😻 Top Tap Restructuring

Part 1. Let’s take a sober look at what’s happening around us

Friends, we have to admit that the mini-apps market has been in stagnation for quite a while now after a series of scams — Hamster killed hope, NotPixel took the money, Bombi destroyed any remaining belief in something good.

We haven’t seen any reasonable listings on TON for a year. Thanks to Starfall we occasionally spot that some solid, high-quality projects do appear here and there — but the audience seems to have lost interest in them in advance. I think it will take a lot more time to recover and heal the market.

And most importantly — there needs to be desire. And there is none. The Foundation keeps poking the corpse of ragomemes with a stick, and even there they managed to screw up — they halted Memelandia without paying out the promised rewards, while meme creators had already spent money on ads and prizes. At least they finally noticed ZARGates, but you can’t imagine how much effort Roman had to put in to make that happen.

Good things also happen — but rarely, sporadically, and without any system. TOP products are doing fine; the same Gift Fest is a fun idea, and the somewhat sluggish Getgems is still alive and well. Freeman is making a lot of noise, but one of the strongest arguments for a good outcome there is the support of the Base blockchain and the fact that the token will not be on TON.

Durov has started aggressively monopolizing his own gifts. It will only get worse — I think many secondary markets will simply die. Tyler regardless of how one feels about the structure behind him, gave out enormous amounts of money and two days ago left Telegram forever. And this happened right after new auction-related features leaked on the test server — features that will further crush secondary marketplaces: native in-Telegram offers for gifts.

Stickers — all of them — are just flipping instruments. Zero utility. They end up looking like memecoins. The ones who get wrecked will be those who believe the most. The only difference is that memecoins usually don’t pretend that they will become utilitarian. The whole point of a memecoin is the lack of utility. The only possible exception is Freeman, but we’ll see later.

Cocoon turned out to be a B2B solution with not-so-clear clients on both sides. Instead of schoolkids mining TON at night on their 3080 Ti with some AI magic, we got a minimal setup costing tens of thousands of dollars with foggy prospects.

Starfall, which all this time has been supporting the mini-apps market, as you know, is switching to an “energy-saving mode”. Like Tyler, we can no longer stimulate the market on our own — though our scale was smaller. But unlike Tyler, Starfall is not leaving. We’re holding on to hope for better, brighter times.

In the next post, I’ll talk about our internal changes in connection with everything described above.