.
▪️Snoop Dogg has launched an official Telegram channel with a verification check mark.
▪️The @TheTONmind channel created and minted the first-ever online SBT collection.
▪️Vladimir Smerkis has stepped down as CMO of Blum and is no longer involved in the development of the project.
▪️Blum co-founder Vladimir Smerkis has been arrested on suspicion of fraud under Article 159, Part 4 of the Russian Criminal Code.
▪️ Uniswap became the first decentralized exchange (DEX) to reach a cumulative trading volume of $3 trillion. The leading EVM-based platform accounted for 67.7% of all deals by value.
▪️ Michael Saylor purchased an additional 13,390 BTC ($1.34b) at an average price of about $99,856 per BTC. The Strategy balance now holds 568,840 BTC ($59b).
▪️ Cardano is developing a stablecoin for anonymous payments.
▪️ Coinbase will be included in the SP 500 index.
▪️ Tether’s market capitalization reached a record $150 billion.
▪️ Tether Gold is launching in the Thailand market.
▪️ Arbitrum announced dynamic transaction pricing and a cross-chain bridge in their new roadmap.
▪️ Infinite Node Foundation acquired rights to CryptoPunks from Yuga Labs.
▪️ The SEC will review an application to launch the 21Shares Dogecoin ETF.
▪️ MoonPay and Mastercard are launching a payment card for stablecoins.