OKX Ventures Invests $5M in TON Ventures to Support Telegram Apps

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Tanzeel Akhtar

Journalist

Tanzeel Akhtar

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Tanzeel Akhtar has been covering the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector since 2015. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CoinDesk, Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin.com.

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December 10, 2024 12:11 EST

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OKX Ventures, the investment arm of crypto exchange OKX, has announced a $5 million investment in TON Ventures, the venture capital fund supporting The Open Network (TON).

OKX said in an X post that the funding will be used to develop Telegram-native applications built on TON’s blockchain infrastructure. The aim is to form a network of experienced builders to develop best practices for TON applications.

Investors Behind TON Ventures

In an interview with Cryptonews.com last month, Ian Wittkopp, a managing partner at TON Ventures, discussed the new $40 million fund co-managed with Inal Kardan. Wittkopp said geographically, the CIS region and Asia are seen as key markets for funding. TON Ventures plans to onboard Web 2 users to blockchain gaming.

So far, TON Ventures has backed projects like the DeLabs and Goat Gaming platforms. It also backs creator economy infrastructure like Memetics, which allows Telegram communities to build mini economies. Moreover, artificial intelligence (AI) apps like Grably use TON and Telegram to source data for AI models.

“The OKX Ventures team was one of the first supporters of the TON value proposition, which sits at the intersection of Telegram’s social graph and TON’s blockchain rails. They [OKX Ventures] have done an amazing job attracting and funding top-tier developers, pushing the TON ecosystem to new heights,” said Wittkopp.

The TON fund usually deploys investments of up to $500,000 for early-stage projects. In the coming months, TON Ventures said it will focus on supporting the emergence of mid-core gaming experiences and the expansion of monetization tools available to creators.

Earlier this year, OKX Ventures and Aptos Foundation initiated a $10 million accelerator fund for projects built on Aptos. The fund aims to bolster widespread Web3 adoption by supporting the growth of infrastructure, social, gaming and DeFi-related projects.